Just Doesn't Click
To the Editor,Good grief! Is everyone as fed up with that egotistical buffoon Jim Click as we are? We agree 100 percent with Rand Carlson's "What Hell Must Be Like" (Random Shots, Tucson Weekly, August 24), and Priscilla V. H. Walker's subsequent comments about Jim Click polluting our air waves with his idiotic banter (Letters, Tucson Weekly, August 31).
I recall when Click opened a dealership in Green Valley. His TV banter went something like, "I'm glad to call all you Green Valley folks (especially the wealthiest) my friends." Please, the majority of Green Valley folks may be elderly, but I believe they can still choose their friends more carefully and tastefully. Hey Jim, how about giving your home phone number to all your "friends" in Green Valley? Maybe invite a few up for dinner?
But the solution is really obvious, a buyer's boycott. If fewer and fewer people patronize Click's dealerships and his Arizona Bank, perhaps he will somehow (but I doubt it) get the message.
But for God's sake and the sanity of everyone, get him off the
air!
--Don Perryman
Class Struggle
To the Editor,As a teacher at Desert View High School, I was appalled at the lack of proper reporting concerning the two high schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District ("Unbalancing Act," The Skinny, Tucson Weekly, August 31).
It is apparent there was no investigative reporting done before the article went to press. One example would be the statement, "Conversely, Desert View has class sizes in the teens and low 20s." Perhaps one of your reporters would like to visit my sixth-period English class and talk to one of the 34 students.
Or, perhaps we can discuss some of our students who are now at USC, Adams State and Rensselaer Polytechnic (all on scholarships).
We can also talk about the grants our school just received for a literary magazine of Desert View artists to be transferred onto CD-ROM, and the new state of the art technology lab.
The accomplishments of our students are too numerous to name, but you can be assured that Desert View definitely, "emerged from the shadow...."
At least your article serves one purpose: I can use it in my
Beginning Journalism class (which has 25 students and is still
growing) as an example of poor reporting skills and slanted news.
--Bridgette Gomez
Neo-Luddite Smith
To the Editor,Regarding Jeff Smith's "Booting The Hard Drive" (Tucson Weekly, August 31): Jeff, shut up just a minute and listen. I know you've got 32 column inches to fill every week, but blaming Bill Gates and the "computer priesthood" for your own uninformed buying decisions is a pretty cheap way to do it. The secrets of buying the right system are these: Decide what you need to do, find the software that does it, buy the computer that will run it, and keep the computer. Spare us the neo-Luddite paranoid fantasies; I don't hear you screaming about planned obsolescence in the auto or electronics industry. Oh, another easy column idea. Two columns.
This fiasco doesn't say much about your investigative abilities. I don't know what authorities you consulted before popping a Pentium Windows box, but anyone that's worked on real computers can tell you that under its shiny user interface is that same old stinking corpse, DOS. Yes, 80 percent or more of the personal computers in the world are INTEL/DOS machines, but ask any video tech about the relative merits of BETA versus VHS, and you'll hear loud and clear that superior quality doesn't necessarily mean market success. Money and marketing clout does.
To put it another way, if you bought your motorcycles the way
you bought that computer, you would have been riding Hondas all
these years.
--Karl Moeller
Judge Not
To the Editor,I'm not a professional writer. I'm not a professional photographer either. I'm just one of the obvious "few in number and sub par in quality" folks who entered your Words & Images contest on time. According to your judges, it's quite obvious the work which was entered was not of a quality high enough to win. I entered your contest according to your rules. I did enter probably with the same intent as everyone else who entered had. Sure, I would have like to win, even place somewhere in your contest.
My assumption (oops, my mistake), was that, like any other contest, places would be awarded based on entrants received, regardless of their number or their quality. After all, this is a contest, isn't it?
While they're at it, why don't your two judges petition to extend
our election day(s) because not enough folks vote? Why bother
to extend this contest to a November 1 deadline? What would happen
if no entrants applied? What's the big deal with deadlines anyway?
Isn't that what they always say at a newspaper?
--Alex Malawka
Breast Of The Story
To the Editor,Years ago I started reading The Weekly because that's where I could find a column by Jeff Smith. Gradually, I read more and more of the rest of your paper, eventually getting to be a cover-to-cover disciple. I even read Tom Danehy, and (hey! I'm only human) actually enjoyed his articles on occasion.
The sarcasm and cynicism wore thin a long time ago, however. Now I mostly just read Danehy to see how his boring, anal-retentive ego would make a fool out of itself next.
When Tom wrote about his family vacation, he offered insight to a problem that's been bothering me: his attitude. Tom visited a town that offered a course teaching women how to braid their under-arm hair. Surely such an enlightened community would offer instruction in how an aging, hack sportswriter could remove that broomstick from his anus.
I was dismayed to learn the sight of nursing infants and naked
breasts shriveled Danehy's face. I suggest a solution to the Danehy
dilemma. If all the offended nursing mothers in Tucson would organize,
volunteers could confront Tom with nursing babes in public often
enough to throw him off his feet for good. Perhaps he would shrivel
up and just disappear. OK, OK! I know it is a silly sophomoric
idea, but we're talking about Tom Danehy here, folks! Silly
and sophomoric will probably work.
--Bill Haynes
Outrage
To the Editor,It is with utter disbelief that you chose to publish the comic strip The City by Derf (Tucson Weekly, September 14). What is the sense of promoting such hateful and discriminatory material? To call gays "Fag" is akin to calling blacks the N-word. To portray "Fags" as overweight smelly psychos is only to encourage more anti-gay prejudice and violence. Is this a service to our community or the community in general? I just do not get the point of this humor at all.
If you wish to have the support of the gay community and you
wish to have those people patronize your advertisers, then a complete
apology is needed from your publication. If that is not forthcoming,
you will be able to see for yourself the monetary power we can
exhibit when your advertisers are notified why they are losing
gay consumers.
--Name withheld by request
