Just how uptight were Americans about s-e-x in 1954? That year, squeaky clean Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” got blacklisted by ABC radio and television for containing “offensive lyrics.” Offensive? She was just singing in Italian, for crying out loud! Even Johnnie Ray, everybody’s favorite Hit Parade crybaby, had a record…
Some people believe that all manufacture, sale and use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) will be banned as of January 1, 1996–and that the world will instantly be without refrigeration. That’s not true. Here’s what is: Only the production of CFCs, also known by the trade name Freon and mainly used in…
The heavy spraying of DDT and its impact on dairy herds is well-known to Arizona farmers, but not to the public. And a new law passed by the legislature may make it more difficult for the media to raise questions about the safety of the food supply. The so-called “veggie…
No Wonder He’s So Chipper Last Sunday, the Arizona Republic published “The Republic 100,” part of an annual special section identifying Arizona’s largest firms and blathering about the state’s fabulous business climate. Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., rated No. 40 on the list, boasting 2,486 employees. What the section didn’t tell you…
The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System has placed one employee on indefinite leave, apparently in response to revelations that the program had footed the health-care bill for people who had been dead for years. The suspended employee, Farrell Janssen, a 59-year-old computer programmer, says he was placed on administrative…
Thirty-seven years ago, state and federal agriculture officials launched a massive attack on the pink bollworm, spraying the powerful insecticide DDT on 65,000 acres of Maricopa County cotton. From May 15 to July 19, 1958, about 500,000 pounds of DDT were applied in the county. It was just the first…
Moe Allen was a character. He was the kind of man whose girlfriends were invariably described as “floozies” and who drank a fifth of Seagram’s every day. He flew his own airplane. He fished for–what else?–bass. He’d spent a few years in prison for bad checks. Sometimes your bad habits…
Triumph of the Grill: Last year, a few months after Rancho Pinot Grill opened, I gave it a rave review. The place hardly needed it. Foodies found out about it quickly enough, and the swamped restaurant soon outgrew its tiny Town & Country Shopping Center storefront. About six months ago,…
The desert does not care if you live or die. It is a brutal, unforgiving place where Mother Nature plays hardened Bitch Goddess to the hilt and the only law is survival. And when the sun is busy redefining “broil”–which is all the time–that’s a law enforced in terms so…
There’s a famous film clip of the Beatles, newly arrived in America, riding in a limousine and listening incredulously to a transistor radio. From that tiny speaker, a strange deejay the lads had never heard of named Murray the K was anointing himself “the fifth Beatle.” Since then, everyone who…
Stephen Sondheim’s most sublime achievements surpass anything in the musical theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein. I would include among these Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Sunday in the Park With George; and his most recent, the controversial Passion. Still pretty good, if not of the first rank,…
Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, “race films” flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,…
And Were You Harshly Toilet Trained? Since the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, Phoenix police have responded to at least 20 false bomb threats. Institutions victimized by bomb hoaxes include the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette, NewsChannel 3 (the station received mysterious packages thought to be bombs; instead,…
The 1982 Cochise murder trial and conviction of Art Amarillas drew little attention outside of Bisbee, and with good reason: That Amarillas shot his friend Ismael “Miley” Teran to death in a drunken rage never was in doubt. At trial, Amarillas’ attorneys had attempted to show that his acute alcoholism…
Last week, the Arizona Press Club presented its first-ever Brick Wall Award to Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, because he tends to ignore the state’s Public Records Act. Governor Fife Symington finished a close second in the competition, which was judged by a committee of print reporters and editors. The…
Attention, chompers! At a handful of McDonald’s locations around the Valley, drive-through customers like yourselves can do something they can’t do at any of the other Golden Arches in town. Mainly, you’ll have the rare opportunity to get personal with a teen burger drone. Or that appears to be one…
If you’re looking for where pay-per-view proceeds are going in the National Basketball Association, look to the West. Six of the 16 teams in this year’s NBA playoffs show their games on pay-per-view–the cable-TV option that allows local fans to see selected home games throughout the season by the game…
Before she became a jailhouse lawyer, Christina Jay Acker preyed on old ladies. In 1990, Acker was sentenced to 36 years in prison for kidnaping and robbing a 78-year-old Phoenix woman. That same year, a Colorado judge sentenced Acker to life in prison for beating a 72-year-old Colorado woman to…
After eight months of anguish on the part of Kimberly Nilson’s family and friends, and diligent work on the part of the Tempe Police Department, her remains were found on April 12 in a clearing beneath the paloverde that was probably her last resting place. She had been missing since…
Scott Bundgaard used to believe that chlorofluorocarbons–most commonly known by the trade name Freon–were depleting the Earth’s ozone layer and increasing dangerous ultraviolet radiation. He’d nag his sister for using aerosol hair spray. Then he was elected to the legislature, where he and his colleagues on the House Environment Committee…
After a modest first try last year, Arizona Film Society has taken the next step toward the elusive goal of bringing a regular annual film festival to the Valley–it’s come back for a second year. Saguaro Film Festival II will be held Thursday through Sunday at AMC Town & Country…
Last year, I reviewed a film called Go Fish, allegedly a comedy, about modern life among urban twentysomething lesbians. I panned it, and, predictably, got some static from lesbian readers who suggested that I disliked the film because I wasn’t a lesbian myself, and not for the actual reason, which…
