It scares people silly. It makes cool-headed adults wonder if witches are real. It draws hundreds of thousands of hits to its Web site. It drives a local historian in small-town Maryland crazy. The Blair Witch Project, a first film by two canny young Floridians, has developed a reputation as…
The other high rollers call him Sam. He’s the bearish, wealthy owner of two clothing stores, and a regular here at the Bicycle Club card room in Los Angeles. Normally a dominating rock of a card player, Sam is anxious and fidgety. He has about $2,000 in chips lying in…
Baby Boom Phoenix City Councilman Phil Gordon and his wife, Christa Severns, are proud new parents. They took their adopted infant son, Jacob Clark Gordon, home on Friday evening. Friends had littered the area around their front door with baby gifts, including many bare necessities–Catholic Social Services had informed them…
Sun-singed and bullshit-sated, we crisscross the acres of car lot in search of a particular auto that may only exist as fiction in the head of the salesman striding slightly ahead of us. The car in question, a ’93 Toyota Tercel, was spotted in a classified ad and confirmed still…
Legal Ease What has John Dougherty been smoking (“Paradise Lost,” July 1)? For 210 years it has taken a unanimous vote of 12 jurors to convict a man and take his liberty. With Mary Jane Cotey, you had at least a hung jury on all counts. Schindler failed to carry…
Out in the dusty boondocks of east Mesa, a blue sign is posted next to Power Road. It tells motorists that the highway has been adopted by Project Challenge. There is no litter in sight. “Don’t Waste Our Space,” insists the sign. The same slogan should be tattooed on the…
Mike Pallagi felt like he knew Ryan Page way before he actually met him. At Sandpiper Elementary School in Scottsdale, Pallagi was an ungainly, bookish nerd who hung with the other overachievers. Page was the epitome of pre-adolescent cool, a blond-maned golden boy who coasted through his classes and was…
Kiss My Butte Tempeans are finally waking up to the true purpose of the city’s $125 million (and counting) Rio Salado Project, which features the 225-acre Town Lake. The lake was cleverly promoted by city officials for a decade as a “regional park,” but residents are now outraged to discover…
Firefighters and medics in the rural east Valley community of Apache Junction want to get their patients to the hospital in a hurry. So when the local ambulance company is slow to respond, the firefighters transport the patients themselves. But now the state has told Apache Junction to knock it…
State-Sponsored Predators So the Child Welfare League of America, which is to children what a nursing home association is to the elderly, claims that fewer than 1 percent of foster children are sexually abused (“Fostering Sexual Abuse,” Terry Greene Sterling, July 1). How, then, does CWLA explain what happened when…
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…
The regulation clearly states that a bare-fisted blow to the skull is prohibited. The theory being a man’s knuckle rack is more destructive to a combatant’s face than that of an open palm. But the base of the hand, that arched mass of bone and tendon just below the palm,…
Bill Clinton came to town last week in search of some good tamales and a legacy. While Hillary was sipping lemonade with retiring Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on his 900-acre farm in upstate New York, Bill was touring an un-air-conditioned tortilla factory in southwest Phoenix. Legacy-building is hot, sweaty work…
A New Twist Dunn’s days are done at Get Out, the Mesa Tribune chain’s weekly fluff churner. The Flash has learned that “Twisted” columnist Dan Dunn (he of the unfortunate head shot in sunglasses) abruptly quit on Friday and promptly embarked on a wild Fourth of July weekend in Las…
One by one, they have been forced out of downtown Tempe in the name of progress: John’s Shoe Repair. Long Island Pizza. Rundle’s Liquor & Market. The Q N Brew. All were knocked off Tempe’s main street more than a decade ago to make way for the Centerpoint project, which…
Two years ago, Hector (a pseudonym) was one of Angela Kirkendall’s best students, a boy so taken with Kirkendall that he sat close to her desk and imitated her speech patterns. Like other students who find themselves in Kirkendall’s sixth-grade class, Hector discovered new motivation and became a better student…
When Scott Bundgaard was 18, he was convicted of a felony in connection with stolen goods. The felony was expunged, and at that point Scott Bundgaard was at a crossroads. With his background as a salesman at The Gap, should he venture into the world of retail fashion? Or should…
Angela Kirkendall’s 26 11- and 12-year-olds pull out math homework, straighten crumpled papers and whisper urgent messages. It’s the morning of May 4, and the Rose Linda Elementary School sixth-grade class is about to start in earnest. But first, students must endure morning announcements, which come out of a tinny…
Last week, the Phoenix City Council crammed a $112 million hotel down our throats. Is the Marriott deal good public policy? I don’t know. But what I do know is that securing its passage was no “emergency”–even though the city council invoked its so-called emergency clause and put the deal…
The Sleepwalker Murder Case may be over, but one question continues to captivate the public: Is it true that Scott Falater talked about a 1980s Canadian sleepwalking murder case with colleagues at Motorola before the murder? The short answer: no. This story within the story–what had Falater been chatting about,…
Wednesday night, driving along Central with zip to do. And what a main drag it is, too; black glass office buildings on a treeless thoroughfare with nary a soul in sight–save for this ruddy-faced homeless guy sitting on a bus bench, miming with his moon shadow. By 8:30, the sidewalks…
A former pastry chef at a tony Valley bistro met a violent death on the morning of Sunday, June 27. Twenty-six-year-old Dion Ybarra was killed instantly when a 14-year-old in a stolen minivan smashed into him, hurling him from his vehicle. But angry friends and former co-workers at Christopher &…
