Tucson might be expanding and changing every day, but over at Mission Gardens they're dedicated to keeping the city's heritage alive through their work in maintaining heritage plantlife and native seeds. On Sunday, August 23, you can celebrate the garden's growth and Tucson's 240th birthday all in one go while donating to the Mission Gardens cause with a special breakfast service. 

The event will feature tours of the garden and a silent auction sale of native trees, plants and seeds. Breakfast will be served at the newly re-opened Sosa Carrillo Fremont House (151 S. Granada Ave.) with a shuttle running from the breakfast to the garden grounds at 929 W. Mission Lane so attendees can see just what the garden has accomplished. The Mission Gardens, which are run by volunteers in conjunction with the nonprofit Friends of Tucson's Birthplace, will be honoring Gail Castañeda for her work in safeguarding the garden.

The morning menu will offer huevos con nopalitos or chorizo, papas en chile, frijoles, calabacitas, Sonoran white wheat tortillas, Pico de Gallo fruit cups, horchata and limonada. You can chose to dine from 7 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. or 9 a.m. until 10:30 a.m. The event is $45 at the door or $40 with advance reservations. Children 5 to 10 are $15 and kids under 5 eat free. You can RSVP for the event by calling 777-9270.

The present U.S.-Mexico borderlands bring  documentary filmmaker and author Kathryn Ferguson tremendous melancholy. 

A Tucsonan by birth, Ferguson remembers the days when she and her family would drive down to Nogales for even the simplest craves, such as a cup of coffee. There were no walls or armed men in uniform patrolling the frontier; people didn't die as often while trying to cross the desert into the United  States; and the cultural exchange wasn't as problematic.

"It was a different world, it is a darker world now," she says. "When I was a girl I would never use the word 'raid,'  the word 'deportation.' You would think, raids at 3 a.m., when people are taken out of the homes and put in prison, you would think that was another country you were talking about, not the United States."

But things have also changed in Mexico. For years, she'd travel alone to as far south as Michoacán and Guerrero. And, as a documentary maker, she extensively explored the Sierra Madre in the state of Chihuahua. Michoacán and Guerrero are now two of the most dangerous states in Mexico. "(They are) not very good places. I would think twice about going...and I love Mexico," she says. 

Witnessing all those changes throughout her life was what inspired Ferguson to write The Haunting of the Mexican Border, a collection of anecdotes about her and friends on both sides of the border.  

The book is split in two: the introduction is on Ferguson's travels through the Sierra Madre, while she worked on a documentary, and the second part takes place once Ferguson returns to Tucson, while also traveling to Mexico back-and-forth. She describes her experience collaborating with a group called the Tucson Samaritans, volunteers who bring water to the desert for migrants to drink. "This is a personal book," she says. "Seeing things that happened to friends, to me, the desert...as a result of politics."

"Nobody really knows what goes on in the border, even though it is on all the headlines," she says. "Everybody is crossing all the borders of the world, and we need to take a look at why that is happening."

Ferguson is having a book party Saturday, Aug. 15 from 5 p.m.to 7 p.m. at the Temple of Music and Art lounge, where she will read excerpts of her work. John Fife, local human rights activist, retired Presbyterian minister, as well as co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, will be the guest speaker.

The Trump Show that has replaced the GOP presidential primary shows no sign of abating, no matter what The Donald says or does. It's reached the point that Slate's Josh Voorhees has told the pundits to stop writing Trump's obituary.

Danny Vinik over at BRINK digs into the "Trumpification of America":

In Trumpville everything is bigger, grander. And all that he touches is The Best! Rich people are really rich and even the middle class should live in mini mansions or as they are known: McMansions, because they tend to go up so fast.

TRUMP appeals to our core instincts, that bigger is better and that we should always strive to be a part of the grandest and most beautiful things. He makes us feel that we are missing out on something. That our thinking is too limited, that we aren’t being REAL Americans, because REAL Americans always have the the biggest, the baddest, the largest stuff in the world.

If Trump is president will he tear down the White House because it’s too small?

Trump embellishes. He decorates. He adds little curly q’s to his favorite branded term “YOU’RE FIRED” because you are fired for not thinking big enough. You are fired for being too plain. The TRUMP logo is a chiseled serif font stolen from French aristocrats who used it to emboss their golden candlesticks with the lascivious titles of inherited wealth. They used it to demark their palaces, and put it on the land grants and menus and posters of the upper class, covering every square inch with elaborate, over-decorated imagery and type.

