For the past few weeks, the folks over at KGUN have been running a gimmick where they use the natural heat of the Sonoran desert to do silly things with food — baking, making smores, so on and so forth — on Fridays. Because, y'know. Fry-Day. As in, it's hot enough to FRY things during the DAY, in case you needed that spelled out for you.

You probably didn't.

But today's Fry-Day event started out innocent enough, and now seems a bit, uh...weird.

Apparently, the idea was to correctly guess how many inches the cactus ice sculpture would lose as it melted in the heat during the 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. newscasts...then, this photo happened.

Why yes, that is KGUN news personality Liz Kotalik somewhat awkwardly embracing that large, tall, hard-looking cactus-esque sculpture — and maybe it's the heat, maybe it's just our warped minds over here in Alt-Weekly world, but we just can't get past how ridiculous (and awkwardly risque) this looks.

A sampling of opinions from the Weekly staff, KGUN commenters and other folks I showed the photo to:

- "I'm thinking of some COMPLETELY different captions for that photo"

- "It'd be more interesting to conjecture how many inches an erection would lose just by thinking about the ice sculpture."

- "Aren't they copying a Phoenix station? [Note: Cooking things with the sun isn't a particularly original idea, but yeah, KSAZ is doing it too.] And isn't that a bit phallic ... at least by six inches. What happened to cooking eggs on the sidewalk?"

- "Their viewers will love it. She'll need a shorter skirt, though."

- "Well, there are all sorts of shrinkage jokes to be made there."

- "This is hot on so many levels."

- "Get Liz' hot hands off of it or it will melt faster."

- "Just the tip."

Yeah, that's a good one to stop at. Hopefully, the next ice sculpture they go with isn't something that isn't quite so phallic — or at least that maybe they rethink putting the pretty, young 23-year-old reporter next to it.

Oh, for the record: at last check (and admittedly, I'm not checking with great frequency) the statue went from 38 inches at 4 p.m. to something very determined to turn into a puddle, as seen here at 5:45 p.m.

Apologies to KGUN's Liz Kotalik, hugger of the ice cactus.