To: Voas From: Holthouse Re: Severe setbacks with Governor Hull in London story. Cheers from England, chief, and bad news: I’m afraid rioting in the streets, too many shots of absinthe, a lobster-electrocuting device known as the Crustastun, and other factors too numerous and bizarre to detail here have prevented…
A Teamster’s strike that began two months ago in Tolleson is poised to go nationwide after a long-awaited federal labor report substantiated union claims that Fry’s grocery store owners violated labor laws. The report by the general counsel’s office of the National Labor Relations Board was released last week. In…
She says she still feels like a leper, showing off the wounds where the worms popped out. “They were all over me,” says recent parasite host Barbara Carroll, 42. “I could see them, moving beneath my skin. I could feel them.” The memory sends Carroll into shivers of disgust. She…
His ass twitching like a pair of brained salmon in a black leather sack, Ricky Martin ascended into view, gyrating upon the hood of a silver drop-top Mustang. The 11-year-old girl in the seat to my left commenced caterwauling. “Rick-eeeeee!” She would repeat this exultation approximately 2,269 times last Thursday…
The six dog has been doom for me lately. Two nights before Halloween, I had easy money on San Tan Mischief in the second, a two-to-one favorite. But the six dog, Golden Lady, got tangled up in the pack on the first turn, wiped out, and took San Tan with…
I like doing screamers the best. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I don’t appreciate moaners. I still feel like I’m communicating effectively with the ones who collapse, go fetal and mew for mercy. I mean, hey, the nights get long. I like a little variation, same as the…
Haikus are the bonsai trees of observation. They’ve been a way of writing for at least 3,000 years. Old school. Free style, but not free form. The usual structure is 17 syllables on three lines: five-seven-five. Like this: Put down that dildo! By order of Skip Rimsza! No sex after…
I’d never tasted Creamsicle punch until the City of Scottsdale served it to me during a recent forum on the Los Arcos redevelopment project. Orange juice mixed with 7-Up and vanilla ice cream is a lot easier to swallow than the sugary half-truths developers ladled out. Their caldron of crap…
Dope pushers lurking around playgrounds? I don’t think so. Dentists are more to blame for turning America’s children on to the perilous joys of getting high. My dentist introduced me to drugs when I was just 9 years old. A white-haired, kindly man, he laid me back in a soft,…
The nubile creature who welcomed me to the 1999 Burning Man Festival was costumed as a space cowgirl: pink boots, leggings, miniskirt, gun belt and glitter. She said the winds had been so high at night they summoned sandstorms from vast wastelands beyond the festival’s perimeter. “There’s been white-outs, but…
A judge has ordered Pima County officials to release for publication autopsy and death scene photographs of 14 undocumented immigrants who perished last year on American soil shortly after crossing the border. Two of the dead were shot by U.S. Border Patrol officers. The rest apparently died of exposure. The…
At night, from atop Tempe Butte, the high canopy of lush foliage over the historic Maple-Ash neighborhood near downtown Tempe blocks out the street lamps, creating a dark square in the grid of lights that appears to extend forever in all directions. On the sidewalks beneath that canopy, underground irrigation…
In the theater of money and power in Scottsdale, Arizona, Fred Unger’s enemies have cast him in the role of Evil Developer. Unger’s vehicle certainly fits the part — a new Chevy Suburban, black on black. “Let me be completely honest with you,” Unger says, deftly piloting his gun ship…
So I was standing outside an adult bookstore Monday morning during rush hour, when I noticed a peculiar similarity among the men exiting the establishment: Their tucked chins, sidelong glances and skittish hustling mimicked that of a puppy that had just been caught soiling the carpet. Like a voice in…
I wondered what $100 million in terra-forming looks like up close, so last Wednesday I walked around the newly filled Tempe Town Lake. It was late morning. The sun was high and cruel. Thirty minutes from the car found me at the far east end of the lake, bouncing deliriously…
The pinball symphony of 400 slot machines morphs into the thump and wail of a Yavapai-Apache drum circle as I leave the dim, eau d’ashtray interior of the Cliff Castle Casino and step 30 yards to a bull-riding ring, site of the sixth annual Verde Valley Powwow. I smell burning…
The rapper and the politician’s son are in a doorless chamber. Its walls, ceiling and floor are bare, polished steel. There is one window, which looks upon a milky, swirling mist, and one piece of furniture — a long, gray leather couch. The two men sit on opposite ends. The…
The morphine left me, like love gone cold. Its soothing caress transformed into a claw, angrily snatching away tufts of the pink cotton candy that swaddled my nerves. Naked, these nerves began to howl a message from the lower left side of my back, just beside my spine, where a…
The price for the baseball had reached $1.4 million. The man who would eventually buy it, for much more, is watching two videotapes which document the auction action from perspectives separated by three time zones. One is a tape of a live CNN broadcast from inside Madison Square Garden, where…
I don’t wish ill on the clerk to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but it’s a good thing she was sick on June 15. That was the day the Board of Supervisors met in a hastily called “special study session” to discuss the media melee over their plan to…
Looking over my county government’s plan to destroy the warehouse district south of downtown Phoenix, I wonder if the schizophrenic crackheads who roam there at night came up with the concept. A jail, a morgue and a parking garage. Maricopa County intends to build this loathsome trinity on the fresh…
Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord. And do not touch what is unclean. –2 Corinthians 6:17 I am alone on a stage in the back of a vast, lavish ballroom, overlooking a panorama of modern Christian soldiers, seated in groups of 10 around white-clothed…
