Ip Man was an actual real-life figure who trained many in the martial arts of Wing Chun, including Bruce Lee.

Donnie Yen plays Ip Man in this fantastical take on the his life, a film that utilizes a few of the details from Ip Man’s biography, but then goes crazy. Early in the movie, Ip Man is visited by a young dude looking to serve as his disciple, and the meeting doesn’t go so well. It turns out the man is Bruce Lee, and his character will appear briefly later in the film in what amounts to a fun cameo in a wacky movie.

The film is set in 1959 Hong Kong where Ip Man finds himself trying to protect a school from thugs. It’s just a premise to bounce a bunch of fights off of, including a matchup of Ip Man and Mike Tyson (!) playing a crime boss.

Yes, Iron Mike goes to battle with Iron Monkey, and the results are surprisingly exciting, even if Tyson’s arsenal doesn’t have much to do with martial arts (He just punches things).

The movie is a strange mix of goofiness and sentimentality (there’s a subplot involving Ip Man’s wife’s cancer), but fans of the genre will like it for the fights, of which there are many. Also, seeing Mike Tyson in something like this is a real trip. 

About a week ago, the Internet unearthed its latest meme—the ever-popular, always annoying "Damn Daniel" Vine. 

Most viral videos are at least a little funny, but "Damn Daniel" is not. Daniel Lara, the Vine's namesake, wears white Vans, but that's about all he does. The line, "Damn, Daniel, back at it again in the white Vans," spoken by Lara's friend, Joshua Holz—the guy behind the camera—is the alleged "humor" behind the Vine.

The Vine isn't really that funny, IMO, but I guess Ellen saw promise in the 14-year-olds behind it because she invited Lara and Holz to her show, giving them free "Damn Daniel" merch and Ellen-brand fame. 

"Damn Daniel" was pretty dumb. It made me wonder why the "Lebron James" kid or the "What Are Those" guy weren't invited to Ellen—those Vines were actually funny, after all. 

An exhaustive new study by the Grand Canyon Institute and Arizonans for Charter School Accountability concludes that many charter schools spend far more on administrative costs per student than school districts. The higher costs amount to $128 million a year. To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers looked at every Arizona charter school and school district's finances by poring over the Annual Financial Reports they submitted to the state for the 2014-15 school year, which means the results are based on the school or school district's own reporting.

I've looked over the AFRs of individual schools a number of times—they can be found on the Department of Education's website—and analyzed the kind of information used in the study, but I've never gone through the laborious task of compiling AFR data for all Arizona schools. As a result of the thoroughness of the study, the conclusions it reaches can be confirmed by looking over the data. Some tables in the study pull out data on specific school districts, charter schools and charter school chains, and others include information about every district and charter school in the state, allowing readers and researchers to check the study's conclusions and use the data for further research.

This is a 64 page report filled with data and analysis, far too much information for one post, so I'll probably be digging into it in further posts. But for now, here is some of the information highlighted by the authors:

• Charters spend an average of $1403 per student on administration. School districts average $628, less than half.

• School district spending is analyzed by the state Auditor General, but charter school spending is not. The state Charter School Board is the only agency responsible for the oversight of charter schools, and it doesn't analyze charter school spending.

• Though smaller charters would be expected to have larger administrative costs because of the administrative inefficiency common to smaller institutions, in fact, some of the large charter school chains are the biggest spenders on administration per student.

• BASIS charter schools are especially big spenders on administration. However, since most of their funds end up at BASIS.ed, a for-profit Education Management Organization, we have no way of knowing how that money is spent because it's hidden behind a for-profit firewall. 

A clear takeaway from the study is that the state needs greater transparency from its charters and also needs to exercise greater oversight. This study of administrative costs is just one example of areas where we know too little about how charter schools operate.

It's going to get a lot easier for medical marijuana dispensaries in Tucson to expand thanks to three zoning amendments the City Council passed Tuesday evening.

