Big news from Wingspan: Tucson and Southern Arizona's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community center has named Carol Grimsby to be their new Executive Director.

From Wingspan:

• Courtesy of Wingspan
• Carol Grimsby

“This is a milestone in Wingspan’s development,” said Kara
Jones, Wingspan’s Board President. For three years,
Wingspan’s Board has been operated by program staff and
volunteers without an Executive Director. Now, after a national
search, Grimsby, who has 20 years of corporate and non-profit
management experience, has been named by the
Wingspan Board to the position.

...

“Carol’s leadership skills, experience in program management,
administration and development matches the demands
needed to move Wingspan to its next level. The staff, board,
and volunteers look forward to working with her.”

If you aren't familiar with TED, you should be.

Using the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading," the organization that originally began to bring together minds from technology, entertaiment and design fields (get it? TED?) has since branched out into accepting lectures and discussions from all subjects, featuring nearly 1,400 talks on their website.

TEDx began as a way for communities to independently produce their own talks with the same mission of spreading good ideas, which brings us to this weekend's TEDx Tucson, where the theme will be "A City of Healing and Innovation."

The speakers for Saturday's event include New York Times journalist Patricia Pearson; University of Arizona professors Stuart Hammeroff, Alex Nava and David Sbarra; and former Gabrielle Giffords intern and current Sunnyside Unified School District board member Daniel Hernandez, Jr., among others.

Topics of the day include the future of consciousness, how seeds change the world and local tech innovations in healing brain diseases.

Tickets for the evening are $20 and can be found here. More information for the evening can be found at tedxtucson.com.

A survey out of Portland, the northwest's urban bicycling mecca and what Tucson seems to aspire to be at times, shows a fascinating trend: pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users tend to visit bars, restaurants and shops more often and spent more than motorists.

From The Atlantic Cities blog:

This finding is logical: It’s a lot easier to make an impulse pizza stop if you’re passing by an aromatic restaurant on foot or bike instead of in a passing car at 35 miles an hour. Such frequent visits are part of the walkable culture. Compare European communities — where it's common to hit the bakery, butcher and fish market on the way home from work — to U.S. communities where the weekly drive to Walmart’s supermarket requires an hour of dedicated planning.

"It’s not just a phenomenon born of the need to carry things," [Kelly Clifton, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Portland State University] says. Walkable (and bikeable) communities by definition facilitate a more frequent interaction between patrons and businesses. This means these bikers and pedestrians are also more regular customers. "That also says something about marketing," Clifton says, "about customer loyalty, about neighborhood-based businesses."

The study does show that yes, motorists do spend the most in general, particularly at supermarkets, which were also included in the survey of more than 21,000 people at 89 businesses in the Portland area.

But the fact that there's data to back up the idea that businesses can benefit from a pedestrian, cyclist and public-transit-heavy system seems to give the light rail a bit more of a reason to exist.

Check out the Portland study here, in PDF form.

Jonathan Mann is a singer-songwriter who produces one song (with accompanying video) per day. Ivory King was his girlfriend.

As of this song, they are officially broken up. Which is cool, I guess, since it appears that they've come to a mature decision and chosen to remain cordial about it. Good for them.

Unfortunately, this video is...difficult to watch. Nothing against Mr. Mann and Ms. King, but man, the choreographed dance that they do about 38 seconds in pegs the needle on the Awkward-Meter. The folks I was watching it with here in Weekly World Central tapped out not long after she pulled out the bass clarinet at about the 55 second mark.

I called it after about one-and-a-half minutes — dance break number two spelled my end. If you can watch the entire time without averting your eyes (and I know that anyone who would claim to have done so in the comments section would be honest about it—after all, who would lie on the internet?), you will officially be my hero for the day.

• Chris Summitt
• American Friends Service Committee Matthew Löewen

At today's Arizona Board of Regents meeting in the UA student union, those in charge of the state's three universities decided democracy should only go so far.

On his tumblr page, Protesting Arizona, photographer Chris Summitt, said members of Fuerza, the coalition of local organizations calling for the resignation of Regent and former U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini from the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) board, were told that only one person from their group could speak during call to the audience.

"Although 10 to 20 people showed up to speak to this issue, just prior to the call to the audience they were approached and told that only one person would be allowed to speak on this topic and only for 3 minutes so a spokesperson must be chosen," Summitt wrote.

When I got to the meeting, the call to audience had ended, and the Regents were listening to a presentation — but DeConcini was noticeably absent from the meeting. Twice individual Fuerza members stood up — demanding they receive more time to address the board and DeConcini's resignation, as well as fellow Regent Anne L. Mariucci, who joined the CCA board in 2011.

