A collection of thoughts falling on a day reserved for love and the occasional gangland massacre:
• We had an absurd number of entries for "150 Shades of Shame," our first foray into getting people to write smutty fiction for us—and most all of them were great, in some regard. Some held examples of spectacular dialogue; some were rich with vivid imagery; and some were simply fun reads, chock-full of references to institutions any Tucsonan would appreciate.
Of course, there were also the terrifying ones that involved Weekly staffers in various, horrifyingly compromising positions, but hey, you take the good with the bad—and apparently, you do so in every orifice imaginable.
• This is nothing against Greg Hansen, who is undoubtedly one of the only reasons to pick up the Daily Star (unless you're looking for new names to put in your byline deadpool), but man, his tweets (@ghansen711) are borderline cringe-inducing. Take this one, written on a particularly dark and stormy day earlier this week: "Sun comes in Tucson. Thought their(sic) might be some doubt. Road for UA hoops now a dark and stormy path."
Lordy. That prose was so unnecessarily purple that Prince nearly fashioned a scarf out of it. I almost want to make it into a haiku, but then that would involve applying critical thought to something an ADS writer put to their keys, which I haven't done since Brodesky left. ;-)
• I've been fairly lenient with our commenters over the past few months - somehow, I was under the impression that a laissez faire approach to administrating the comments section might be the best way to allow free-flowing discussion.
It appears that tends to lead more to flame wars between folks of differing political ideologies and asinine complaints about Tucson's food scene.
Friendly piece of advice for readers: If you're passionate about discussing a topic, raining deprecation on the people debating with you isn't the way to get anyone to identify with your point of view. And continuing to press those buttons can lead to a termination of your commenting privileges (read: a banhammer).
• [High school basketball reference.]
The Week On Our Blogs
On the Range, we alerted the world to the approach of Eegee's sugar-free strawberry flavor; lamented the trend of suicide deaths among military veterans; noted the absurdity of giving Crusty Old Sen. John McCain a live Twitter account; wondered what Edward James Olmos was doing on an airplane with Jan Brewer and Larry Fitzgerald; watched a really, really weird North Korean propaganda video; became weirdly impressed by a heroic hitchhiker with a hatchet; followed the most recent twists and turns in TUSD's Mexican-American Studies saga; heard a response from the gentleman behind Blacked Out Media; and talked, at length, about the smut you wonderfully depraved folk have been submitting.
On We Got Cactus, we talked about the reunion of Fall Out Boy; got excited to see French alt-rockers Phoenix when they stop at AVA this year on their way to Coachella; became disappointed when we reflected on the fact that this year's Postal Service tickets were going to be absurdly expensive when compared to their second-ever show, which happened to be at Solar Culture; reflected upon why Coachella's performance contracts are so great for Arizonans; asked Corey Reidy a few questions; and started dusting off our boots for the Dropkick Murphys concert coming to Rialto.
Comment of the Week
"Another socialist marxist(sic) move by the media and by liberal think tanks. Gov. Jan Brewer perhaps only common sense reliable politican(sic) there. Common sense needs to be discussed on the gun & illegal immigration issues. It is the decay of sociality(sic) that needs to be strongly looked at." - TucsonWeekly.com commenter "hadenough" who should probably reflect further on the terms "socialism" and "Marxism" before throwing them out into adult conversation.
Best of WWW
We're loving the responses that we've gotten to our recent weekly polls as to the best particular food item in town. Our Facebook fans gave us more than 120 suggestions as to where we should be going for breakfast a few weeks ago, and we have more than 60 opinions as to where the best burger (meat, veggie, or otherwise) could be found in town. Keep feeding us ideas, folks—and if you have any suggestions as to what other foods we should be asking about, feel free to send 'em to us.
