JAM Culinary Concepts, the parent company of both Vero Amore and Noble Hops, recently took well-loved former Indian food truck Twisted Tandoor under its wing, with promises of an eminent brick and mortar location. Though that restaurant is still projected to be a couple months out, you don't have to wait to get anther taste of Twisted Tandoor.

Vero Amore has already incorporated the Singh family Twisted Tandoor recipes into their line-up with their unique Indian pizza nights for the past year and a half, while seeking to get the truck up and running again for catering and private events. Now, the restaurant's speakeasy-inspired bar, The Still (located behind a rotating wall in Vero Amore at 2920 N. Swan Road), will play host to a special Indian Night event. 

Led by Roopinder Grewal of Twisted Tandoor, Josh and Aric Mussman of JAM and bartender and manager of The Still Tiffany Eldredge, the one-night-only event will run from 7 p.m. to midnight on Thursday, May 12 and will offer seven dishes and eight cocktails inspired by Twisted Tandoor.

Here's the menu:

Time's almost up! I won't waste your time with witty banter here because your Best Of Tucson ballot is due by the end of the day Sunday and we don't accept late work in this class, buddy. 

Vote! Fill out at least 30 categories, support local business and (if you're new) make sure you sign in using your full name because...

IMPORTANT: If our website is telling you "someone has already logged in with this email address using a different name" that someone is probably you! If you've ever opened a Best Of Tucson ballot (in any year), you've got a voter account. Your name is your forever Best of Tucson password. You have to type your name the exact same way from year to year, or you won't be able to get into the ballot. Can't figure out how you typed your name last year? Email me: [email protected]

Feelin' pregnant? Monday's Full Frontal with Samantha Bee broadcast a report on "crisis pregnancy centers"—antiabortion clinics that often masquerade as abortion clinics and legitimate pregnancy centers.

“A crisis pregnancy center is a fake abortion clinic,” Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation says in the segment. “They want women to believe there are long-term negative consequences, like they won't be able to have children, like they will suffer from 'post abortion stress syndrome,' or that they would have an increased risk of breast cancer.”

Saporta says there are about twice as many of these "fake clinics" in the U.S. than there are actual abortion clinics. 

Watch the segment here:

Director Ben Wheatley, who made a couple of weird films with A Field in England and the brilliant horror-comedy Sightseers, gets even weirder with his latest, an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel about warfare inside a high-rise building.

Tom Hiddleston is Robert, a doctor who moves into the building to get a new start on life. He has an affair with the beautiful woman downstairs (Sienna Miller), makes himself some new friends, and even gets to know the building’s eccentric architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons).

Things are going relatively well in the complex, save for a couple of control panels and elevators breaking, when an occupant falls to his death. That sets off a chain reaction where the tenants fall into an anarchic state. They rape, they pillage, and they paint their own apartments with no authority to do so.

Wheatley’s movie has echoes of Gilliam and Kubrick, although he has an incredibly unique vision unto himself. Hiddleston is good in the lead, slowly falling into madness. There are times where the film doesn’t make much sense, but it’s always insane and somewhat enjoyable.

Having lived in apartments most of my life, I’d say much of what happens in this complex is fairly accurate.

By now it’s clear that food isn’t just about restaurants and dining out, but has grown to be a movement that focuses ever more on local farms and farmers and the traditions of food in any given region. After all, Tucson wouldn’t have won its illustrious UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation without the region’s rich agricultural history paired with modern strides to not only revive it, but make it accessible and inclusive to those in the community.

One of the organizations at the forefront of that very effort in town is the Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace and their heritage crop efforts at the Mission Garden. That’s why local food fanatics should head to the garden on Saturday, May 14 for the 2016 Dia de San Ysidro festival.

The event, which aims to celebrate traditional farming in Tucson by highlighting Old World and indigenous food traditions, will include a procession from Tucson Origins Heritage Park to the garden, performances from Mariachi Milagro and the Desert Indian Dancers from San Xavier, a Native American Four Directions Blessing, a presentation on water saints and acequias by M. Brescia (PhD) and a Pozole de Trigo tasting. Attendees can also take part in a community wheat harvest where you can thresh and winnow alongside members of Presidio San Agustin.

The celebration has roots in Arizona history, and the organization shows it off with an 120-year-old excerpt from the Arizona Weekly Citizen from May 19, 1894:

“All honor was shown today to San Ysidro Labrador…San Ysidro is the rural saint, the patron of the fields and crops. The image was carried today about the fields below town, with a gay procession following…At every house refreshments are on hand, and are served. A feature is usually an olla of teswin, a light wine made of corn. No other intoxicants are permitted…The first of the crop of each field was promised to the patron saint. The Chinese gardeners have come to have due regard for this annual festival, and were among the heavy contributors, some of them giving money.”

