• Marylee, The Potted Desert
• Better Dirt Than Dead!

We have a few options when contemplating these dead plants. Choose one of these and feel free to let me know which you decided to do with your dead potted plants!

Limited Work Options:
1. Clean out the dead plants and make the soil look neat and tidy.

• Marylee, The Potted Desert
• Vinca Survive the Heat AND the Monsoons!

2. Plant an easy care summer flower that will love the heat — such as the vinca in the picture below. They will fill in nicely with a minimum amount of work. They do need daily water though!

3. Plant your favorite sun loving succulent or cactus. Pay attention to any cacti with thorns if you have low stature pets or kids!

• Marylee, The Potted Desert
• Cactus are a Sure Thing!

• Arizona Craft Brewers Guild

Heroes 19, as we wrote about last month, was set in motion as a fundraiser for the families of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who died fighting the Yarnell Hill wildfire. Yes, we've noted a few places and occasions at and with which to pick up a pint or two of the brown ale, but when there's an opportunity to drink to charity, we see no reason to pass it by.

Tap & Bottle closes up at 11 p.m. tonight. For more on Heroes 19, including where to pick it up on the chance that T&B has run out of it by the time you swing by there, the Arizona Craft Brewers Guild has information.

No matter how many times I update the settings, both on the main site and my mobile app, discounted-things-you-didn't-know-you-needed pusher LivingSocial keeps thinking my location is Phoenix. Whatever, it just usually means I hit delete on the emails without ever opening them.

Until I saw this in my inbox:

While yes, I admit I was slightly intrigued by discounted entries to a race where I could get away with wearing a fuschia tutu, it was actually the 'Sun Devil Football' that really caught my eye.

At first I thought it was some sort of specialty item related to the the football program at Girls Gone Wild University and Casino, but once I clicked on the link I found that, nope, it was indeed discounted tickets to ASU's home opener, Sept. 5 against Sacramento State.

I think it's going to take more than the deal offered (an upper deck seat and a T-shirt for $25, or a slightly better upper deck or lower end zone seat, plus the shirt, for $37) to get people to head to Sun Devil Stadium on a Thursday night to see a game against a lower-division opponent. Especially when the deal itself is only for one ticket, and you can't buy a second for someone else. And you have to redeem the voucher in advance, so you can't just go in on the deal with a bunch of friends and get your seats together when you show up just before kickoff.

Or maybe that's the demographic ASU is going for: lonely single people who will all likely sit three seats apart from each other, thus making the Living Social-filled sections look like acne on an awkward teen.

But then again, maybe this will sell like gangbusters. Who knows? As of 3:45 p.m. LivingSocial had sold more than 110 of these, probably mostly to people who were lured in by this awesome (and well-attributed) piece of predictive analysis on 2013 ASU football:

Promotion in Tucson is impossible to predict.

Some events are bandied about through press releases, billboards and other attempts to reach the public far in advance of the actual event itself. Then there are those that seem to swoop into town completely unannounced considering the lack of pimping that's done to get people interested in coming out.

On that note, a show of hands for how many people were aware the Mrs. America pageant was going to be here next week? Yeah, me neither.

It wasn't until our esteemed web troll leader here at Weekly World Central, Dan Gibson, pointed it out to me (in the midst of what I now realize was some backhanded compliments related to me being a Mr. Mom) that I had any idea 51 married women representing every state and political compound were descending on the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort next Monday and Wednesday.

According to what I could find on the sparse Mrs. America Web site — which at least has been updated more recently than the event's Facebook page — the pageant has been held since the late 1970s.

It's been held in Tucson for eight years, but has gotten minimal local coverage. Other than the obligatory slide shows that one media outlet considers all the rage, that is.

This might not help the pageant's cause:

This year's Arizona delegate is Brooke Nelson, a mother of three from Gilbert. She's bidding to be the first winner from here since Tucsonan Diane Tucker took home the crown in 2006.

Mrs. America is not to be confused with Miss America, Miss USA or any other pageants devoted to "emphasizing that America’s 70 million married woman are extraordinarily beautiful, poised, articulate and versatile." The other ones don't have the nuptial requirement, and I don't think most Miss America or Miss USA participants have kids.

Which means they can't be called (again, h/t Dan Gibson) MILVFs. Or, Moms I'd Like to Vote For.

Tickets are still available for both the preliminary (Monday night) and final (Wednesday) rounds, according to the Mrs. America site. They can be ordered online - tagline: seeing the event is just a PayPal click away! - if that's your thing.

• Look! We're not covered up by the logo now!

Thanks to you, Tucson Weekly readers (and maybe some other people too, but I doubt it), Tap & Bottle made the finals of CraftBeer.com's Great American Beer Bar competition. However, the battle is not over yet, as there are seven Colorado bars, one in Nevada and (sigh) a place in Scottsdale to beat out to win the possibly prestigious title of Best Beer Bar in the Mountain West region.

Arizona Beer Week, which claims to represent our entire state, is throwing their weight behind the Scottsdale establishment, so T&B needs all the help it can get:

Voting is as easy as clicking two times with your mouse, so represent for Tucson. It would be a nice birthday present for the city, after all, to win something for once.

