A hotel in China asked someone at ASU about some signage. The answer was, "Arizona St. University should suffice" pic.twitter.com/Ljmnuogs7H

— Tim Ring (@timring3TV) August 13, 2013

The learning institution generally known as Girls Gone Wild University Casino sent its basketball team to China to buy discount iPads or something, which led to this wacky mixup at a hotel there, as reported by Tim Ring of Phoenix's KTVK.

[HT: Deadspin]

Raise your hand if you've ever assassinated an hour or two just following a thread through Wikipedia. My favorite was the time I started with  the Bilderberg Group and wound up via sub-atomic particles, etc., at art taxidermy.

Imagine how much you could discover about your home town if you had a Tucson-only "Wikipedia." You could start with a question about your neighborhood and wind up reading about haunted houses, the first bar in town, hunting woolly mammoths , Hohokam ball games, ranching tips, bird indexes, how to make an adobe brick ... whatever someone might be passionate enough to write about, list references to and invite legitimate and courteous revisions from anyone who might know more.

At Code for Tucson 2013, July 27 and 28 at Gangplank Tucson, one team experimented with what a TucsonWiki might look like. The result was this prototype, developed in 24 hours with team lead Justin Williams of Startup Tucson. 

This Thursday, Aug. 15, at Gangplank, anyone interested in working on a TucsonWiki can join a conversation about how it might be structured and rolled out to the community. Subject matter experts, people with blogging experience and anyone who can recruit others to contribute skills and information are especially encouraged to attend. It's free, and there will be cake. Please RSVP via Tucson Wiki Meetup on Facebook.

If you already have a blog and a website to maintain, come anyway. Through its discovery process, TucsonWiki can direct traffic you might not otherwise attract. Organizers encourage bloggers and website owners to attend because of all the experience you bring to the planning, and the insights you'll have about how the TucsonWiki can work for you.

Gangplank is located in the Pioneer Hotel building, at 17 E.Pennington. Parking is free in the library parking lot, assuming you'll be leaving after 5:40 p.m.  There's also the Pennington Street Garage.

So you can see more of what it's about, here's Justin giving the TucsonWiki pitch and final presentation at Code for Tucson.  

The Charlie Daniels Band brought their hits from a nearly half-century career built on trenchant nationalism, Southern pride, and showing the folks a good time, at Desert Diamond Casino, Sunday, Aug. 11. Pan-genre music afficionado C.E. Elliott was there.

Michael Hicks, TUSD board member and burrito conspiracy theorist, made the Star today with his complaint that all these pesky citizens keep wanting to talk at TUSD board meetings. Sure, there is probably a conversation to be had about the public comment time and whether something can be done to keep the topics germane to issues facing the board at that meeting. However, Hicks, because he's Michael Hicks and is good at this sort of thing, managed to frame the issue based on the fact that he gets sleepy by nine-ish:

"It's hard for me," Hicks said. "Before you know it, it's 10 p.m. and I'm making decisions that will affect every child in TUSD, and I'm not making good decisions because I'm not functioning well because it's late at night."

An unrelated note: Michael Hicks' term ends in 2014.

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Lesson learned: When you're in the media business, it's probably a good idea to avoid exposing yourself in anyway. For example, a post that included a photo of my hand yesterday earned four posts from (seemingly) one heckler, including the brilliant "Nice hand, douche."

Not a big deal, but I found that this video, featuring a baby panda and its mother, distracted me momentarily from the total despair of learning I have douche-hands.

Tucsonan Murphy Woodhouse and Laura Carlsen, both of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, released this video recently that got to the heart of border issues using President Obama's recent speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany.

Congrats, Tucson! We're apparently in the top 100 for the smartest cities in the United States — and unsurprisingly, we're beating Phoenix (suck it, losers!). 

Unfortunately, our 68th place ranking isn't anything to crow about, in my opinion. Considering that we live in a city full of mostly-competent college students, tech geeks, engineers and all-around intelligent people, how the hell are we scoring so poorly? (And yes, I'll ignore your jokes about city council members.)

Well, for one, it seems that we're not all doing our part by taking the tests on Lumosity.com, who put the list together based on the people using their training games.

From Lumosity's blog:

Traditional smartest cities rankings often use indirect measures—college education being the most common—to extrapolate intelligence. While there is value to this well-worn metric, most of us can agree that not only are degrees unequal across institutions and eras, but college degrees aren’t the final word on intelligence. Here in Lumosity’s local San Francisco metro area, for example, we rub elbows with college dropouts Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Wozniak—sound familiar?

