Arizona Wildcat Hockey (they're not the Icecats these days, thank you very much) have their first home games this Friday and Saturday night against the Liberty Flames at the newly-renovated TCC Arena, but first, as a kickoff faceoff to the season, they're hosting a fanfest tonight at 6:30 p.m. It's an opportunity to watch a practice, look around the arena and meet the players, plus it's free.

Plus, they're doing something nice for a kid with cancer:

Coach Berman continues, “One of Fan Fest’s highlights will be the introduction of the newest addition to our team — Chase Lock. Chase is a 6-year-old boy who has been fighting CPC (choroid plexus carcinoma) brain cancer since the age of 2 ½.

Chase is part of “Draft Day,” which is facilitated by Boston-based nonprofit organization, Team IMPACT, whose mission is to improve the quality of life for children facing life-threatening and chronic illnesses through the power of team. Team IMPACT children are drafted on to local college athletic teams and, in effect, become official members of the team from Draft Day through to graduation, attending practices, games and social events while forming unparalleled relationships with the student-athletes and coaching staffs.

“We are thrilled to welcome Chase and his family to the UA Wildcat Hockey family,” said Coach Berman. “He is a very tough kid who has battled through some unfortunate circumstances. I expect that we will learn a lot from Chase and look forward to bonding with him as the newest member of our team.”

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If you're getting psyched for Halloween (AND WHO ISN'T?), the world of Tucson film has plenty to offer you this week. First off, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly pass up the opportunity to see Jim Henson's "Labyrinth," starring David Bowie and a magnificent leather jumpsuit/codpiece combo, as part of their on-going Late Night Cult Classics series. Sure, you've probably seen the creepy tale of a 15 year old who wishes her little brother away and heads off on a quest to retrieve him, but how much better will it be on the big screen? The 1986 film shows three times over the weekend: Friday, Oct. 24 at 10 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 25 at 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. Tickets are $6.

If you've been waiting for an opportunity to share the joy of cinema with your dog (sure, ok), Friday, Oct. 24 is the night you've been waiting for as the Loft is screening Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie" outside. The evening kicks off with a doggie costume contest at 5:30 p.m. then the movie at 6:30 p.m., with food trucks supplying food for the humans in attendance and free dog treats for the canines. Tickets are $6, although I think the dogs are free, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Pets Are Worth Saving.



More info on those films and the wide variety of other on-screen options this week (including "The Internet Cat Video Festival 2014") at loftcinema.com.

100% of sales from the OHSO Brewing, Fate Brewing, and Arizona Wilderness Brewing beers on tap tomorrow night are being donated to a very special family. Baby Gavin Hillman was born in July with serious health complications, and has already braved two surgeries. The funds raised from these kegs at the Tucson Girls Pint Out anniversary party will go towards little Gavin's treatments.

For a love of all things lowbrow and dark places that offer cold beverages and respite from the bright, bright sun, we bring you Day Drinking. This is the first in a regular series, and lucky us, Tucson artist Melo Dominguez agreed to be our guinea pig. So last week, we grabbed some drinks at The Shelter, a local retro spot at 4155 E. Grant Rd., known for its martinis and Rat Pack-era interior. On this day, the staff were putting up the Halloween decorations to some good music on its jukebox, and somehow we persevered to find out what cool projects Dominguez is up to lately.

Edge 69, the Casa Libre reading series of emerging and younger writers, continues tonight, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m., with Jia Oak Baker, Roberto Bedoya and John Myers, at the 228 N 4th Ave. literary arts center. Suggested donation is $5.

Reading tonight is Jia Oak Baker, author of a forthcoming chapbook, Crash Landing in the Plaza of an Unknown City, from Dancing Girl Press and recipient of the 2013 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award; and John Myers, a social worker and writer living in Tucson with his partner Brian Blanchfield, who has work published inPank, Ilk, Spork, Abjective, Frigg, Handsome, Word For/Word, The Bakery Poetry, among many others.

But I'm particularly excited to see Tucson Pima Arts Council's Executive Director Roberto Bedoya. A writer and arts consultant who has worked on projects for the Creative Capital Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts
(Creative Capital's State Research Project), The Ford Foundation (Mapping Native American Cultural Policy), and more, is also the the author of the chapbook, The Ballad of Cholo Dandy from Chax.

One topic Bedoya has written extensively on is placemaking and creative placemaking, and recently swimming through the Facebook internets was a beautifully written essay from Bedoya in Creative Time Reports titled "Spacial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City," that looks at gentrification, placemaking and the Chicano practice of Rasquachification and how placekeeping could expand racial justice.