Modernist design was a rejection of that kind of pretension. Negative space and a strong grid system dictates the design, along with clean san-serif fonts like Futura and Helvetica Neue. The strength of the graphic goes to battle with commercialism, greed and yes, cheapness.

Donald Trump is the great exaggerator. Elected president he will be the exaggerator in chief. Forbes magazine tells us he even exaggerates his own net worth… by 100%.

To my eye so much of TRUMP style just feels cheap and overblown, like ornateness for the sake of ornateness. The man selling us this vision of America is the Emperor with no clothes. He thinks he knows what is fine and what is beautiful, and he thinks he has the most of it, but really some rascal designers from a tacky New Jersey sweatshop have sold him a bill of goods, and he is no wiser for it. And he turned around and sold it again to us.

Tucson Unified School District is getting some national recognition for its renewable energy usage.

The Environmental Protection Agency ranked the Old Pueblo's largest school district number 2 of the country's top 30 K-12 schools generating the most green power. The district also placed 12 on the top 30 for green power production in  the entire country.

TUSD currently generates about 20 million kilowatt-hours of green energy every year from the solar energy systems scattered at various schools. That meets 20 percent of the schools' electricity use, according to a TUSD press release. The EPA says it is the equivalent to the electricity use of nearly 2,000 average American homes annually.

The district began installing solar rooftop panels—they hoped for a total of 38,000—last spring.  They anticipated to save $170,000 in the first year and more than $11 million in energy costs over the 20-year life of the 11-megawatt project, the district says. 

"Over 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be averted from local power plants in the project's first full year of operation, along with 23.5 tons of nitrous oxides," the district says on its website.

Others on the list include Apple and Google.

The Cup Cafe at Hotel Congress continues its 25th birthday celebration with a throwback special: the Maximilian, a roasted turkey melt with asadero cheese, avocado, chipotle line crema and New Mexico green chiles on a croissant. Available through Aug. 16.

Governor Ducey hopes to eliminate the income tax. He wants to continue cutting business taxes, which, according to him and fellow conservatives, will bring businesses streaming to Arizona by the U-Haul-load. He wants to change the school funding formula to reward "success," a term he hasn't defined.

Same with Kansas. An article in this week's NY Times Magazine, The Kansas Experiment, puts Arizona's conservative agenda items in national perspective. Kansas, under the leadership of Governor Sam Brownback, who took the helm in 2011, is moving in the same direction, and is probably farther along in the process. The two states aren't identical, but the similarities are strong enough that you can almost see Ducey and his fellow state conservatives leaning over Brownback's shoulder to read his playbook.

Here are some excerpts.

With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.

[snip]

The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state.

[snip]

[State Rep. Gene Suellentrop, vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House] brainstormed with Dave Trabert, the president of the small-government Kansas Policy Institute, about whether there was a way to isolate the administrative costs in the state education budget, so Republicans could cut them without reducing classroom spending.

[snip]

Do you love drinking and buying things with other people's money? Of course you do, that's The Dream. It's also why you're going to want to get started on your Summer Passport. We've talked about this a few times, but here's the deal: We've got about $2,000 in gift cards and prizes from Tucson businesses. We're raffling them off in bundles (detailed here). To enter, you need to visit the 24 businesses who contributed to the gift total—tell them thanks for being so cool and participating in this giveaway! Each business will have you complete a task (take a picture kissing a Hawaiian skeleton! Eat a quesadilla! Sing on stage!) and send you on your way with their part of your "passport" stamped. Your destinations are listed in the paper (on Page 14 of the Aug. 6 issue, Page 13 if you snag a copy for the upcoming Aug. 13 issue).

Sure, 24 seems like a lot. But these prizes are hefty and we're going to need you to earn them.

Here's a secret: There aren't a ton of people who have the time, patience or will power to earn all 24 stamps on the passport. That means, there aren't too many people in the running—bettering your chances to win! So get on it. Spread it out over a couple days (You've got until noon on Sept. 4) or challenge yourself to get it done in the smallest possible amount of time. I believe in you. Now win this.

