Parade magazine calls the Sonoran hot dog "America's wildest wiener" in this article about the country's top hot dogs:

America’s wildest wiener is the Sonoran hot dog, sold by street-corner vendors throughout Tucson. A bacon-wrapped all-beef frank, hoisted hot from the griddle, gets loaded into a soft bun from a Mexican bakery and is outfitted with chopped tomatoes, a scattering of pinto beans, onions, a line of mustard, an artistic squiggle of mayonnaise, and a ribbon of hot sauce. On the side comes a roasted guero pepper, customarily wrapped in its own tight skin of cooked bacon and sometimes stuffed with cheese. For refreshment, drink a tall glass of the cool, sweet rice drink called horchata.

UA journalism student Robert Alcaraz introduces us to Norman Weinberg, the director of percussion at the University of Arizona's School of Music. Weinberg is often seen working with his students on a personal and professional level.

Remember when we said last week that the top kill strategy might be slowing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Not so much, as it turns out. It appears the oil may continue pouring out until August, according to this NYT account.

Meanwhile, Kierán Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity has responded to the latest moratorium on off-shore drilling from the Obama administration. He says it's not enough:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar yesterday released the Department of the Interior’s written description of the six-month drilling moratorium announced by President Obama last week. Salazar has been heavily criticized for breaches of his previous moratorium—which allowed at least 17 drilling permits to be issued—and for defining the moratorium differently with each new revelation of an approved drilling permit. It was later determined that Salazar’s previous moratorium had only been issued verbally.

The current moratorium lifts limits placed on drilling in waters less than 500 feet deep, which were put in place on May 6, 2010. Such drilling can now continue unabated, while under the May 6 moratorium new wells were not allowed to be initiated in waters less than 500 feet deep. The oil industry and Republican congresspersons have been heavily pressuring Salazar to exempt drilling in shallower waters from his moratorium.

The current moratorium expands limitations on drilling in waters greater than

Boca is the brainchild of Brian Mazon—whose family runs Papagayo Mexican Restaurant and Cantina—and his wife, Maria Jose, who is the executive chef of the new eatery. The couple spent some 13 months renovating the building and getting all the permits in line before quietly opening to the public three days ago, said Mazon.

“We took the outside taco stand and took it inside,” said Mazon. “We’re very happy with what we got.”

There are 15 different tacos in all, ranging in price from $2.50 for a carne-asada version to $3.95 for one made with certified Angus beef. Other fillings include barbecued pork, octopus grilled with onion and garlic, salmon in a tangerine-orange-lemon marinade and a vegetarian mixture of mushrooms, serranos and cilantro.

Mazon said the tortillas are made in house and cooked to order, and that the tacos are a bit on the hefty side. “Two tacos is a meal,” he said.

More appetizers and desserts are on the way, but for now, Boca serves deep-fried arroz con leche on a bed of chocolate ganache and topped with cinnamon, caramel and fried tortilla strips. Boca also serves beer and liquor, and will continue to expand its tequila selection until the bottle count reaches 100, said Mazon.

Hours: 10:30 a.m. to midnight, Sunday through Wednesday; and 10:30 a.m. to 3 a.m., Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Call 777-8134, or visit their Facebook page for more information.

Here's a New York Times story from earlier this week about how cuts to subsidized childcare are making it impossible for single moms to hold onto jobs:

Here in Tucson — a city of roughly 500,000 people, sprawling across a parched valley dotted by cactus — Jamie Smith, a 23-year-old single mother, once had subsidized child care. That enabled her to work at Target, where she earned about $8 an hour. She paid $1.50 a day for her 3-year-old daughter, Wren, to stay at a child care center. The state picked up the rest.

She was aiming to resume college and then find a higher-paying job. But in December, she missed by a day the deadline to extend her subsidy. When she went to the state Department of Economic Security to submit new paperwork, she learned that all new applicants were landing on a waiting list.

Ms. Smith sought help from Wren’s father to look after their daughter. But he had his own job delivering pizza, limiting his availability.

“Some days, I’d just have to call in sick,” she said.

By March, she had missed so many days that Target put her on a leave of absence, telling her to come back after securing stable child care, she said.

Without the state program, she sees no viable options.

She, too, is contemplating going on welfare.

“It’s a blow to my own self-image and self-worth as a person who can take care of myself,” she says. “I’m totally able, physically and intellectually, to continue working. But I can’t work without child care, and I can’t afford child care without work.”

But remember: Republican lawmakers are pro-life and pro-family. Just don't ask them to fund any programs that actually help low-income families get a toehold on improving their lives. That would be helping out the people that state Sen. Frank Antenori likes to refer to as the "tax-eaters." Compassionate conservatism is sooo yesterday.

Wick Communications takes over the Friday Roundtable as Dan Shearer of the Green Valley News and I look back on the big stories of the week on KUAT-TV's Arizona Illustrated.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada and Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever visited the Friday Roundtable on KUAT-TV's Arizona Illustrated last night.

The New York Times looks at the musical boycott of Arizona over SB 1070:

For the singer Larry Hernandez, the 2010 Billboard Latin Music Awards should have been a moment of pure celebration. But when it came time for Mr. Hernandez to accept his award as new artist of the year, he got drawn into politics, prefacing his remarks with a condemnation of the tough new immigration law that his home state of Arizona had just adopted.

“It is deplorable that they are discriminating against us just for the simple fact of looking Latino,” he said from the stage. “It’s not fair. We have to say no to that law.”

Mr. Hernandez’s name, however, is not on the list of prominent pop music performers who have declared that they will no longer perform in Arizona, one of the most dynamic markets for Latin music and culture. The boycott effort, called Sound Strike and led by the singer Zack de la Rocha of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, did get pledges from some big names, including the rapper Kanye West, indie rockers Sonic Youth and the trip hop duo Massive Attack. But it was light on mainstream “big tent” performers who can fill stadiums, and included no country music performers.

Read the whole thing here.

The New York Times reports:

Gov. Jan Brewer has removed the state’s attorney general from defending Arizona’s controversial new immigration enforcement law, accusing him of colluding with the United States Justice Department as it weighs whether to challenge the law in court.

But the matter remained in dispute on Saturday, as the attorney general, Terry Goddard, said in an e-mail that “I am definitely defending the state” in legal challenges to the law.

Ms. Brewer, a Republican, said she took action after Mr. Goddard, a Democrat and her potential challenger for re-election, met Friday with Justice Department lawyers, who then met with her legal advisers.

Mr. Goddard, who has publicly stated that he opposes the law but has vowed to defend the state in court as its chief lawyer, said he told the Justice Department team that “we need solutions from Washington, not more lawsuits.”

Read the whole thing here.

• NASA/Caltech/JPL/E. DeJong/J. Craig/M. Stetson

A bulletin from Daniel Stolte of UA Communications:

A team of planetary scientists has used radar and a high-resolution camera to reveal the subsurface geology of Mars' northern ice cap.

The findings — based on data from SHARAD (the surface-penetrating radar) and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — were published May 27 in two papers in the journal Nature.

The group studying a canyon feature called Chasma Boreale included Shane Byrne from the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics are the papers' lead authors.

"The ice sheet on Mars' northern polar region is about the size and thickness of the Greenland ice sheet," said Byrne. "Just like Greenland, the layers of ice on Mars preserve a climate record that reaches back probably a few million years. Studying this ice sheet and its internal layers tells us about Martian climate and how it has varied in the past."

On Earth, large ice sheets are shaped mainly by ice flow. But on Mars,