Reporters’ Notebook

Well, if you’re Texas lawyer David MacDonald, you do. At a recent court hearing, the attorney who represents the medical clinics being sued over last year’s hepatitis C outbreak repeatedly referred to the 1997 federal case of the NCAA vs. UNLV coaching legend Jerry Tarkanian.

Problem was, he kept saying “Tartanian.” The locals in the room rolled their eyes and muffled their chuckles. Even the judge tried to correct him.

At the end of the hearing, patients’ attorney Will Kemp offered to help.

“We’re going to buy him a DVD of the 1990 championship,” he joked.

BRIAN HAYNES

DR. LARRY LEHRNER NEVER MADE IT TO MONDAY’S FORUM on Iran’s nuclear threat, where he planned to join his wife, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. A bit worried, Berkley put out a plea for his whereabouts at the event in Summerlin.

“A point of personal privilege,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet my husband here. Is he here? Larry?”

Luckily, this was not a “hiking-the-Appalachian-Trail” type situation.

Lehrner “apparently got lost on the way in,” Berkley’s spokesman David Cherry said. “There’s a happy ending. He wasn’t lost for the rest of the weekend.”

KEITH ROGERS

WEST PREP ACADEMY IS NOW A HIGH-ACHIEVING SCHOOL, but not so long ago it was considered one of the worst schools in the state.

During a School Board meeting Wednesday, West Prep junior Cynthia Velasquez praised her principal, Mike Barton, for turning things around. She said she felt sorry for him when he took over in 2006-07.

“Poor guy, he’s probably not going to be able to handle it,” she recalled thinking.

JAMES HAUG

LAS VEGAS MAYOR OSCAR GOODMAN HAS A KOI POND in his yard. One day he looked out and saw that a blue heron had speared one of his prized fish.

“I wanted to kill this blue heron,” he said recently, just before recognizing the city’s Animal Control Department for an award it won.

He said he called Mayor Pro Tem Gary Reese, “who is an excellent marksman,” but ended up taking matters into his own hands. He set up a net and caught the bird, which suffered a broken wing.

“When I got to the point where I was going to whack him, my heart began to bleed for his broken wing,” Goodman said.

The bird was healed and taken back to the wild, but “two days later, the stinking same bird was in my backyard!” Goodman said.

From here details get murky, as these things do.

“One of the animal control officers, he said, ‘I took care of him,'” Goodman said. “I’ve been advised he’s been taken care of.”

Of course, that could mean the bird was released out at Lake Mead. City spokesman David Riggleman encouraged that possibility.

“That’s the official statement. He’s living at the lake,” he said.

The operative word is “living,” because if the bird was simply “at the lake,” he would probably be wearing concrete shoes.

ALAN CHOATE