Here's the good news:

Outdoor cultivation of medical weed is now allowed in industrial zones in accordance with state law. The Arizona Medical Marijuana Act says that outdoor growing is good to go only if the area is surrounded by 10-foot walls made of metal, concrete or stone that prevent outsiders from seeing the marijuana plants. 

Dispensary owners have said that adding more cultivation space helps keep up the demand of patients. Many in Tucson get marijuana shipped from Phoenix, because they run out of product quickly.

Off-site cultivation sites in commercial areas are now allowed to grow to up to 4,000-square feet, which is 1,000 more than the previous restriction. And, thirdly, existing dispensaries can expand within 500 feet from "sensitive areas," which include schools, parks and libraries. The old rule said dispensaries needed to stay back at least 1,000 feet, even if a school or another so-called sensitive place opened after the dispensary was established.

What starts as a fairly interesting film about how foreign countries feed and teach their children goes off the rails and loses any sense of focus in this, the latest junk food documentary from goofball Michael Moore.

The premise for this one has a flag toting Moore representing America “invading” other countries and threatening to steal ideas like great school cafeterias and free tuition. Moore has a way of presenting scintillating factoids only to cloud their presentation with dopey and gimmicky showboating.

The bit where he plants American flags and says he’s claiming shit for America is lame the first time, and incredibly mundane the tenth. There’s just something about this guy when he gets all sad and somber and scary with his narrations that makes me want to throw a small car at the movie screen.

As usual, Moore presents some facts about other great countries while demonizing the one we live in. Sure, we have much room for improvement, but so do the countries Moore visits in the movie.

Oddly enough, we only see the really good stuff other countries have to offer with only mere small mentions of any problems they might be having. Moore has a history of twisting and playing with the facts to match up with his agenda, and this movie is no exception. Plus, it just isn’t very well made. It’s sloppy and lazy documentary filmmaking.

Former Supreme Court Justice and class act Sandra Day O'Connor told Fox 10 News in Phoenix that Senate Republicans should stop with the business of blocking any appointment to fill the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court.

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake became the latest Republican to say he would not even consider hearing from any nominee President Barack Obama put forth. Flake, like many other Republicans, holding up this unprecedented obstructionism as some kind of tradition. His statement:

One would have to go back more than a century to find a scenario where a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court was confirmed by the opposition party in the Senate when the vacancy occurred during an election year. I'm not about to break new ground in the Senate, particularly when any nominee could so drastically shift the balance of the court.

The real breaking of new ground here, of course, is the refusal to even consider a nominee. Flake may be technically correct that an opposition party hasn't confirmed a nominee in more than a century, but that's only because the opportunity hasn't come up. (Jonathan Chait at New York mag debunks the claims of "tradition" here.)

What's really going on here is the continuing collapse of all political norms that have kept our government functioning for as long as it has. This is raw power politics, not some deference to long-held principles. And that's not going unnoticed with the comments on his Facebook page.

Flake is doing this to save his own political hide; Arizona conservatives are growsing that he is a secretly a big ol' lib because he voted in favor of Loretta Lynch as US attorney general, so he's gonna prove them wrong, no matter what the damage is to the country and the reputation of the court. Nice work, Sen. Flake.

It's a sad well-proven fact that the criminal justice system overwhelmingly targets low-income individuals and people of color. But the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community also faces disproportionate discrimination and incarceration rates. This issue worsens with LGBT people of color and those living in poverty.

As a new report points out,

A gay teen is forced [out] of his home by his parents because of his sexual orientation and is harassed and arrested by the police for sleeping on the street. A black transgender woman is arrested under suspicion of prostitution just because of her gender identity. A bisexual parolee can't find a home because she's not legally protected from housing discrimination and she also has a criminal record. A lesbian woman in prison is assaulted by a correctional officer. A transgender woman who is an undocumented immigrant is placed in a men's facility, in isolation, simply because she is transgender.

