The $13.5 million campaign for the Save Old Main fund to support the renovation project continues. The UA employee site, Lo Que Pasa, just released this video along with this campaign/renovation update:

Before it sprawled across 387 acres, the UA was housed in just one building: Old Main.

While the University has grown in size over the decades, Old Main has remained standing, becoming a beloved campus icon and a reminder of how far the University has come.

Last summer, Old Main was emptied so a delicate process of renovating and restoring the 122-year-old brick building could move forward. On Oct. 1, the University launched a $13.5 million Save Old Main fundraising campaign to support the project. (Read more about the restoration efforts in this article.)

Renovations are scheduled to be completed this summer, with the building ready for occupancy in time for the fall semester.

To UA students and employees, Old Main is much more than just another campus building; it's the heart of the University. Many employees have fond memories of Old Main from when they were students or had offices in the building. In this video, they share some of those memories and talk about Old Main's significance to UA history.

Updates on the Save Old Main campaign are available on Twitter, at @SaveOldMain, and users can share their own memories by using the hashtag #saveoldmain.

Here's what I think you should do this weekend.

There's two awesome concerts going on simultaneously tonight.

• Photo courtesy of The Rock.

Cash Lansky and Marley B, this week's cover stars, are home after a month long tour through the US of A. You can catch the rising stars tonight at The Rock, 36 N. Park Ave. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are only $8 at the door.

• Image courtesy of the Facebook event page.

Acorn Bcorn and The Resonars are opening for Seattle surfer punk rockers La Luz tonight at 191 Toole. La Luz was supposed to perform at Club Congress in November, but was forced to reschedule after losing all their musical equipment and tour van in a car accident with a semi truck. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $5 for this all ages show. Click here for more details.

Here's what you should make time for the weekend of Feb. 1-2:

Gannett Publishing, which clears more than $6 million annually as part of its partnership with Lee Enterprises and the Arizona Daily Star, decided today that its salary overhead — one full-time employee — was too much of a burden to its bottom line.

It announced today that it has shut down the community blog site TucsonCitizen.com, effective immediately. The site will become an archive-only site.

“We are pleased to continue tucsoncitizen.com as an important community resource for Tucsonans who want to research history and the traditions of their city,” wrote Kate Marymount, Gannett’s senior vice president/news for the community publishing division, on a note posted on the site.

Marymount did not respond to repeated efforts for comment about the status of the site during the months since a leadership transition occurred. Mark B. Evans, the editor of Wick-owned Inside Tucson Business, left his position as the administrator of tucsoncitizen.com in September. Since that point, Anthony Gimino, the sole paid casualty in today’s decision, ran into repeated roadblocks in an effort to revamp the concept.

“It’s certainly what I feared when Mark left. Gannett’s energies would be directed toward finding a way to shut it down, “ Gimino said. “I presented an alternative for the site, which was to make it a two-person sports-specific site with two full-time people and a talented group of bloggers including Andy Morales and Scott Terrell. Apparently, that didn’t gain enough traction for them. That idea was even endorsed by Mark, who thought it would be a good direction for the site.”

In recent years, tucsoncitizen.com had been plagued by increasingly frustrating technical issues. Behind the scenes, it wasn’t a priority for a web development staff focused more on devoting its efforts to the functionality of the Arizona Daily Star website, azstarnet.com. And Gannett made no effort to pursue improvements through other avenues.
“There were long-term technical issues,” Gimino said. “Mark (Evans) had been banging that drum as early as a couple summers ago. It wasn’t something at the top of Gannett’s top priority list to get a redesign of the site or get a fix for our more recent technical glitches. We were definitely at the bottom of their totem pole.”

Despite the frustrations, tucsoncitizen.com had some standout contributors. In addition to Gimino, whose coverage of UA sports has been the best in the city for years — Evans calls Gimino one of the finest sports journalists in the Gannett chain — the site also benefited from the efforts of Andy Morales, the city’s top prep reporter. Gimino singled out the efforts of other contributors, including pet blogger Karyn Zoldan and current events blogger Carolyn Classen.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t offer my appreciation for their work, for some of them for five years being unpaid by the site,” said Gimino. “Some of their work was remarkable.”

Said Gimino: “I’ve been laid off by Gannett before. That’s not new. It was also a great job with autonomy. I could cover the university as I chose. That’s certainly the fun part of it, covering this football and basketball team. I’ve still managed to write about sports, write about the university, so I hope there are some opportunities in that regard. I hope to continue writing, or talking, about Arizona athletics.”

