Letters

X Mex
I reread Howard Seftel's fantasy-restaurant-week review ("Holiday on Rice," December 28) just to make sure. Not one Mexican restaurant among his favorite Valley 21! How to account for this absence? Maybe Seftel just doesn't like Mexican food. Fair enough. Unfortunately for the Seftels of this world, whose eating fantasies don't include green chile burros, cooking Mexican food is what we're really good at here on the border.

Curtis F. Beckman
Phoenix

Station Identification
Doesn't David Holthouse get it (Coda, December 7)? Radio is a listening thing. Who, besides slackers and sk8rs, listens to KUKQ? In business, you need profit. By attracting a demo with little or no cash, that station won't be appealing to advertisers. Then take into account that you've got music on AM, and there's a critical marketing problem.

I love the station but hate that tinny AM sound. The Edge and The Zone get tons of rotation in my office. I would be brand-loyal to any station playing the harder stuff, but both program directors play strictly to the masses, not offering anything outside mainstream alternative. I think what they forget is that their core demo grew up with Dead Kennedys and Circle Jerks. But they don't play well to the masses, so I guess we're all stuck with Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

Until The Edge loses ratings and can't charge the advertising rates it does, David Holthouse should keep his pen quiet and listen to his old New York Dolls albums and dream of the good ole hard-core days.

Scott Nosenko
Phoenix

Begging the Question
Peter Gilstrap's Screed column of December 7 seemed to coddle and sympathize with the hopeless, homeless kids loitering in downtown Tempe. I understand they have come from dysfunctional family situations, but who hasn't? Instead of turning their lives into something important, they take the easy way and turn their lives into nothing by begging and living on the streets without jobs or responsibilities.

Why does this bother me so much? I have been working since I was 15 years old so that I could help my mom pay for community college for me to better myself. I could have not worked and not gone to school and hung out on the streets begging for money, too. I have been going to community college and working for the past six years, and it has not been easy. I have just qualified for a student loan to attend ASU. Because the $10,000 a year that I make was too much of an income to qualify, I had to cut my hours at work and skim by.

The downtown Tempe merchants are the first people who will complain when they lack customers because these losers are hanging out in front of their businesses when the Super Bowl is in town. My tax money is being wasted paying for the police to watch them. I may be only 24 years old, but I have learned a lot about responsibility and working hard and making sacrifices to better myself.

Name withheld