In 1979, construction concluded on the Awhatukee House of the Future, a $1.2m model home in the new Phoenix suburb of Ahwatukee Village, co-built with input from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Associated Architects and equipped with 10 networked Motorola processors that retailed for $30,000.
Continue reading “Remembering the Awhatukee House of the Future, a “shining home of dreams” that became a $3 tourist trap”
Tag: phoenix
Phoenix’s police union has a secret deal with the department to purge dirty cops’ disciplinary records
For two decades, the Phoenix police union has had a secret deal with the police department that required that the disciplinary records of cops would be “purged,” so that no one, not even their supervisors, would be able to retrieve them.
Owner of Phoenix apartment building serves eviction notices to every tenant so he can turn their homes into unlicensed hotel rooms
Like many large US cities, Phoenix has a housing shortage and like many US cities, that crisis is worsened by the conversion of much of its housing stock into unlicensed hotel rooms through companies like Airbnb, VRBO, and Wanderjaunt, a new competitor in the unlicensed hotel room industry.
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Man donates mother’s body to science, discovers it was sold to the military for “blast testing”
When Jim Stauffer’s mother Doris Stauffer died at the age of 73, he sought out a way for her body to be used to further scientific study: she had Alzheimer’s but did not carry the genes commonly associated with it, so he thought that her brain might yield further insights into the disease.
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FBI agent describes finding “Frankensteins” and a “cooler full of penises” at an unregulated Arizona body-donation center
Phoenix’s Biological Resource Center advertised that it would collect your relatives’ remains and dispose of their body parts for medical purposes, cremating the unused portions and returning them; it was founded by the aptly named Stephen Gore, whose highest level of educational attainment was a high school diploma and who learned the processes by which he dismembered and preserved the bodies in his care “from books or the internet.”
Continue reading “FBI agent describes finding “Frankensteins” and a “cooler full of penises” at an unregulated Arizona body-donation center”
Where to find me at Phoenix Comics Fest this week
I’m heading to Phoenix Comics Fest tomorrow (going straight to the airport from my daughter’s elementary school graduation) (!), and I’ve got a busy schedule so I thought I’d produce a comprehensive list of the places you can find me in Phoenix:
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See you tonight, Scottsdale, AZ! (then San Diego, Portland, Seattle…) (!)
Thanks to everyone who came out to last night’s Walkaway tour-stop at Houston’s Brazos Books; I’m just arriving at the airport to fly to Phoenix for tonight’s event at Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen Books with Brian David Johnson.
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Phoenix airport threatens to kick out TSA, hire private (unaccountable) contractors
The administrators of the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport are apparently considering getting rid of the TSA and replacing them with private contractors, similar to the setup at San Francisco International Airport.
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Airport workers, including TSA, raid unlockable luggage for valuables
Airport stings keep catching insiders pilfering millions of dollars worth of passenger property from bags that can no longer be effectively locked, thanks to a TSA rule that insists on luggage being equipped with locks that are all vulnerable to the same passkey.
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FBI recommended felony counts against Joe Arpaio’s cronies
The FBI has turned over a redacted set of documents from its investigative archives related to Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, a notorious strong-man whose antics have cost the taxpayers millions in civil suit settlements for actions ranging from racial profiling to stealing a defendant’s paperwork in open court to arresting newspaper owners who refused to turn over readers’ identities to torching a house and killing a puppy in the process of investigating traffic citations.
The FBI archives, which go back to 2008, reveal that the Bureau recommended that some or all of former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, Arpaio and his officers be indicted for felony counts of “obstructing criminal investigations of prosecutions, theft by threats, tampering with witnesses, perjury and theft by extortion.” This recommendation was ignored by federal prosecutors, who concluded that there was not enough evidence to proceed.
County officials who tried to rein in Arpaio have had their offices swept for bugs, believing that Arpaio’s regime engages in dirty tricks and illegal wiretapping against local politicians that are hostile to his tactics. Arpaio’s office filed several charges against hostile local politicians, none of which led to convictions (by contrast, Arpaio’s friendly county attorney Andrew Thomas was unable to get reelected and was eventually barred from practicing law altogether).
Arpaio’s bid to quash the FBI investigation and his campaign against local politicians have cost Arizona taxpayers over $44M to date.
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