Archive for the 'Local' Category

Soda Review: Waialua Pineapple

October 2nd, 2008

Get ready for a classic “kid in a candy store” scenario. Yesterday the mister and I had a day-long trip to nearby Scottsdale (zoo, antiquing, lunch). Since we were going out there anyway, I had to have a detour at Pop The Soda Shop — a hot local business that I’d heard a lot of […]

To All the Call Letters I’ve Loved Before

August 21st, 2008

This is a post about cool local radio stations that I grew up loving in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then the industry was run by real people who loved music and not some crappy demographic chart cranked out by a computer. In hindsight, we can now see that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 pretty […]

Unidentified Persons Bureau

July 24th, 2008

Locally speaking, last week’s Phoenix New Times had an interesting story on the Maricopa County Medical Examiners Office and one woman’s efforts to get an unidentified body database going on the county’s website. Apparently Maricopa is one of the few counties in the U.S. to have one of these features online, and it has resulted […]

Housing Developments

August 24th, 2007

Funny stuff: the Phoenix New Times‘ Robrt L. Pela begins a new column, Surreal Estate, with a piece on the new faux-Italian apartment complex bordering the busy I-17 freeway. This reminds me of when I went apartment hunting back in 1994. Looking for places in the East Valley (Tempe/Chandler/Mesa), I used the Arizona Republic listings […]

Concrete Reasoning

August 14th, 2007

Last weekend we caught a photography show called Midcentury Modern Buildngs in Phoenix at the local library. The Phoenix metro area doesn’t have a whole lot of eccentric midcentury architecture, but what we do have is something to be cherished. I’m glad to see a gallery of prints celebrating this stuff before short-sighted developers destroy […]

Sugar Sugar

August 7th, 2007

Last week me and Christopher (both natives of the Phoenix area) got to talking about the fondly remembered local businesses that we used to enjoy as kids. One of the first places that came up was Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlours. I used to love going the location in Tempe, which back in the ’70s was […]

Let’s All Go to the Mall

April 13th, 2007

Keith Milford of the terrific Malls of America shares a short video of Phoenix’s Metrocenter circa 1990 (you can tell when it was videotaped because that lame-o “Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird” song is playing in one of the shots). I visited Metrocenter only once as a child, but it was amazingly clean, white and […]