Matchbook covers. Cigarette wrappers. Business cards. Coffee stirrers. Fingernails. Thanks to the ingenuity of a pair of Mesa businessmen, the orally aggravated can add another item to this list of unorthodox toothpicks: a two-inch spine clipped from a saguaro cactus. “They’re much superior to traditional, wooden toothpicks,” claims Anthony Williams,…
WANTED: Self-starter with extensive experience in political advocacy, fund raising and lobbying, to serve as executive director, Common Cause Arizona chapter. Preferred candidate: ethical–but not self-righteous; plugged into scene at state legislature–but not an insider. Must be able to operate fax and photocopy machine, answer phone. SALARY: $20,000-$25,000 for the…
Steve Emerine swears he’s not a cop. A spokesman for the University of Arizona’s controversial Mount Graham International Observatory project, 58-year-old Emerine claims he attends campus demonstrations only to observe and answer media questions. “Under no circumstances, that I can think of, would I be involved in telling police who…
“She wanted me. I was sure of that,” Sam says, recalling the day about two years ago that he met Cheri. Her cart accidentally bumped into his at the local supermarket, and he struck up a conversation with the striking, long-legged redhead. They hit it off immediately, engaging in what…
Los Angeles street cop Dan Calderon sketches in the air with an imaginary brush. “If I wasn’t a cop, I wouldn’t have nothin’ to draw about,” he says. “I’m not into pictures of flowers and stuff. I’m not an accomplished artist, but I’m into real life–what’s real to me.” Calderon…
The murder of Carle Hodge, the finest science writer I ever knew, remains a mystery. That his death would be shrouded by enigma is only fitting. Hodge himself lived a life so private that many of the pertinent details were unknown by his friends and fellow workers. Everyone liked and…
Joe Bugel is too easy a target. He is the quintessential Bozo. He is a caricature of the simpleminded football coach. Unfortunately for Bugel, he was the man who was forced to face the television cameras last Sunday. It was Bugel’s job to explain why the Phoenix Cardinals had dropped…
A degree of madness has enveloped us all since last year’s acquisition of Charles Barkley by the Phoenix Suns. It has now reached astonishing proportions. I need only cite the panic over a minor incident at the Suns’ training camp in Flagstaff last Saturday night. Barkley was running a wind…
His face pinkens with exertion as he lifts the tightly bound bundles of mail onto a desk in a back corner of a Washington, D.C., congressional office. He snips the plastic binding with scissors and sorts through the contents. In his mid-60s, skinny and bowlegged with a face leathered by…
Tempe on a Friday night. Mill Avenue, the main drag, is a warm, yeasty environment, alive with frat rats, gang wanna-bes, packs of young women from the dorms and mom-and-pop tourists in the kind of ugly madras shorts that only Ohioans bring to the desert. A shaggy transient toting a…
During the final days of a heated 1990 Republican primary campaign for Arizona attorney general, candidate David Eisenstein accused Grant Woods and his family of doing business with a known mobster. Eisenstein claimed the Woods family’s failed project, the former Radisson hotel in downtown Mesa, would cost taxpayers millions of…
It was just another Friday night at Stinger Cocktail Lounge at 19th Avenue and Camelback: September 24, and the serious drinkers were balanced precariously on their stools. Colleen Speed was tending bar when a regular named Russell, who everyone knew as “the Mexican guy with one arm,” took a seat…
Like everyone else these days, Tammi and Chris Carmody have many questions about the Clintons’ proposed health plan. But this young Phoenix couple knows for sure that a “health insurance for everyone” scenario sounds better than what they faced after the August 1 birth of their second child. The Carmodys…
In a cool, hushed room on East Magnolia Street, Maricopa County officials threw away more than $12 million in taxpayer money last week. The county’s Health Care Agency–with the blessing of the Board of Supervisors–began to dismantle a brand-new, multimillion-dollar computer system that was mostly paid for but had scarcely…
David Parker lovingly unwraps a plastic baggie and carefully flattens it on the coffee table. Inside the bag are the remains of a badly disintegrated cigarette butt. Most of the tobacco has long since fallen out, and one end of the crumpled paper bears a faintly visible crimson smear. As…
Have you looked at your latest cable bill? Thanks to Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and your local cable-television company, that monthly amount-due reminder might surprise you. It will prove especially surprising if you recall headlines over the last few months touting something called the Cable Act of 1992, government’s…
The ax has finally fallen on Kamala Stillwell, director of the Maricopa County Library District, who has been involved in a bitter, years-long fight with County Manager Roy Pederson about how the district spends its money. On September 22, after a brief executive session, the county Board of Supervisors voted…
Those who tend to wheeze when their fingers do the walking should perk up at this news: Local phone companies have a new service that saves callers the maddening task of dialing after they’ve called directory assistance. Go ahead–pick up the phone and try dialing U S West’s directory assistance…
Everett Hind was the love of Evelyn Hind’s life. Although she remarried after Everett died in 1972, Evelyn never forgot her first husband, the man with whom she had her only daughter, Sharon Browne. Before Evelyn died August 17, she told her daughter that she wished to be cremated and…
There is nobody in the medical field in this state with a better reputation than Dr. John Eckstein at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. Having been thoroughly confused by what everyone tells me about President Clinton’s health plan, I decided to seek out Dr. Eckstein the other day for his…
Ernest Hemingway said that no one had ever written a truer account of battle than Stendahl in his re-creation of Waterloo in his classic novel The Red and the Black. “Once you have read it,” Hemingway wrote in Men at War, “you will have been at the battle of Waterloo…
As she described her third suicide attempt in ten days, Debbie Townsend didn’t leave out many details. Struck with “an overwhelming desire to be dead,” she pulled a sheet from her narrow bed. She hung it over the door leading to her bathroom and climbed on a desk chair she…
