FEEDING FRENZY

HOW TO GET BABY FOOD INSIDE A BABYIN 25 EASY STEPS More indispensable survival tips culled from Dr. Dad’s Baby-Owner’s Manual ($24.95; Meetda Press). 1. Accept the grim fact that all babies will eat dirt, rug lint and old bug carcasses and like it, yet very often the little animals…

BATTLE LINES

Maybe Gail Simmons and her neighbors in northeast Phoenix wouldn’t have been so surprised–and so angry–if her city councilmember, Skip Rimsza, had just answered her question the way a pol might in, say, Chicago: “Of course we’re gonna draw up districts to keep ourselves in power, lady. Whaddaya think we…

POP GOES THE EASEL

He was standing by the stack of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes boxes, staring ahead, eyes glazed, face pock-marked and wan, mouth slightly open. Later he was around the corner, with his shock of white hair and a Macy’s shopping bag. And then he was in another room, with two women, one…

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The last time Karen Finley performed in the Valley, she used a teddy bear to sponge her torso with raw eggs before sprinkling herself with multicolored glitter. The time before that, she slathered canned yams onto her bare butt and used shredded beets as a gruesome metaphor for menstrual discharge…

THE MOTHER’S FATHER CONFESSOR

December 3, 1989, began as Armando Saldate’s day off, but proved to be one of the most momentous of his twenty-year career. “It was a very long Sunday,” the former Phoenix homicide detective says. “Two murder confessions and a poor little guy’s body out in the desert.” Saldate’s seven-page account…

DEATH-ROW DEBBIE NO ONE WANTED TO BELIEVE SHE COULD KILL HER CHILD.

The prisoner’s dream starts with such promise. “They’re letting me out and I’m going to meet Christopher,” Debbie Milke says. “He’s alive! I’m free!” Suddenly, the dream becomes a nightmare. “The only way we’ll be together is if we get attached by handcuff. Forever. That’s the only way he’ll stay…

COMING OUT OF HIS SHELLTHE PEANUT MAN TRIES TO GO GLOBAL

In an era when sub-.500 baseball pitchers get million-dollar contracts, it makes sense that a peanut vendor has a publicist. In his own field, Rick “The Peanut Man” Kaminski–ace bag-tosser for the Seattle Mariners, Seahawks, and SuperSonics–is no borderline player. He’s the franchise, a superstar. An MVP. Last month, Full…

ASSASSINATION 101

Grassy knoll. Warren Commission. Zapruder footage. Hard to believe, but my generation’s buzz words are now another generation’s U.S. History assignment. And some people evidently haven’t been paying as much attention to their homework as they should have. Or so I discovered after I recently agreed to play the chauffeur…

DRUNK WITH POWER

Hugh Ennis likes a good joke. Especially when it has a cop theme. Take the toy police car resting near his window at the Liquor Department, for instance. Like the slapstick autos that zoom around a circus ring, this one looks as though a squad of battery-powered minicop-clowns will tumble…

IN HEIDI WE TRUST

Only 3 percent of Valley residents place “a great deal” of trust in the Arizona State Legislature. Just 16 percent of new governor J. Fife Symington’s constituents trust him the same way. Also down at 16 percent on the trust meter is the Arizona Republic, a daily newspaper. Slightly more…

SWUNG ON AND MISSED

If three strikes are out, Arizona has finally touched the bottom of the barrel. First, there was Evan Mecham, whose eccentricities became such a cause celebre that the Arizona State Legislature voted him out of the governor’s office after a lengthy impeachment trial that enthralled the entire nation. Mecham was…

MAN O’ WAR

For months we’ve been bombarded by puff pieces about General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf, the general with the 170 IQ, has been certified by the Newspaper Publishers of America as the hero of The War That Saved the Emir of Kuwait and his 350 Wives. After President Bush telephoned Schwarzkopf…

VICTIMS’ RITES

They haven’t got much in common on the surface. Candice Nagel, a second-term legislator before she resigned last month, drives home along the Dreamy Draw in a white Mazda convertible and parks in the driveway of a Paradise Valley house that is massive, uninteresting and crammed onto a lot so…

DEVICE SQUAD

Bodacious mail-order products for teens with money to burn, lagging popularity, weasels for parents and a loose grasp of reality. HOOVER HICKEY-QUICK. Face it, dudes and dudettes. Nothing says “sex appeal” quite like a neck covered with bright purple “love bites.” But how do you get them if you’re an…

MISSING IN ACTION

Editor’s note: On February 23, New Times sent staff writer Darrin Hostetler to Saudi Arabia to cover the Gulf War. Shortly after his arrival, Hostetler gained access to Kuwait City and witnessed the final days of Operation Desert Storm. Hostetler is the only Arizona reporter covering the liberation of Kuwait…

FREE TO BEAT YOU AND ME

The local chapter of Little Criminals Who Luck Out was inadvertently started about four years ago. It works like this: You’re a fourteen- year-old kid who burglarizes a house and gets locked up in Adobe Mountain, a state prison for juveniles. After promising to be a good kid, you’re paroled…

THE SMART MONEY

During one of those postcollege years when young men flounder around not knowing what to do next, Allen had a job in a laundry. This was in Los Angeles. At the end of the day, Allen would add up long columns of figures–shirts and trousers, cleaned and pressed–and put a…