A third time during the meeting, remaining Fuerza members stood up, chanted and were escorted out of the room. There was extra security at the meeting, including police and outside two police on motorbikes circled the mall while Fuerza members gathered for their noon rally.

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, who serves as an ex-officio ABOR member, said during the meeting that ABOR needed to discuss how to respond to Fuerza at a separate meeting. He also described Fuerza's actions as "bullying."

Outside, during the press conference, Fuerza members read the the statements they had prepared for the ABOR meeting. After the jump is the statement from Matthew Löewen, American Friends Service Committee program coordinator.

A new place, with an odd name, looks to be hiring in preparation to open soon. The Lodge Sasquatch Kitchen is moving into 7265 N. La Cholla Blvd., near the Foothills Mall. The space was previously occupied by My Big Fat Greek Restaurant. No contact information is listed, but I will be following up to see what a place with such a unique name is all about.

Press release from Fuerza on rally outside Arizona Board of Regents meeting today at the University of Arizona student union:

On Thursday, December 6, 2012, community members and students from the University of Arizona will speak out before the Arizona Board of Regents. This is an effort to heighten public pressure for Board of Regents member, Dennis DeConcini to resign his position from the board of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). At 9 am, the public is invited to speak in front of the Arizona Board of Regents’ meeting. Organizers from the Fuerza! Coalition, concerned community members, and students plan to offer public statements urging DeConcini to step down from his CCA board position.

CCA is the nation’s largest private prison company and leading jailer of immigrant detainees. With a recent contract for 1,000 new Arizona state prison beds and six existing facilities in Arizona, the company profits from continued mass incarceration and immigrant detention. Lifetime Tucson resident and three-term Democrat Senator Dennis DeConcini is a CCA shareholder and Board member and profits directly from the incarceration of Tucson families.

From 12-1pm, students will host a press conference and rally in support of the efforts directed towards former US Senator DeConcini. In a recent op-ed in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, graduate student Patricia Hohl expressed her concerns, “It is unsettling to think there are Board of Regents members actively profiteering from the increasing prison and detention population.” Fuerza! and UA students call on Senator DeConcini to immediately resign from the CCA Board and denounce the company.

There will also be a press conference at noon in front of student union on the UA mall.

Every human being with a computer enjoys animated GIFs (there's a report out there somewhere, I swear), but at the Tucson Weekly, we don't think we've seen enough of these simple online animations that are Tucson themed...whether that's some sort of evocative capture of a Tucson sunset or a frantic animation of someone falling down drunk on Fourth Avenue. More Tucson GIFs, we say!

So, we're doing something to remedy this terrible situation. We coughing up a stack of gift certificates to Tucson restaurants (good ones, even) to the person who creates the most Tucson of GIFs. You have until the 21st to create and submit a GIF to our convenient contest entry page, then we'll select some of the best, put those online for you to vote on, then combine those results with the scores of our expert panel of judges and pick a winner, who will eat for free for a few weeks on us. You get gift certificates, we get more Tucson-themed GIFs. What a delightful and mutually beneficial exchange!

So, get to work making our dream come true. The world (or at least this area code) awaits your animated work of art.

This isn't particularly well put together, but the time someone dedicated to this project helps validate my love for ABC's Shark Tank, so here you go. SPOILER ALERT FOR THE SHARKS: the Bayside crew decide that friendship is more important than success, so this might not be the best investment.

In another case of something that you might spend hours poring over simply because you can, here's a giant map of the internet that will show you exactly how significant your website is in relation to the rest of those on the web.

• See that speck up there in the upper left hand corner? That's your Tumblr.

So as much fun as it is to look at at guess which site is which (this would be the kind of drinking game that would kill its participants, by the way), what's the real point of this thing?

From the Internet Map's "About" section:

Like any other map, The Internet map is a scheme displaying objects’ relative position; but unlike real maps (e.g. the map of the Earth) or virtual maps (e.g. the map of Mordor), the objects shown on it are not aligned on a surface. Mathematically speaking, The Internet map is a bi-dimensional presentation of links between websites on the Internet. Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users’ switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

...

The Internet global network is a phenomenon of technological civilization, and its exceptional complexity surpasses anything mankind has ever created. In essence, what we are dealing with here is a huge quantity of utterly unstructured information. The Internet map is an attempt to look into the hidden structure of the network, fathom its colossal scale, and examine that which is impossible to understand from the bare figures of statistics.

So there you have it. It's a tool to try and gain understanding of what links us all on the internet. Aside from HTML code.

(For the record, TucsonWeekly.com is an itty-bitty little teal dot caught somewhere in the gravity between aol.com and the Huffington Post. There's worse company to be in, right?)