Blog Archives
Choir teacher suspended after taking students to downtown Phoenix “Hooters”
[Source: eCanada Now] — In Phoenix, Arizona, a Paradise Valley High School choir teacher has been put on paid leave after taking her class to Hooters for lunch. According to Judi Willis, a spokeswoman for the district school board, Mary Segall took her class to a Hooters resautrant after a performance at Arizona Center last week. Segall said that Hooters, a restaurant known for hiring women with large breasts, was the only restaurant in the area capable of handling such a large group.
Segall, 23, took 40 students to the controversial restaurant, The Arizona Republic reported. “We believe that there are many venues for lunch for a large group of people in the downtown Phoenix area,” Willis said. “There could have been a choice that might have been more appropriate, given that it was a school-day event with a school employee in charge.”
The Hooters website says its restaurants aim to provide “a unique, entertaining dining experience… delivered by attractive, vivacious Hooters Girls.”
Segal traveled to Washington in January with the school’s choir and strings group to perform at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural events, “History in the Making: A Dream and a Change Inaugural Ball.”
Does Arizona have an image problem?
Outside the Phoenix Convention Center, where the U.S. President was speaking on Aug. 17, "Chris" sports a semi-automatic rifle and pistol.
[Source: Scott Wong, Arizona Republic] — Just as local and state tourism officials tried to shed Phoenix’s unbecoming title as the “kidnapping capital of America,” another national moniker has emerged: gun-crazy. A man carrying a pistol and semi-automatic rifle outside the Phoenix hall where President Barack Obama spoke this month ignited a media firestorm, reinforcing the stereotype of the Grand Canyon State as a gun-loving vestige of the Wild West.
The firearms display, later revealed to be a publicity stunt, was legal under an Arizona law that allows most citizens to openly carry guns in public without a permit. But the spotlight cast by cable-news pundits, newspaper editorials and blogs — including censure from a world-renowned travel writer — raised questions about whether Arizona’s lax gun laws make it safe to travel and do business in the state. “We’re an urban city, and there are individuals trying to hold on to the old ways of the Wild West,” said Phoenix Councilman Michael Nowakowski, himself a gun owner. “We’re going to lose a lot of conventions because of one knucklehead.”
Before the gun stunt, tales of Mexican drug cartels abducting rival smugglers and immigrants and holding them for ransom in Valley homes had already painted Phoenix as a city under siege. [Note: Read the full article at Does Arizona have an image problem?]
Frommer may boycott Arizona over guns
Man with a rifle in downtown Phoenix during President Obama's visit (Photo Source: Jack Kurtz, Arizona Republic)
[Source: Robert Mackey, New York Times] — This week, the travel writer Arthur Frommer found himself in the middle of an unusually heated debate on his blog at Frommers.com after he published a post headlined “Do Guns at Political Events Disturb You? Then Consider Skipping Arizona for Now.”
Although Mr. Frommer, the founder of Frommer’s Travel Guides (which is an online content partner of The New York Times), has used his blog to express strong opinions in the past, his post on Wednesday — expressing horror at the spectacle of about a dozen gun-toting protesters on Arizona’s streets during a visit by President Obama — stuck out from other recent entries like “Current Room Rates in Orlando at Non-Disney Properties Are Almost Too Good to Be True” and “Southwest Airlines Announces a Four-Month Airfare Sale — and It’s a Dilly.”
We’re going to go ahead and assume that readers of The Lede can guess which post generated hundreds of times more comments than the others. [Note: Read the full article at Frommer may boycott Arizona over guns.]
Obama’s summer novel includes dreary passage about Phoenix
"Garage mahal" in downtown Phoenix (photo source: Flickr photographer combusean)
[Source: Phoenix New Times and an observant reader] — The award-winning novel, Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, famously being read this summer by President Obama, contains a rather downbeat assessment of downtown Phoenix:
On our way out we passed through downtown Phoenix. It was seemingly an uninhabited place given over to multilevel garages that, with their stacked lateral voids, almost duplicated the office blocks and their bands of tinted glass.
The general vacancy was relieved by the slow and for some reason distinctly sinister movement of automobiles from street to street, as if these machines’ careful, orderly roaming was a charade whose purpose was to obscure the fact that the city had been forsake; and all the while the radio ceaselessly reported crashes and emergencies in the streets around us. It was one of those occasions on which the disunion between one’s interior and external states reaches almost absolute proportions, and even as I smiled and nodded and knocked my can of Bud Light against another’s, I had fallen into the most horrible misery. I escaped into a sleep.
[To read the full article, click here.]
Smaller trains considered for metro Phoenix light rail
[Source: Mike Branom, East Valley Tribune] — Metro light rail believes it has found a solution to its budget woes: Smaller trains running with less frequency. Facing a $1.3 million deficit in the coming fiscal year, the agency is considering as a cost-cutting measure the occasional use of single-car trains. Also, Sunday’s schedule would be cut back, with any given station seeing in an hour three trains rather than the current four.
According to Metro, these changes, plus unspecified cuts in administrative costs, will result in an annual savings of $885,000. Making up the rest of the deficit is the expectation fare revenue will rise in the coming year. Metro’s Rail Management Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday on the proposed $33.7 million budget. If approved, the budget will go before the board of directors later this month.
Since the 20-mile cross-Valley system opened in December, almost all of the trains running use two vehicles, each of which can carry 225 passengers. During large events, such as President Barack Obama’s appearance at the recent graduation ceremony for Arizona State University, three-car trains are used. [Note: To read the full article, click here. To review related East Valley Tribune editorial on merging of mass transit organizations in the Valley, click here.]