I'm all for satire and Sochi-shaming, and even re-posting those bare-chested horse-riding Putin photos as often as possible. But this new video making the rounds on the internets is satire magic.

I foresee a special Winter Olympic opening held at the Loft with a sing-along. A girl can dream.

All those hipster lists about best cities and all the cool restaurants and shopping areas—well, yada, yada. They've missed pointing out what know in Tucson, our libraries rule and we have some amazing librarians that seem to love dishing out those books and community in Tucson, too. You know who you are, and yep, we love you.

Anyway, if you feel the same, perhaps you should take some time this weekend calling our lovely state lawmaker and ask them as nicely as you can to stop HB 2379, introduced by Republican Justin Olson.

From our lovely librarians:

The bill would put levy caps on library districts and seriously impact budgets. ... The bill will likely go to Rules, caucus, Committee of the Whole, and possibly a floor vote in the House next week.

Librarians and advocates should email and call their legislators expressing opposition to HB 2379: special districts; secondary levy limits. AzLA opposes HB 2379, a bill that places levy caps on Library Districts. Under the bill, levy growth for library districts is restricted to the same percentage growth as the annual increase in the county’s primary levy limits (maximum of 2 percent plus new constructions, annually).

◾Ask your library advocates, friends and staff to email your Representatives by Monday, February 3rd, at 5:00pm. Legislative contact info: http://www.azleg.gov/alisStaticPages/HowToContactMember.asp
◾Whenever possible, please copy or forward AzLA Legislative Chair Brenda Brown (brenda.brown@chandleraz.gov) and and AzLA lobbyist Jessica Rainbow (jessica@pivotalpolicyconsulting.com) onthese e-mails
...
◾Follow-up with a call to make sure they received the email and offer to discuss the issue further

Residents filled the ballroom at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, leaving few open seats and not enough time to hear from everyone.

At the event, jointly hosted by the Children’s Action Alliance and Child & Family Resources and other sponsors, organizers aimed to emphasize the need for preventative services so that CPS would be a last resort. David Higuera, the Children’s Action Alliance Southern Arizona office director, said that funding these preventative programs should be a priority.

“I think the biggest goal for tonight is that the legislature and the governor hear the community when we say loudly and clearly that we think the state can and should be doing more to prevent kids from ever reaching the point where CPS ever needs to get involved,” Higuera said. “To help families succeed, to help families stay healthy and strong.”

The event began with an opening statement from District 16 Rep. Leah Landrum Taylor, who mentioned the progress that’s been made since Gov. Jan Brewer implemented her CARE team commissioned to investigate CPS and address the roughly 6,500 cases that the department has overlooked. The collaboration from law enforcement in municipalities across the state and other organizations, Landrum said, made their effort a success that needs to continue.

Congressman Raul Grijalva responds to the statement of immigration principles that House Republicans are now hammering out:

Like many of my colleagues, I’m encouraged to see forward progress on immigration reform, but this document raises more questions than it answers and I wouldn’t be representing my constituents effectively if I didn’t say so.

The entire country knows an enforcement-only strategy is doomed to failure. Unfortunately, this document emphasizes the same failed crackdown efforts that have torn families apart and brought us no closer to a solution. Immigration reform proponents already believe the Senate bill’s additional $43 billion in unnecessary border militarization spending is too much. Republicans seem to believe it’s not nearly enough. The public has a right to know where this money is coming from, how it’s going to be spent, and how it advances the interests of border communities sick and tired of drones, wire fences and a siege mentality.

We’ve been waiting two and a half years for something as simple as a set of principles, so I’m obliged to ask—what is the followup? What is the Republican end game? They have rejected any notion of a conference on S.744. We’re left to wonder—what kind of bill do they want? Will it includes all or parts of the divisive, politicized SAFE Act? What will these principles lead to?

KEVT AM 1210 has dabbled with a number of Spanish language formats since it turned on the transmitter in 1985. That changed today (Friday, Jan. 31). Talk show host Jim Parisi, who over the summer told the Tucson Weekly he was pursuing efforts to operate a station, has made good on that promise.

Parisi is launching Power Talk 1210 beginning Feb. 17.

“We looked at three stations, two of them very seriously,” said Parisi. “We were talking with money folks for awhile, but it was tough to get it going and get everybody to shake hands and get it done. A lot of people don’t get the business done because they’ll haggle over what I think is a relatively small amount of money in the big picture, so I think the reason we finally got something done is maybe we’ll pay a couple grand more than the last group that tried to get it done. I would rather drive the car than not, and we’re in a situation where we can have some success.”