The report—Unjust: How the Broken Criminal Justice System Fails LGBT People—co-authored by the Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project, looks into the experiences of many LGBT people—a community that, the report finds, is overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

Commenting sections on the internet are notoriously unpleasant and we're sad to report that our website is no exception. 

We've recently seen an influx in the types of comments deemed unwelcome on our website and we need to address the issue. Let's start here: our Comments Policy is always posted on our website.

Here's a refresher: 

THINGS THAT BREAK THE RULES

• Potentially libelous comments.
  
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We delete comments that violate the policy. Repeated and particularly egregious violations get you booted from the TW comments for good. 

We strive to be judicious about which comments to delete. We don't want to censor you. We also don't want the comments section of our website to turn into a cesspool of hate speech, personal attacks and hijacked conversations.

When that happens, we start deleting posts and closing commenting.

You can notify us about comments you find objectionable by pushing the "report" button at the bottom left and telling us why you think the comment should be removed.  

Here's the deal: Make your points, say what you need to say, speak up when someone is mistaken or misinformed. Be critical. Discussion and debate are welcome. Personal attacks and racist comments are not.

It's award season which interests me for just about two reasons: We can watch (and rewatch) the Hamilton cast's performance at the Grammys and the Oscar nominated animated shorts are showing in theaters. 

Oh, you want to see the live action shorts? Forget about it, those were last week and they're not the important ones anyway. These are the ones you want.

The Loft Cinema (3233 E Speedway Blvd) is showing the films (and a few bonus ones!) this Thursday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m.  

Here's a taste of the films, with descriptions provided by the Loft:

Sanjay’s Super Team – Bored with his father’s meditation, a young Indian boy daydreams of Hindu gods as superheroes. (Dir. by Sanjay Patel, 2015, USA, 7 mins.)

"You get a private school voucher! You get a private school voucher! You get a private school voucher!" (h/t Oprah). That's what the bill passed by the Arizona Senate sounds like to most people's ears. If the bill becomes law, in a few years every child in the state will be eligible to receive an Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher. But it's more complicated than that. Let's look at the bill and its ramifications in a bit of detail.

First, the ESAs aren't simply vouchers for private schools, where the state picks up the cost of private school tuition, or a portion of the cost. They're vouchers for every child who isn't enrolled in a publicly funded school, district or charter. As well as children attending private schools, it includes a wide variety of home schoolers. So long as the children aren't enrolled in publicly funded schools, parents can get accounts containing taxpayer money they can draw on for any approved educational cost. That includes private school tuition, of course, but it can also include textbooks, educational therapies or services, tutoring, tuition for a learning program, the cost of tests such as the SAT and so on. If parents want to be entirely responsible for their children's educations or if they want to create a cafeteria-style, pick-from-the-menu education strategy which includes tutoring, individual classes and so on, the ESA lets them do that, all on the taxpayer dime. If any money is left over at the end of the year—and many home schoolers would have lots of money left over—it can be rolled over year after year. Anything left at the end of K-12 can be used for college. The idea of subsidizing home schooling, and even encouraging home schooling by dangling the prospect of having money left over to pay for college, creates all kinds of frightening scenarios in which parents who aren't equipped educationally or emotionally to educate their kids will be lured into trying to provide education on the cheap by the prospect of subsidized college education.

Next, to qualify for an ESA, a child must spend at least 100 days at a publicly funded school. That's a little more than half of a 180 day school year. So, put your five year old in a public kindergarten, leave the child there for the whole year or just the first hundred days, and you get the next twelve years of non-public education paid for by the taxpayer.

But how much will the state pay for each child? That's a phenomenally important question. The answer is somewhere between $3,500 and $5,000 per year for most children, based on estimates I've read. Children who need educational assistance beyond the normal classroom—they have physical or mental handicaps, they qualify for ELL, etc.—get more money allotted to them, just as they do in all publicly funded schools. It can be upwards to $20,000 a year, and maybe more in some cases.