So instead of college degrees, Lumosity concentrated on a new measure of intelligence: Brain Performance Index, or BPI. Generated as a number, BPI is a snapshot of a person’s cognitive abilities at the precise moment they complete a Lumosity exercise. What’s more, BPI is calculated based on data from 400 million global gameplays, making it an incredibly rich source of information available only to Lumosity. Because BPI is a more direct measure—and a potentially more accurate portrayal of actual cognitive ability—Lumosity scientists compared over 1,000,000 initial overall BPI scores to compile a ranked list of the smartest cities in America.

So, in an attempt to help raise our bell curve (and also because I like clicking things and getting points for it!) I signed up for this "Lumosity" doo-hickey, where my "BPI" was gauged using only three training games. That's opposed to the five games that full users get, because I'm too cheap a bastard to purchase the $15-per-month package that would tell me whether or not I was smarter than the average 25-year-old dork.

When I got there, I threw myself right into the fire of the games, doing fairly well (I thought) on a speed-memorization game, kicking ass at a pattern-recognition game, and doing well on a game that involved flashes of birds and numbers to gauge my attention -- or to subliminally implant Audubon Society propaganda into my mind. 

My BPI scores, based on this game: 158 in Speed, 522 in Memory and 365 in Attention. Now, what does that mean?

I have no idea.

Because I didn't pay for my membership, I have no clue. After all, Lumosity is providing a service where they gamify intelligence and allow you to compare yourself against other people in order to feel better about yourself — or, if you're terrible at first, to improve at the games and then feel better about yourself, because you got used to a game and now you're better at it than other people!

In other words, Lumosity's scheme smells like bullshit. Sure, it's fun bullshit, and it's cheaper than training your reflexes by playing Call of Duty for hours on end, but it's all still a game -- and for that matter, a game that they want you to pay $15 a month for.

Take solace in the fact that you didn't throw your money out the window to prove that you're better than other people in other parts of the country, Tucson. Hell, reward yourself with a beer! Might as well kill off some of those hard-working brain cells — call it an early retirement, maybe.

Brian J. Pedersen and I were discussing our predictions this morning for the KFMA Fall Ball announcement (full disclosure: most weeks I do an unpaid segment on the KFMA morning show with Fook) and while we couldn't quite pin down the headliner (my guess was Imagine Dragons, he went with the Chester from Linkin Park fronted Stone Temple Pilots), we both resigned ourselves to the idea that Korn would likely end up as the top biller anyhow.

So, guess what? It is Korn! (I refuse to use their capitalization style.)

Also on the bill for the September 22 show at Kino Sports Complex? A Day to Remember, POD, Device (featuring the bald dude from Disturbed), Pierce the Veil, Asking Alexandria, Stars in Stereo and American Fangs, although usually a band drops out and another one gets added along the way.

If you enjoy a bargain (and pizza), Pizza Hut will be selling $25 tickets to the show this Saturday only.

From a press release sent this afternoon:

Dave Sitton came to Tucson four decades ago to play baseball at the University of Arizona – and he stayed, giving back to his adopted hometown in a way that few others have.

Many knew Dave as the longtime voice of UA sports – but he was so much more than that as he became deeply involved in our community. He was among the first to step forward and offer his time and his talents to nonprofit organizations that were struggling. Dave was heavily involved in sports at all levels – but he also was a great music lover and worked tirelessly to ensure the Tucson Pops remains a vibrant part of the Tucson scene.

In the past year, I have been working closely with Dave and others who are dedicated to strengthening our military installations and supporting our men and women in uniform in Southern Arizona. Dave was a true patriot who understood the importance of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Fort Huachuca and the 162nd Fighter Wing of the Arizona National Guard to our national security and our local economy.

Dave Sitton was a friend and a colleague. He left enormous footprints on the Tucson community and will be deeply missed. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.

A record 1,299 people entered (and in some cases, re-entered) the 9th annual Arizona State Poker Championship over the weekend at the Casino Arizona Talking Stick Resort near Scottsdale, with 172 of them surviving to today's play.

I don't know the names of every person who plays poker locally — some of you I just know as 'that guy I beat in a big pot' — but I recognized at least five people who made it to Monday's semifinals and a chance at the 130 spots splitting nearly $1.3 million in prize money.

Lee Gaines, Mark Ivan, Raena Janes, Tirza Sanders and Nadim Shabou were among those who restarted play at 9 a.m. today. At last check (around 2 p.m.) the field was down to 80 players, and play was expected to go until the field got as close to the final table of nine as possible.

Tuesday's final round will pay out the big bucks, with first place getting more than $246,000, not to mention a swanky trophy.

When I get updates on any locals I will pass them along.