Parisi will act as station manager as part of a local marketing agreement. The 10,000-watt signal, which reduces power to 1,000 watts at night, will remain under the ownership of Armando Zamora, but Parisi has total control over content.

“I’ve come to a point that the only way to be happy is what I believe in. I’m not doing anything that doesn’t reflect how I truly feel, so it will be the most genuine station I can be a part of,” said Parisi, who announced the deal in front of a group of faithful supporters at a local Pizza Hut. “I’m going to have to thicken my skin and not worry if people say I don’t yell enough or if I’m open minded to something on the left. I’m at peace with that. I’m a strong, hard-hitting journalist when need be, but if I want to do comedy for 15 minutes, I’m doing it. There’s a market for that. I think the average person is deeper than just politics. I don’t want it to be just politics.”

It won’t be. KEVT will run mostly local newstalk programming weekdays from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., but then play Fox Sports syndicated programming overnight and for the most part on weekends.

“That’s one of the reason I went with sports as opposed to unknown national hosts overnight that only people who are political addicts would enjoy. I want to have all kinds of topics,” Parisi said. “The only rule I’m going to have is be open minded. I don’t care if you lean left or right. Be open minded. Listen to the callers, engage with them, you can be funny and give them grief, but be open minded. Some may see it as weakness. I see it as legit. If you really like the far right mandate right down the line, you’ll find fault in what we do. But we’ll have more women listening, we’ll have more well-rounded people listening. I’m the only political reporter out of all these (local talk show hosts) on the air, but I’m just not a guy who thinks and talks politics his whole life. That’s just a waste of people’s time. You don’t have to fight your fight every single second. If someone is some kind of activist, I respect what you’re doing but you don’t define yourself by it.”

Parisi will host his show weekdays from 7 to 10 a.m. The rest of the schedule has yet to be solidified, but he’s working on final details on a local afternoon host and expects to nail down the specifics on a lead-in program from 5 to 7 a.m. in the next few days. In the short term, a syndicated political talk show will likely hold down the fort mid-days.

“We should have more local programming than most anyone in town,” Parisi said. “We want to be as local, but as budget conscious as we can so that we don’t go away.”

And always with a focus on other perspectives.

“Our catch phrase is the power to think for yourself,” said Parisi. “I like coming in without taking over for something that talk radio listeners were already listening to. We’re bringing an alternative in.”

• Photo courtesy of shutterstock.com

Start February fresh and buy locally produced food.

Here's all the Farmers Markets and Market locations for Feb. 1:

Loft Cinema Farmers' Market
3233 E. Speedway Boulevard
Saturdays, 8am-Noon
520-795-7777
loftcinema.com

Plaza Palomino Saturday Market
2960 N. Swan Road
Saturdays, 9am-1pm

Rincon Valley Farmers' Market
12500 E. Old Spanish Trail
Saturdays, 9am-2pm
520-591-2276, rvfm.org

St. Philip's Farmers' Market
4280 N. Campbell Avenue
Saturdays & Sundays
Winter Hours (Oct.-April): 9am-1pm
520-882-2157
heirloomFM.com

Republicans want to make sure pesky voters don’t get in the way of their plans to cut down on the number of pesky voters. That’s the long term reason they’re voting to overturn HB 2305, the voter suppression law they passed last year, and why they’re patting LD-9 Republican Ethan Orr on the back for casting the deciding vote to get it out of the House Judiciary Committee. They can’t wait to kill their own bill so they can block the state-wide referendum to overturn it. Then, of course, they plan to reinstate it piece by voter suppression piece, making it referendum-proof.

But they have a short term agenda as well. This November, the referendum would be a magnet for exactly the kind of voters Republicans fear: Democratic-leaning voters. People who otherwise might sit on their hands and their ballots could come out in thousands, or tens of thousands, to vote down the voter suppression measures, which could give Democratic candidates the edge they need to beat out Republicans. With so many state offices on the line, that could spell Republican disaster. Kill the referendum, and Democrats lose a rallying cry.

Both parties love propositions that give their bases an extra incentive to vote. Arizona’s Republican legislators can use their majority to put hot-button propositions onto the ballot any time they want, but the Democratic minority doesn’t have that luxury. For Democrats, it takes money and shoe leather to gather the necessary signatures. Well, they managed to gather 146,000 signatures for the "Protect Your Right to Vote Referendum." If it’s on the ballot, Democrats can tell voters, “Republicans want to take away your right to vote. You can stop them by opposing the new law. And while you’ve got your ballot in hand, don't forget to support all those Democrats who support your right to vote."