Ever seen a 36-inch commuter unicycle or a commuter-bicycle race? Watch the video below to see that and more.

This week's Tuesday Night Bike Ride was marred by an incident in which a pedestrian allegedly pushed a cyclist off his bike. Find out what happened.

Pima County is working overtime getting things ready for their big river-park event tomorrow. Check out which projects they are feverishly working on.

Today and tomorrow probably aren't the best days for a ride out to Gates Pass. More than 50 buses and thousands of people will visit Saguaro National Park for BioBlitz 2011. Check it out.

A cyclist injured in May is doing well and attending classes at the UA. Find out what else he is up to.

Tucson's first bike boulevard gets BIG signs on its major cross streets. See what they look like.

The father of a 14-year-old boy that was killed riding his bike four years ago is opening a BMX park in his memory. The park opens tomorrow. Get all the details here.

After six months in business, a local bike shop calls it quits. Find out why the shop owner decided to move on.

Ride a bike with the man credited for inventing mountain biking. Check out all the details here.

Almost everyone has seen the Titanic. Even though I had to wait until I was out of my house to watch it (thanks, Mom), I've at least seen it. But before now, we didn't realize that the entire time the Titanic was sinking, Jack and Rose were updating their Facebook statuses:

We mentioned a few days back that Republican Tyler Vogt, who hopes to unseat City Councilwoman Shirley Scott in Ward 4, had an ad up on TV hammering her for spending on Rio Nuevo.

The other Republican candidates have also taken to the airwaves. Republican Rick Grinnell, who hopes to beat Democrat Jonathan Rothschild in the mayor's race, and Ward 2 GOP candidate Jennifer Rawson, who wants to unseat Democratic Councilman Paul Cunningham, both have slick TV ads. Rawson takes Cunningham to task over recent reports of problems with the city's 911 call system, while Grinnell has more of a bio spot that makes the underlying point that the city is on the wrong track.

Taken together, the TV spots add up to a narrative that the current city government has failed its citizens and the GOP candidates represent a change in direction.

On the Democratic side, so far, only Paul Cunningham has launched a TV spot, which is a positive bio piece that you can see above; Scott and Rothschild have been focused on direct mail pieces. We'll see whether that strategy shifts as a result of the GOP campaign.

We'll be talking about the ads on tonight's Political Roundtable, at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 6. Look for more here and in next week's print edition.

Giant Sand "Recovery Mission (Radio Edit)" by FortLowellRecords

When I was reporting this week's feature story on the Luz de Vida benefit album, I got a chance to talk with Howe Gelb about how he wrote "Recovery Mission," one of the 37 tracks on the benefit album for the victims of Tucson's Jan. 8 shooting rampage.

Howe told me it was "very, very, very difficult" to write about the shooting:

A few days after the shooting, Gelb says he was deep in despair and plunking away at the piano in his old adobe house in downtown Tucson when a song began to form.

"I was trying to deal with how loud it was in my head," he says.

Not long afterward, he took a shot at fleshing out the song while in the studio with Giant Sand. The band got it right off the bat.

"It was one of those times when the music just came," Gelb says.

But it still fell a bit short, until a final burst of inspiration struck: Gelb recorded the voices of kids at his daughter's school singing "step by step" and "recovering, recovering."

He knew he'd found the missing ingredient.

"The sweetness and natural hope in a child's singing is just a relief," Gelb says. "So with the sadness of the event and the lyric, you have this wonderful, medicinal, sonic release. ... 'Step by step.' That's exactly it. That's the only way back from this."

The result is "Recovery Mission," a song that soars to both acknowledge the grief and celebrate the hope found in healing.

"The song was very cathartic, but it wasn't adding to the lament," Gelb says. "It's saying that it's going to be OK, no matter what. ... The thing that still works is that primal, simple utterance of your mother when you were younger and something bad happened to you, when she said: 'It's going to be OK.' It's going to be OK."