I don't know what Bedoya is sharing tonight, but I know this essay—you can read it in its entirety here—is a great reminder for Tucson's own struggles with gentrification, and a good reminder om how we need to work to hold it all together with "rasquachismo":

The scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes Rasquache as a Chicano aesthetic with an “attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.” Evoking rasquachismo from an artist’s perspective, Amalia Mesa-Bains calls it “the capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado.” When I think of rasquachismo, I think of repurposing a tire into a flowerpot that you would never find at Home Depot. Such an object signifies the imaginary structured by resourcefulness, and prompted by poverty, which is distinct from the imaginary imposed by the monetization of neighborhoods, a prevailing objective in urban development.

Rasquachification messes with the white spatial imaginary and offers up another symbolic culture—combinatory, used and reused. The Rasquache spatial imaginary is the culture of lowriders who embrace the street in a tempo parade of coolness; it’s the roaming dog that marks its territory; it’s the defiance signified by a bright, bright, bright house; it’s the fountain of the peeing boy in the front yard; it’s the DIY car mechanic, leather upholsterer or wedding-dress maker working out of his or her garage with the door open to the street; it’s the porch where the elders watch; and it’s the respected neighborhood watch program. Rasquachification challenges America’s deep racial divide through acts of ultravisibility undertaken by those rendered invisible by the dominant ideology of whiteness.

Rasquachification is also what the community activist Jenny Lee calls placekeeping—not just preserving the facade of the building but also keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, keeping the tree once planted in the memory of a loved one lost in a war and keeping the tenants who have raised their family in an apartment. It is a call to hold on to the stories told on the streets by the locals, and to keep the sounds ringing out in a neighborhood populated by musicians who perform at the corner bar or social hall.

• NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The UA's HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got a great snapshot of comet Siding Spring as it passed by Mars over the weekend. HiRISE mastermind Alfred McEwen explains what you're seeing in the above image:

Oort Cloud comet Siding Spring made its closest pass to Mars and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Sunday, 19 October 2014. The highest-resolution images were acquired by HiRISE at the minimum distance of 138,000 kilometers. The image has a scale of 138 meters per pixel.

Telescopic observers modeled the size of the nucleus as about 1 kilometer wide. However, the best HiRISE images show only 2-3 pixels across the brightest feature, suggesting a size smaller than 0.5 kilometers for this nucleus, the first ever imaged for a long-period comet.

This composite image shows two of the best HiRISE images of the comet. Shown at top are images with the full dynamic range, showing the nucleus and bright coma near the nucleus. Shown at bottom are versions where the fainter outer coma is brightened, saturating the inner region.

These closest-approach images were made possible due to very precise pointing and slewing of the MRO spacecraft by engineers at Lockheed-Martin in Denver, based on comet position calculations by engineers at JPL. HiRISE acquired three images 12 days before closest approach, when the comet was barely detectable above the “noise level” of the images. These early images showed the comet was not quite at its predicted location! This new viewing angle on the comet was used to update its predicted location and timing at closest approach. Without this update, the comet may have been outside the HiRISE image area in the best images.

Attorney General candidate Mark Brnovich made a statement following the ruling (and current AG Tom Horne's decision to not appeal) on Friday, Oct. 17 that allowed same-sex marriage here in Arizona that was banal in it's the-law-is-the-lawness:

State and local officials now have an obligation to put aside politics and personal feelings and uphold the law, in accordance with the court's decision.

But make no mistake, he's very much against the ruling and judicial advocacy and same-sex marriage and everything, as he said on KFYI yesterday.

We have the rare good fortune of having two good candidates running for the open seat on the Pima Community College governing board: Mark Hanna and Michael Duran. Both would work to steer the college in a positive direction, something it sorely needs given its much-deserved bad press lately and its fight to get off probation so it can maintain its accreditation.

Of the two, Mark Hanna is the better candidate.

Both Hanna and Duran attended PCC, which means that they don't have a helicopter view of the college. They both have a personal understanding of the students and instructors which will inform their decisions. With buildings, budgets, administrators and programs to worry about, it's too easy to forget about the flesh and blood students who are the reason the school is there.

That being said, Hanna has a few things going for him which will make him a more effective board member than Duran. The first is time. Hanna is retired. He was a general manager for Costco who helped open stores around the country and learned what he calls the "management by walking around" style of making his stores successful. Now he has the time to give the complex task of overseeing Pima Community College the careful attention it deserves, especially during this transitional period.

Duran is a vice president at the Tucson Medical Center and already sits on a few nonprofit boards. Because of his many responsibilities, he'll have to budget his time more carefully. Instead of going over the issues with intensity and focus, instead of "walking around" to get a sense of what's happening at PCC on the street level, he'll be more likely to depend on his management skills and experience — and he's got skills and experience, no question — and rely on others to summarize the issues for him.

I saw this in two debate/forum sessions with Hanna and Duran. Both gave good answers, but Hanna had done his homework more thoroughly. He answered questions with specifics, citing relevant facts and figures to inform and illustrate the points he was making. Duran gave respectable answers which were more general and leaned heavily on his past experiences. That is likely an indication of the way the two would handle the board position.