The Skinny

NO WAY, JOS...: So City Counciltwerp JosÉ Ibarra wants to ban saucy newspapers from the streets of Tucson?

Visual pollution is a drag, and who but the horniest horn dogs would give a damn if we never saw those titty papers again?

Certainly not us. Although we found it amusing the other day when Arizona Daily Star reporter "Bazooka" Joe Burchell caught Ibarra's left nipple in a rhetorical clothespin by reading smutty ads and asking the moral crusader if the Council should ban them -- yes it should, said the twerp. Children can read them, and by golly, they shouldn't be available for anyone to grab.

Only problem was, one of those smutty ads Bazooka Joe was reading came from the Tucson Weekly, which has been known to discuss important public issues, besides offering smutty ads and that Dan Savage fellow's views on doin' it doggy style, as well as more serious perversions.

Go ahead, JosÉ, try to ban The Weekly, and while you're at it, why not try for an ordinance banning all television from our fair community, because all the network promos seem to talk about these days is sex, sex, sex. And why stop there? Perhaps you could appoint a movie commissioner to review the films shown in local theatres -- God knows they're smutty enough these days. And be sure to cut us all off from the Internet, which serves up the most amazing sorts of full-color plumbing diagrams to anyone who can type in www.worldsex. com.

Oh, and while you're at it, will you do something about people who scratch their private parts in public?

The sad fact is, JosÉ, that we are surrounded by sex. There are more than 5 billion people on the planet at this very moment, and nearly every one of them got here because 2.5 billion people before them had sex.

Even most of humanity's relatively small number of test tube babies got here because of masturbation.

Humans are sexual creatures. We may deny it, but we think about it, we imagine doing it, some of us even like to imagine doing it with multiple partners, in odd places, and with strap-on items that require "D"-sized batteries.

Are you going to ban batteries, too?

And do you think you, or an army of a thousand tight-assed storm troopers like you, can protect children from the sexuality that brought them into the world? Is your ego that large, JosÉ? Is your mind that twisted?

Why not chill out and consider this -- given the pervasiveness of sex in our psyches, hormonal systems, global and national media and, yes, our political leadership, maybe those poorly done, smutty little papers with their stupid-ass articles about how to score with chicks and housewives who like to suck cock aren't really so bad after all.

Given the right parental guidance, they could well serve as examples of how all human drives and emotions can be cheapened and made tawdry by the dollar's touch.

And as far as the ads in this slutty little tabloid go, what are you saying, JosÉ, that our readers should be obscene and not heard? Hey, get fucked, Councilman -- and we mean that sincerely.

SHARPE THINKING: We opened the morning paper last week to quite the pair of articles. In one, we discovered that the Sahuarita Town Council is supporting developer Bob Sharpe's plan to fill a man-made 10-acre lake with groundwater.

To get around restrictions on privately owned lakes using groundwater, Sharpe is giving the lake and an additional five acres for a park to Sahuarita. Then he's going to make a fortune by building 8,000 houses around it.

Meanwhile, enough water will evaporate off the lake annually to serve about 150 homes. Sharpe, who owns the water company thereabouts, says that's no big deal, since the pecan farms are using a lot more groundwater. How comforting.

In the second article, we learned that Mayor George Miller and Congressman Jim Kolbe were the latest volunteers in Tucson Water's "Ambassador" program. You know the one -- the $2 million PR project delivering a blend of quasi-recharged CAP water and groundwater from a big tanker truck to four different neighborhoods for about 90 days. Tucson Water is crowing about the success of this program, which is no surprise given the amount of dollars that are going into it.

Keep in mind that large-scale delivery of a CAP blend won't be as tightly controlled -- and even Tucson Water officials admit the blend now being served won't be the same quality as the CAP blend they hope to deliver to us in the next few years. That's your classic bait-and-switch scheme.

Once again: the Growth Lobby wants us to drink that CAP cocktail so that irresponsible development can continue apace, with a few folks like Bob Sharpe fattening their wallets.

WASHED UP: Last week's Inside Tucson Business tabloid carried a bit in its "insider" Scuttlebutt column (allegedly written by ITB editor/publisher Lonnie Clement) telling us the Citizens Alliance for Water Security "is out in droves petitioning for Prop 200, which will probably land on the November ballot."

Actually, the deadline for turning in signatures was July 1. Newsflash, Lonnie: the initiative is on the November ballot -- and has been for a month.

With this kind of appalling ignorance about the most critical issue facing Tucson, is there any reason to think Clement has a clue about anything else?

BURCHELL'S BITE: It may not be as bad as his growl, but Arizona Daily Star reporter Joe Burchell's teeth are playing an unexpected role in the mayor's race. But has anybody told Democratic frontrunner Molly McKasson? Here's the deal:

Democratic Supervisor Raul Grijalva, still moody that he can't be alcalde, told The Weekly on August 3 that he would endorse McKasson the following day, at the same time Secretary of the Interior and former Gov. Bruce Babbitt was endorsing his former aide, Betsy Bolding. Grijalva's announcement never came. When asked about it, Grijalva explained that he had coordinated the timing with Burchell, who was out with a "toothache."

Actually, Burchell has been in and out of the oral surgeon's chair for more than a mere toothache. He was feeling well enough over the weekend (11 days after the initial planned date to endorse McKasson) to take Grijalva's statement, meant to help McKasson on the south side in the September 7 primary.

DOPEY: Last Saturday, August 14, the Tucson Citizen ran a short "capsule comment" headlined "And register for Bong-Making 101," in which they were aghast about a Tucson Parks and Rec class that teaches how to make "Beaded Pouches -- Ages 17+: Create a Victorian beaded bag, loomed bag, flat peyote bag and a cloth evening bag."

"Peyote bag?" asked The Citizen. "Should the city really be teaching people how to make bags designed to carry illegal drugs?"

Rest easy, anti-drug crusaders. The "flat peyote bag," as any artsy-craftsy type can tell you, is a type of stitch. We're not sure how the name came about, but we can assure all worried minds they don't need to call Drug Czar McCaffery.