Gelb is out of the country, so he can't be at the Rialto Theatre on Saturday night for a big benefit concert for the Tucson Together fund. But a lot of the other artists on the album will be there, including Joey Burns and John Convertino from Calexico, Kiss and the Tells, Salvador Duran, Reno Del Mar, Mariachi Luz de Luna, HAIRSPRAYFIREANDGIRLS, Tracy Shedd, La Cerca, Golden Boots, Silverbell, Rich Hopkins and Tom Walbank. You should be there, too. It's gonna be a great show, it costs next to nothing, and it's for a good cause. Details here.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Among the many fun diversions downtown this weekend (including the Luz de Vida benefit concert at the Rialto Theatre and the opening of Who Shot Rock & Roll at the Tucson Museum of Art): The UA College of Science is opening Mars and Beyond, featuring a whole bunch of artifacts and exhibits from the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab's adventures in outer space, including shots from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Details here.

This week's Arizona Illustrated Political Roundtable promises to be lively: Ballots have dropped in the mayor's race, GOP presidential frontrunner Herman Cain wants to build an electrified fence on the border and one of our panelists is being sued for a million dollars. Tune in at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 6 to see Tucson Weekly senior writer Jim Nintzel ask the questions of Arizona Public Media reporter Andrea Kelly, Democratic strategist Rodd McLeod and GOP strategist Jonathan Paton.

Local firefighters will duke it out to see who makes the best homebrew at the second annual Homebrew Challenge at Thunder Canyon Brewery this Saturday.

The event works like this: You pay $25 at the door (or $20 in advance), which entitles you to tastes of tons of different beers. Everybody drinks their beer-loving buts off until the winner is selected, and that person gets to mass brew a batch of the winning beer at Thunder Canyon Brewery. The proceeds from the sales of that beer will then be donated to Northwest Firefighters Charities.

There will be food, too. While the event focuses on home-brewed beers, many breweries are sending beer and representatives. I'll post a list of the participating breweries after the jump.

Watching this video made me strangely sentimental for an era I didn't live in, but filmmaker Jeff Altman's montage of 16mm video home movies shot by his grandfather in the early 1960's might have that effect on you as well.

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If you're bored in Tucson this weekend ... you need help. Serious help.

In addition to the Luz de Vida launch party going on at the Rialto; all the arts openings happening thanks to the Tucson Rocks! collaboration; and about a bazillion other things, the Childrens Museum Tucson and the Fox Tucson Theatre are hosting a day of Bollywood fun (cliche alert!) for the whole family.

Bollykids presents FAME: The Family Arts and Music Experience kicks off at noon at the Childrens Museum, 200 S. Sixth Ave., with entertainment, arts-and-crafts activities and Bollywood culture. Then, at 2:30, the party moves to the Fox, for a live performance of Childsplay called Tomás and the Library Lady:

In Tomás and the Library Lady, Tomás loves the stories. Grandfather tells them every night during the long summers, when the family leaves Texas to pick crops in Iowa. But soon Tomás knows all the stories by heart, and that’s when Papa Grande tells him there is a place full of stories he’s never heard before: the library. When Tomás meets the library lady, nothing is ever the same again. Based on Pat Mora’s popular book by the same name, the play tells the true story of Tomás Rivera, who began his life as a migrant worker and ended it as a university chancellor, Tomás and the Library Lady celebrates the wonder of reading.

The fun is being presented by Neelam Sethi , creator of "Bollywood at yhe Fox," and her husband, Dr. Gulshan Sethi.

Best of all: The whole event is free. Get more info here.

• Photo Ryn Gargulinski

The fact that many have it figured out is steadily apparent on Oct. 31, when chichi neighborhoods that usually house about 10 kids suddenly have more like 100 swarming through the streets. Those streets, of course, are clogged with cars bold enough to park in yards and in front of fire hydrants.

The survey that made the rich-give-more-candy theory official came from the survey research and consulting firm Morpace Omnibus, which last month asked 1,011 American consumers about their Halloween habits.

Those pocketing an annual salary of $100,000 or more are the most likely to give out candy, which makes sense since they probably have a few bucks to spare, with 77 percent of them saying they’ll be doling out treats.