Thank yourself, Tucson, for making it possible to listen to awesome original programming by real DJs playing one song at a time on Community Radio KXCI.



We love them so much that we don't even mind that they keep bringing back the ’70s like a lost cat. After last Saturday at the Rialto we relived 1973 for, with luck, the last time in our lives. And, face it, we had fun imagining what those ’73 hits would have sounded like had some of our favorite Tucson musicians been around to give them a spin.

Here are CE Elliott's photos of the night's festivities:

• Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

I think we can all agree that baby showers are terrible events that no one should be forced to suffer through (leave your gifts at the door and move on, people), but being forced to look at melted candy bars in diapers is far better than a baby-related event that ends up dragging out until 3 a.m. and involves stilettos used as a weapon:

According to the Lincoln Police Department, Bol and Rebeca Boss, 41, got into an argument around 3 AM yesterday after attending a baby shower. The sidewalk dispute escalated when Bol grabbed one of Boss’s shoes (which she was holding in her hands) and “stabbed her in the face with it.”

Armed with the stiletto, Bol used the shoe to strike Boss in the face with such force that the heel pierced the victim’s cheek. “The stiletto heel punctured the victim’s cheek and had to be pulled out of her face,” according to a police summary.

After clobbering Boss with the shoe, Bol also allegedly “knocked the victim to the ground and began choking her,” police allege. Boss “suffered redness and bruising to her neck, as well as a through and through puncture wound to her left cheek.” Boss was treated at a local hospital.

The post-baby shower beef, cops reported, stemmed from Bol’s “relationship with the father of the victim’s child.”

• Courtesy of Shutterstock

Apparently, it's designed to allow kids to pick colleges or something, but for some reason, the people behind LinkedIn, the social network I usually refer to as "Oh right, that," are expanding their reach to include kids starting at 13. Now, you might ask, why on earth would a 13-year-old want to be on a network based on resumes, recommendations and middle-aged-folk looking for work? The LinkedIn blog sort of explains:

We are updating our User Agreement to make LinkedIn available to students 13 years and older, depending on country. Smart, ambitious students are already thinking about their futures when they step foot into high school — where they want to go to college, what they want to study, where they want to live and work. We want to encourage these students to leverage the insights and connections of the millions of successful professionals on LinkedIn, so they can make the most informed decisions and start their careers off right.

I suppose that's theoretically possible that there are mobs of ambitious teens waiting to get on LinkedIn to start early on their application to the Ivy League, it almost seems more likely that those same young people might need instruction on how to stay off social media, rather than add another site that might provide embarrassment or negative Google results when those colleges start searching.

Elmore Leonard, one of literature's best-known and frequently adapted crime authors and father of Tucsonan Chris Leonard, died today at his home in Bloomfield Village, Mich. Leonard, who was working on his 46th novel before suffering a stroke earlier this month, was a mainstay on the bestseller list, but also known for providing the source material for TV's Justified and films including Out of Sight, Get Shorty and (one of my favorite films of all time) Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown:

From The Detroit News:

The writer was born in New Orleans, but his family moved around in the South before ending up in Detroit in 1934, when he was 9 years old. He attended the Blessed Sacrament School on Belmont in Detroit and was teased about his Southern accent. “The kids used to say, ‘Say, “sugar chile,” for me.’ I'd say, ‘Why are they asking me that?’ ”

He majored in English at the University of Detroit, graduating in 1950, then plunged into an advertising career in Detroit in the 1950s.

Famously, Leonard started writing Western-themed novels from 5-7 a.m. at home before going to work at the Campbell-Ewald agency, where Chevrolet trucks was one of his accounts. He developed a ferocious work ethic, writing every day in a cinder block basement office that son Peter described as looking like a prison cell.

After he quit advertising, he kept up the discipline in his monk-like office, writing from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. without a lunch break.

If you have any interest in writing at all, you have to read Leonard's ten rules for writing, published in the New York Times in 2001:

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character — the one whose view best brings the scene to life — I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

Elmore Leonard was 87.

Next time you're wandering the 99 cent store for irregular Jelly Bellies and Larry the Cable Guy beer bread, make sure to keep an eye out for our fair governor, Janice K. Brewer — apparently, the commoners of this state aren't the only folks whose annual salary could use a bit of sprucing up.

According to a survey from the Council of State Governments, Brewer's pay is less than that of 37 state administrators and 44 governors across America.

From the Mojave Valley Daily News:

The top Arizona salaries in the report went to state officials who direct higher education and commerce departments, each of whom made $300,000, the survey said.

But governors across the country consistently make less than the bureaucrats who reported to them, according to the data, which came as no surprise to experts.

“We don’t pay our elected officials a lot. Period,” said Ruth Jones, a professor at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.

And the author of the survey said the salary is not why governors run for the office, either.

“You don’t want to be governor just to make a lot of money,” said Audrey Wall, the managing editor of the Council of State Governments. “That’s not what your goal is if you’re running for that office.”