Go to your toaster. Look at it. Pet it. Is it doing okay? Does it want an upgrade? Is it toasting perfectly, just the way you like it? Does it love you? If it seems unnatural to be so intimate with a household appliance, you might not be ready for…
Snooze, You Lose Four months after New Times documented chaotic conditions in East Phoenix No. 1 Justice Court, Judge John M. Carpenter has taken a medical leave of absence. “I feel this leave is in the best interest of the public and myself to clear up any concerns about my…
Strolling the paved shores of Tempe Town Lake, I notice the water has changed in color since my last visit — from antifreeze green to a sort of espresso-sludge brown. I stop amid a troupe of snowbird cyclists to watch a city employee methodically scoop garbage from the water with…
Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy Roy Cook stepped into Judge Donald Daughton’s courtroom on the morning of January 11 and surveyed the scene. Two middle-aged people sat at respective tables facing the judge. Cook was there because Daughton — who presides over the Superior Court’s Probate and Mental Health Department –…
Anyone rooting for the underdog on October 27, 1999, was treated to a particularly wretched lesson in public humiliation. The last game of the World Series found the New York Yankees once again making pennant purée out of the Atlanta Braves. The game itself wasn’t any more ignoble than the…
Phoenix city officials appear to have improperly spent $527,000 in mid-December to pay vendors and entertainers threatening to cancel their appearances at a downtown New Year’s Eve celebration, records obtained by New Times show. On December 17, Phoenix finance director Kevin Keogh ordered his staff to deposit a half-million-dollar check…
More than two years after hauling away construction debris from the site of the new Harkins 11 Luxury Theatres in Flagstaff, Barb and Tom Vlahopoulos are still waiting to be paid by the Scottsdale theater chain. The original bill? Around $7,000. Barb Vlahopoulos has taken her case to the media,…
Ken Krusensterna knew he was in trouble the moment he knocked on the front door of Gabriela Leyva’s house and it swung open from his touch. She had told him many times that she kept the door and the gate locked because she lived alone. It was 8:30 at night,…
Marital Law Political consultant Jason Rose started off 2000 with a bang by proposing to zoning attorney Jordan Rich at the stroke of midnight. The question got popped at John Teets’ tony little fete in the ballroom of the Phoenician. Rose and Rich are a match made in media heaven,…
Doppelgang Bang Last week’s Flash item on the Millennial Arizona Republic’s redesign prompted a swift and indignant response from daily newspaper executives — at the East Valley Tribune. That Flash morsel contained a parenthetical reference to the Trib’s own redesign, which is uncanny in its resemblance to the Republic’s. Or…
It was a sublime slice of time, made of a machine gun, a new dawn, and two shots of Cuervo gold. It happened on the First. You know the mantra: Day. Month. Year. Century. Millennium. It was early in the morning, still dark, and I was standing on the sea-sprayed…
Still searching for more morbid info on dead rock stars? Consult these Web sites: www.rockobits.com This site contains all the names and causes of death found in the encyclopedia, which makes for handy quick reference until you buy the book. www.cybercomm.nl/~keeslely/rdl/rlist.html One of those ridiculous sites that seeks to honor…
Seated at a booth in an upscale Phoenix eatery, TV pitchman Don Lapre is arranging packets of Equal on the table to demonstrate a new wealth-building company hes preparing to launch. Each packet of the sugar substitute is a stock market share, and Lapre a boyish 35-year-old wearing jeans and…
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE 9s TURNED TO 0s? Former governor Ev Mecham told us he was “spending a quiet evening at home.” Rose Mofford, Mecham’s successor, hung up on us. Onetime glitter-rock night owl Angela Bowie slept through the whole thing. And in Tempe, the Suicide Hotline was reportedly…
My original New Year’s Eve plan was to be in Redondo Beach, California, to see a rare solo performance by Beach Boy legend Brian Wilson. In my naiveté, I thought that ringing in the new millennium with a concert by a man whose music has been a symbol of all…
St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, the pyramids of Giza and the breathy night glow of Sydney, Australia, all flashed in brilliant kaleidoscopic glory on CNN’s millennial report. In my brother’s pint-inspired phone report from the River Thames, he describes Queen Elizabeth II floating past, resembling “a cardboard prop-up of the…
Can there be another city in the state, or even the country, that would organize a massive public New Year’s party, invest in it heavily, and then scare the citizens out of attending? It is New Year’s Eve, and people are frightened. In the afternoon, the Albertsons at 16th Street…
MAR Attacks The Flash has digested the first few issues of the fresh, new and improved, repurposed, redesigned, revised, glorified, fortified, sportified, mortified, metamorphed Millennial Arizona Republic. The MAR reminds me of something Pete Townshend said: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The lyric is uniquely apropos…
If He Only Had a Brain Called onstage to accept the “Key to Munchkinland” during a June performance of The Wizard of Oz starring Mickey Rooney and Jo Anne Worley, Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza told a Grady Gammage Auditorium audience: “Politicians and actors do have something in common — we…
“Fear is your greatest salesman” was once the rallying cry of insurance vendors the world over. But in the case of this anti-cataclysmic New Year’s, fear seemed more like a broken promise. Fear wasn’t the reason ticket sales for everything from Phoenix Celebration 2000 to the Judds reunion concert to…
Carr Crash The Arizona Democratic party’s downward spiral continues. While party chairman Mark Fleisher was making national headlines with the news that Arizona will be the first state to use Internet voting in March’s presidential primary — a terrible idea, in my opinion, given that the party can hardly get…
In the past three years, the rate of gang homicides in Phoenix has skyrocketed by nearly 90 percent. In 1996, street gang members killed nine people. In 1997, 11 people were murdered by gangs. In 1998, the last year for which statistics are available, 17 people died at the hands…
