Most people who’ve had the misfortune of making my acquaintance are of the opinion that I am just another cynic hardened by living far too long as a city dweller. They couldn’t be more wrong. Just this past week I bought my fourth farm–specifically, my fourth Uncle Milton’s Giant Ant…
In the basement of the well-worn Kingman courthouse, the spectators who’ve arrived for the Clawson bail hearing are spilling out into the hall. As they wander around in the hall’s narrow dead end, their faces are alert for word from within the closet-sized courtroom that a way has been found…
Some thoughts about the Peter MacDonald hearings: I pick up my Arizona Republic each morning in the dark. I walk with it to the porch light. It is then that I’m able to see that Pat Murphy’s Republic staff has placed still another story about the Navajo tribal chairman on…
I’m not a Lute Olson fan. To me, any Sunday his University of Arizona team loses a basketball game on national TV is a fine one. I’ve nothing against the Wildcat players. Actually, they appear quite likable. They play very well, too. It’s Olson who gives me difficulty. He coaches…
I called Cameron and Heidi because I cannot imagine what it feels like to be an entirely likable person. I cannot imagine that the day will ever come when drill squads of military men will tramp across the TV screen and chant about me some version of, “We like Cameron…
The morning coffee had yet to complete the perk cycle when my three-year-old son hollered, “Daddy! Come look! Come look!” I get this request about 3,000 times a day. There was no reason to suspect I was being summoned to view anything more unusual than a Lego spaceship, a wooden-block…
The stories follow a pattern: The mother is anxious, the doctor is pooh-poohing, and the child nearly dies–or does. The career of Kingman pediatrician Ahmad Khan, the doctor entrusted with Christine Clawson’s care, is distinguished at least in part by the unsettling stories that some Kingman mothers and grandmothers tell…
Dear Cap’n Dave, Where can you go in Phoenix and spend $3 for a lunch that would fill a Phoenix Cardinals defensive lineman? Answer: Food City, at 1648 South 16th Street. A mixed burro, side of beans, and a medium Coke will set you back $2.94 (before tax). I’ve traveled…
The hand-painted sign on the wall in St. Joseph’s Hospital reads: “Me llamo Nicolas Ruiz Flores.” When Nicolas was three, his dad was kidnaped and executed. Later that same year Nicolas’ mother was kidnaped and she is presumed dead. The child cannot tell you very much about what happened to…
On the morning of the biggest anti- abortion demonstration in Phoenix history, the prayerful, placard-bearing, demon-eyed enemies of abortion weren’t the real story. The real story was the complacent, glad-handing, slow-footed Phoenix police, who milled among the lawbreakers as though they’d stumbled into a party. This came as a huge…
Dear Cap’n Dave, I find this luncheon spot (The Turtle’s Hurdle) very good. The food is tops and the place is extra clean. Try it sometime. Walter F. Dudley Accountant Phoenix I found The Turtle’s Hurdle just north of the lovely intersection of Indian School and 15th Avenue. A garden…
If Bill Moss can teach Arabs how to sew tents, he can probably teach America how to house its homeless. At least house them temporarily so they won’t freeze to death in the long, cold night. House them in cardboard. This famous artist-tentmaker-designer doesn’t care that some people think he’s…
One inch could be all that decides whether Valley voters are willing to tax themselves for thirty years to build the country’s most ambitious mass transit system. That inch–raising public suspicion Valley-wide–is how mapmakers for the Regional Public Transportation Authority show mile-wide “corridors” in which they want to build a…
It’s relatively easy to turn a “2” into a “4” on a piece of paper. Mark Killian thinks he can do the same thing with Arizona law. Four years ago state lawmakers agreed to let Maricopa County voters decide whether to impose a temporary half-cent sales tax to fund freeway…
I felt sorry for Steve Patterson the other day when they ordered him to announce his resignation. The Arizona State basketball coach was just one more victim of J. Russell Nelson, that total incompetent who still sits as president of the university. It was predicted even before Nelson came down…
The greatest athletes stand alone. Magic Johnson, Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Orel Hershiser, Larry Bird. Each of these men is an artist whose canvas is sport. They transcend their respective games and loom above them like colossi. (Author’s note to dumb people: Colossi is the plural of colossus,…
Every day, newspaper headlines scream of crimes against children. Yet there is one rampant horror you never read about. Its victims are helpless newborns, and it destroys their lives. Fact: Every 26 seconds in this country, a child is born with an idiotic name. Why the government hasn’t stepped in,…
I received a letter from a man who doesn’t trust the people who are running the campaign to push the approval of rapid transit in Maricopa County. He wondered why the financial war chest, which now approaches $500,000, comes from land owners and contractors who stand to gain most from…
I arrived half an hour early. I wanted to watch Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in warm-up. It was to be one of Kareem’s final appearances as a player in Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum. The press box was nearly empty. As I have been doing for the past nine years, I spotted an empty…
Tired of having your friends sneer and jeer whenever you drag out the latest batch of miracle snapshots? Take a tip from the ace shutterbugs who regularly snap photos of the Bayside Apparitions, a series of religious visions seen near the Vatican Pavilion on the abandoned site of the 1965…
Tracing just who owns the Phoenix Suns is not easy. Certain investors have made their involvement with the team known, while others have preferred to remain in the shadows. The team won’t release the names of all the owners, a practice described as “uncommon” by NBA publicist Terrence Lyons. However,…
“I’ll keep creating till I draw my last breath–which, at this point, may be any time!” So says horrified hatchet man Peter Petrisko Jr., the self-styled “renegade artist” who fears for his life after desecrating a yucca plant many believed contained a sacred vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe. During…