The cultural festival begins at 9 a.m. and is open to the public. While the event is free, a $5 donation is requested per person. For more information, visit the Friends of Tucson's Birthplace website.

The next time someone tells you charter schools are superior to district schools—because, "Look at BASIS!" "Look at Louisiana!" "Look at [fill in the blank]!"—and has FACTS and FIGURES to back it up, tell them charter schools have a significantly lower graduation rate than district schools, and hit them with some FACTS and FIGURES of your own.

And, by the way, even if both of you have good data, more often than not the comparisons don't mean a hell of a lot when it comes to showing that charters are better that district schools or vice versa.

The seventh annual report on U.S. graduation rates just came out. According to the report:

"Seven percent (7%) of regular district public schools, or roughly 1,000 schools nationwide, were low-graduation rate high schools."

"Thirty percent (30%) of charter schools were low-graduation-rate high schools."

The study is chock full o' stats. Here are a few more. District schools have an average 85 percent graduation rate, while charters have an average 70 percent graduation rate. And if you look at virtual schools—online schools where the students work from home, like the K12 Inc. schools (such as Arizona Virtual Academy), 87 percent are low graduation rate schools, with a shockingly low 40 percent average graduation rate.

If I were anti-charter, which I'm not, and wanted to score points, which I don't, I'd say, "See? All those district schools that the 'education reform'/privatizer folks love to complain about are doing a better job graduating students than the charters they praise to the skies." But that's ridiculous, because these stats, like so many used against district schools, don't lend themselves to direct comparison.

Over at Salon, Tucson novelist Lydia Millet offers a modest proposal about giving up on literary fiction and jumping into writing porn:

So we’ve got the unmoving words on the page. That’s the first black mark against us. Second: do we get to the point? How soon? Here’s the answer: no. We don’t get to the point, not for 200 pages at least. Sometimes 3,600, if we’re Knausgaard. At writing workshops they taught us to show not tell — well, showing takes time. We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don’t get to the point, and sometimes when we do our readers don’t notice, in fact. It’s so couched in nuance it can fly right over a person’s head. What was that you said? I couldn’t quite make it out.

Third, sound bites. We don’t have them. No pull quotes. No celebrity names. Few if any pictures. The list of what we don’t have is a long one. Our tools for captivation are few, and often ungainly.

Which is why I’ve settled on porn, come to a decision that my next book after this one will be devoted to relentless, often hardcore pornography. I can’t give you an exact preview here on the pages of Salon, of course: this is a decent website. Plus that would be a spoiler.

All joking aside: Millet's new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, continues to draw rave reviews. At Slate, Laura Miller writes:

Meow! I'm Midnight.

I'm a 3 year playful boy and I need a home. I love attention from people and will run right up to you for pets on my head and scratches on my chin.

I tested positive for FeLV, but that doesn't mean that I don't deserve a good home! If you're interested in me, but have current cats don't worry: The Humane Society of Southern Arizona will test and vaccinate them at no cost to you to make sure that all your pets stay happy, safe and healthy!

If you're looking to brighten your home with a social and lovable cat contact the Main Campus at 327-6088 to check on my availability and exact location!

Lots of love,
Midnight (823366)

S. Ramanujan was one of the greatest scientific minds to ever roam the Earth. Writer-director Matthew Brown’s film chronicles the time he spent in London studying with G.H. Hardy and formulating some of his greatest mathematical breakthroughs.

While there is no doubt Ramanujan’s contributions to society are massive, the movie about how he reached his conclusions is a bit of a dud.

Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons labor hard as Ramanujan and Hardy, delivering admirable performances. However, much of this movie is men sitting at tables with pencils trying to figure stuff out, and men writing a bunch of numbers on chalkboards. This doesn’t make for captivating cinema. The movie brushes upon other subjects, such as the racism Ramanujan faced, and his wife back in India. These subplots do little to move the story along, and the film just sort of drags. Patel and Irons are not at fault. Heck, Brown had a monumental task making this story compelling. He is only about fifty percent successful. The movie is, ultimately, a bit of a bore. 

How could we be here already? The first round of Best of Tucson® voting closes at the end of next Sunday, May 15. 

Once the gates close on this ballot, our team of caffeinated pandas will comb through your answers and compile a ballot of finalists based on the top 5 nominees in each category. 

Give us about a week to get everything together then be on the look out for the finalists to be announced (and the second round of voting to open)!

Vote. Spread the ballot. Time is running out!

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P.S. Are you having trouble getting into your ballot? There's a reason the ballot says first and last name are required! Your name is, in essence, your Best of Tucson password. You have to type your name the exact same way from year to year, or you won't be able to get into the ballot. Can't figure out how you typed your name last year? Email me: [email protected]