The first shoe has dropped. The unofficial AzMERIT scores for the state have been released, and, as most people expected, fewer students made it above the cut score—were declared Proficient—than with the earlier AIMS test. We were told AzMERIT was going to be a tougher test, so it makes sense that the proficiency rate would go down. But there's another shoe yet to drop when the individual district and school scores are released. Here's what you should expect: the percent of students declared Proficient will fall in all schools and districts, but it will fall less in high performing schools than in low performing schools. That means the gap between high achieving and low achieving schools and districts will appear to increase, but the change will have more to do with the way the test is scored than with any change in student achievement.

New York City was the first in the nation to give its students a test aligned with the Common Core. Passing rates dropped all over the city, but the drop was greatest among students who scored low on the previous test. That  didn't mean the achievement gap increased. The raised cut score made the increased gap in passage rates a virtual certainty.

If the proficiency gap increases in Arizona as I expect it will, the new AzMERIT test itself won't be the main reason, and it certainly won't mean the differences in students' achievement levels have grown. It will be due to the raised expectations about what it means to be proficient. When you raise the cut score, raise the dividing line between Proficient and Partially Proficient, the apparent achievement gap is going to increase even if students' academic abilities remain constant. That has to do with the nature of tests and cut scores. More or less the same thing would have happened if we kept AIMS and set a new, higher bar on the old test.

If I'm wrong, if the percentage of students declared Proficient drops more-or-less evenly school to school and district to district or the differences don't have any relation to whether the schools are high or low achieving, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, anyone who uses the new scores to slam "failing" students and schools by saying things have gotten worse since last year, that the test's increased proficiency gap means that low achieving students and schools are achieving at a lower level than they did before, is wrong.

The Marijuana Policy Project has gathered 50,000 signatures in the past 10 weeks for its ballot measure to legalize recreational weed in Arizona. 

The initiative would allow for adults 21 and over to buy, posses and even cultivate marijuana. There'll also be the opportunity to get retail licenses and revenue from taxation would go toward education and public health efforts.

“Adults of all ages and political stripes want to vote for this in November 2016,” says JP Holyoak, MPP's campaign chairman. “We are excited by the outpouring of support. This is the right initiative at the right time.”

The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol began the signature-gathering process in May, and in a little more than month had already raised $300,000 and collected 25,000 sigs, according to MPP spokesman Barrett Marson. 

Voters can sign petitions at Motor Vehicle Division locations around the state, says a statement by MPP campaign political director Carlos Alfaro. 

Marson says MPP expects to collect well over 200,000 before the July 2016 deadline. State law requires a little more than 150,000, but they are trying to be cautious in case of invalid signatures.

"Prohibition does not work. It hasn't worked for marijuana, just like it didn'tdre work for alcohol," Marson told Tucson Weekly in July. "Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, and it is well past time to make adult use of marijuana legal. Right now, marijuana is in the hands of the cartels. The cartels grow, distribute and sell it here in Arizona and across the country. This is an opportunity to regulate and tax it, take that away from the cartels, and bring in much needed state money to education and ensure marijuana is regulated for adult use."

For those of you who have been re-watching “This is Spinal Tap” or “Best in Show,” quietly praying that mockumentary king Christopher Guest would return to his forte, rejoice.

Netflix announced today that Guest would be joining their growing list of big time movie folks creating smart, funny and popular originals for their streaming service.

“Mascots” will be Guest’s first directorial project since 2006’s “For Your Consideration,” a film that didn’t really hit well with fans or reviewers. (This is the only film of his that I haven't watched and quoted a zillion times. Once, was enough, though I say that with respect and disappointment.) The new feature will hearken back to what the fans love him for, satirical mockumentaries about funny people in niche worlds. From dog shows, to washed up rock bands and folk performers, this comedy will tell the untold story of mascots. Think of it as, the heart and soul beneath giant animal heads out on the football field or basketball court.

Not much has been released about the film, just a short plot description and promotional poster.

“Welcome to all the drama, intrigue, and occasional excitement of the 8th World Mascot Association Championships, where a group of 'unusual' men and women, with big heads and furry suits, compete to win the prestigious Gold Fluffy Award and be crowned best mascot in the world.”

Though the cast has not been announced yet, I am willing to bet that some of his right hand men and women will be returning with their fearless brand of wit.

Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard making jokes through big, hot animal heads. Yes, Please.

Parker Posey making some reference to Busy Bee, while maybe in a bee costume herself? I have been waiting for the day.

While no official release date has been announced, I am sure fans are just waiting, ready to dial it up to eleven.