Power Hungry One day this week, the Flash and about a dozen other peons were waiting patiently for a table at Crazy Jim’s restaurant downtown during the lunch-hour rush. One party of four, however, swept in and was immediately waved to a table. That was Mayor Skippy Rimsza and friends,…
There are women in tattered cotton shawls who kneel outside the border crossing station in Nogales, Sonora, to sell jigsaw puzzle maps of the continental United States. The maps, cut into 50 cardboard pieces shaped like states, are made in China. One of these maps has traveled from China to…
“Mexico sucks!” Under normal barroom conditions — particularly in a southern-Arizona beer joint heavily populated with Hispanics — them’s fightin’ words. But as the anti-nationalist proclamation echoes through Tucson’s Wildcat House on a recent Sunday afternoon, them’s more like wrestlin’ words. “Butt-biting midgets,” “masked Mexican wrestlers,” “marauding mat maidens.” For…
Francisca Montoya hugs a framed, autographed photo to her chest as shouts of “Si se puede” and “Viva la causa” ring through the afternoon air. “Yes, we can,” and “Long live the cause” were rallying cries of the farmworker movement, and Cesar Estrada Chávez was its founder. Montoya’s beloved photo…
I remember chatting with Angel Carbajal in a strip club outside Corpus Christi, Texas, in the spring of 1997. The club’s owner — a fan of Angel’s famous boxing brother, Michael — had unlocked his sprawling establishment for an after-hours party, a celebration of Michael’s 10th-round knockout of Scotty “The…
Burning Questions The article “Danger to Children” (Paul Rubin, March 23) was the most moving and disturbing I’ve read since moving here last year. As a mother of three, it devastated me to think of what the children went through. Yes, I feel that their mother was wronged by the…
The sparsely attended bankruptcy-fraud trial of former governor J. Fife Symington III grinds along. Most days, the only observer who is not a lawyer or a journalist is an old guy with a crew cut sitting on Symington’s side of the room, seemingly offering moral support to the ex-governor. His…
Kiss Your Butte Goodbye The next target on the downtown Tempe development agenda: “A” Mountain, a.k.a. Tempe Butte. The construction, proposed by MCW Holdings and embraced by city officials, involves dynamiting a sizable chunk of ASU’s beloved hillock to accommodate more retail stores, living space and movie theaters at the…
Last August, about 30 residents of Central City South, a few city officials and some interested outsiders gathered in the steamy summer heat at the Valley Christian Center at 13th Avenue and Hadley Street to hear what the city planned to do about this neighborhood in need of help. Stuck…
Thirty-five people who suspect they’re descended from aliens are walking through Indian ruins on a Saturday night. They’re following Marcia Schafer, a petite 41-year-old Phoenix author and business consultant. Schafer leads her group down a trail that’s adjacent to the Pueblo Grande Museum on East Washington Street. The dirt gives…
The alien ancestry theory is wildly complex, extremely bizarre and fills just enough holes in evolutionary theory to have won its modest share of proponents. The theory’s influence extends from sci-fi movies such as Mission to Mars and Stargate to effecting the very real debate over rain-erosion tests that suggest…
The day Laura Bernstein was stabbed, kicked and left to die on a Mill Avenue sidewalk, the Tempe Daily News ran a front-page photo of a new police car. In a staged shot typical of small-town newspapers more than 30 years ago, two officers were shown “inspecting” the spanking new…
The Case for Shredding First Amendment groupies are passing stones over a judicial order that a reporter surrender his notes. This startling news is made even juicier by the fact that some of the people who are demanding to see the notes are reporters themselves. If you’re guessing that any…
Bathhouse Blues David Holthouse’s vivid description of a gay bathhouse (“Slippery Chute,” March 16) questions why it is treated differently by the city than heterosexual sex clubs. Gay men meet in bars, bathhouses, bushes and bookstores because we’re not permitted to meet in schools, churches and living rooms. We’re not…
Trunk Federation Lay the Hip (Plastique Recording Co.) That Trunk Federation even managed to get together and put out a third album after a year of dissolution, defections and personal problems is amazing enough. That Lay the Hip turns out to be their best effort to date is nothing short…
“Grant Them Your Unending Strength And Courage In Their Duty Assignments.” — from the Firefighter’s Prayer Phoenix fire Captain Autry Cheatham and his crew had just picked up their lunch when dispatch alerted them to a nearby shed fire. The four hoped the call would be brief as they arrived…
Can Kelly Blake’s civil attorney really expect a jury to blame psychiatrist Bill Sbilris for not foreseeing what she would do to her children and herself? After all, even though the mother of three did something to make a nurse at Southwest Behavioral jot down “Danger to children” on Blake’s…
A few years ago, when Steve Brittle suspected improper activity in the local office of the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, he wrote an impassioned letter to the FBI. He says he got an apathetic response from the feds suggesting that he take it up with the bureau’s supervisor…
He may not know a Coquille St. Jacques from a Jumbo Jack, but self-styled “Mill Avenue Food Critic” Dennnis (that’s how he spells it) Skolnick knows what he likes: a free lunch. But four years after he first began dispensing dining tips to tourists walking along Tempe’s main drag, the…
A legislative bill to increase state employee salaries by 1 percent didn’t survive the Appropriations Committee during this session. The Legislature is about to adjourn, and underpaid state employees apparently won’t get legislative attention again for another year. For Loreen Swanson, this means another year of scraping by. She has…
When Tucson attorney William Morris died of a heart attack on March 11, he left behind a lawsuit that promises to be as divisive as the school finance rulings of the 1990s. In fact, perhaps more so, because it not only involves money for educating poor children, but also bilingual…
Cyber Nemeses Sheriff Joke Arpaio has a new arch enemy — a Web site, www.arpaio.com. Its raison d’etre? Ridicule of the Crime Avenger. A home page introduction informs surfers: “This site is dedicated to the men and women of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office whom [sic] have been victimized by…
