A new use for that Gurley Street building?

There's been a flurry of activity at the site of the old Bruener's furniture store, where the last tenancy was a brief fling by a Halloween chain. Now we have something called One80 about to open.

Let's see: live music & drama. Free admission. Saturdays. Sounds remarkably like the old Underground, a religiously sponsored place in the basement beneath the former Christian bookstore at Gurley and Montezuma (below). I still contend that the building looks like a prime venue for a real night spot or possibly a dinner restaurant. Hosting an event one night per week seems a waste!

Anybody have further info?

Media Links: Somehow I missed the first couple of issues of the latest music, art & night life paper hitting the local street, Pop Rocket. It joins the two Sparrow Press magazines (Monsoon and Frontier News) which also cover the local scene, the difference being that the new kid on the block is offering a couple of researched articles of interest. The best news, however, is that ReadItNews is back in business, though only online; no dead tree edition. I wonder if Candace will be doing further writing about the water issue! There's another online only publication, PrescotteNews you might want to check out. And for the record, don't forget our local Courier which actually has a lot of interesting stuff on its web pages, including pictures galore. A search by The Google did not produce URLs for either of the slicks, Yavapai Magazine or Yavapai Woman (BTW, is the latter magazine still being published?) Any other publications I should know about?

Media Update: One reader reminds me of maitre 'd guide; a second reports that Yavapai magazine has gone belly up. 'S funny -- folks keep trying slick magazines, but, oh, the cost of that coated paper & all that 4-color printing (I've been there); I can't see the necessary subscriber base to support such a publication.

Part of a HUGE sundog or ???

Very strange rainbow I caught at 11 a.m. in the eastern sky, about 45 degrees above the horizon. No clouds to the west so I couldn't check to see if it was part of a really, really huge sundog. If not that, I don't know WTH. Any knowhow out there?

A Buggy Mystery

Recall my post about the old Courier litho plates? At the same place the daughter and I took those photographs, we came across another curious phenomenon: a swarm of bugs of some sort, clinging to a piece of well weathered particle board.

They were so red, I thought they might be ladybug larvae until I took a closer look. Not. Took pictures and moved on.

Eleven days later, the famous Niece from Memphis and I visited the same spot to take some close-up pix. The black fellows above I recognized -- I see them early, every spring, on the sidewalks, mating. Presumably, the insects in these pictures are all the same species, in differing stages of maturity. So: are the mating pairs adults who have over-wintered?

The swarm seems to include immature forms (the more immature, the more red; the smaller, the more immature -- at least that is my hunch.) Note the undeveloped wings on some of the critters.

How to ID these bugs (for I'm pretty sure that they are hemiptra, true bugs)? The obvious place to start out is at the Yavapai county agent's web site; unfortunately, the bugs that get attention from the ag department are those that cause problems, tho there was a similar form called seed bug (melanopterus belfragei). Being a wiseacre, I figured melanopterus as the species & I tried The Google's image service, netting a large number of fish and shark pictures for my trouble. So: at this point, I've got an email to our county agent to see if he can track down the genesis of this critter. Note: Welcome to visitors from the Circus of the Spineless! For further adventures with Prescott arthropods, click on the "insects" label below.

Interesting Links: Have you seen any of those cat pictures with the hacker slang captions (i.e., Im in ur server eating ur dataz)? Wikipedia, natch, has an article about them, as well as another about what it labels as Internet phenomena. And just for fun, take a look here.

The Mysterious Staircase

Many local folk are familiar with the hillside staircase that goes from the foot of Willis Street up to the Sacred Heart Church and school. Far fewer are aware that there is another set of steps up a hillside. These stairs start behind the Middle School and take one up to McCormick Street at the spot where it turns west for the final climb up to the Pioneer Home, barely visible at the top of the picture above.

I've no idea of the history of these stairs. I can speculate that they were put in place for use by residents of the home back in the world before autos were so ubiquitous. However, they don't take the user toward downtown -- it's much easier to take the sidewalk straight down McCormick to go shopping or to Whiskey Row for a beer. There are even benches to rest along the way.

Maybe the stairs were for students who lived up the hill? No, they don't actually end up at the school, either, but rather wind up at a path to Aubrey Street. Is there anybody out there with an answer?