Citizen Staff Writer
CARLOCK COLUMN
Judy Carlock
Editor’s note: Citizen staffer Judy Carlock wraps up the week’s events with a dash of sass.
One car wash movie is a dumb 1976 comedy featuring a suds crew and Richard Pryor as a preacher.
Monday’s drama was shot by surveillance cameras at 11 p.m. as two Nogales men cleaned their cars at a self-service place on West Valencia Road.
A video spliced together by the Sheriff’s Department shows a man getting out of an Audi convertible and backing away from it. Another clip shows a gunman shooting.
Francisco Antonio Calvillo, 20, was killed and his companion injured.
A sheriff’s spokeswoman said the shooting at first appeared to be random, and found no evidence that the two were doing anything wrong.
“Random” means it could be you. “Planned” indicates someone targeted these guys.
The Audi, which had been reported stolen in Mesa, was found burning a couple of miles away.
Is this an example of syndicate-linked violence? Who cleans their cars at 11 p.m.?
Then again, I’ve done stranger things.
LEARN ENGLISH! It’s easy to learn a new language when you’re 3. You don’t mind sounding 3.
A 15-year-old, though, may not want not to sound dumb, or even worse, feel dumb in front of peers.
Kids who can “just pick up” a language fare well. Those who don’t might give up trying. That may mean they’re not getting equal opportunity in education.
A feud regarding that issue came to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, where questions from judges revealed the same schism apparent in politics between the “sink or swim” attitude and the one that favors helping the 15-year-old learn English and basic academics.
The suit started in Nogales, and grew to engulf the entire state. Miriam Flores, now in her 20s (and fluent in English), was a third-grader when her mother pursued the suit.
Some say it will cost hundreds of millions to help children who are being deprived of their civil rights. State schools chief Tom Horne puts the figure at $9 million.
Whatever the amount, plenty will be sucked up by layers and layers of administration.
I say, bribe the kids. It’s cheaper.
CORNERED: Do you have one? A snapshot where you pose like a total dork to prove you were in four states at once?
Maybe that’s just me.
That feat of contortion may have been a waste of pixels. Or film, if you were born in the Jurassic.
The actual location turns out to be a third of a mile away.
With tools available in 1875, surveyors did a bang-up job, a federal official says. It’s like shooting pool: Blame the miss on the curvature of Earth.
Do you reconfigure the boundaries of the states? Or simply move the monument?
Someone’s going to make a federal case out of this.
THUMBS UP, CHUCK: Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry feels a recount of 2006 transportation ballots “vindicates” the Election Division’s electronic tally. The news from Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard came Tuesday.
Democrats had demanded records of the vote and some even whispered the fix was in.
If it were, someone would have thrown in a crosstown freeway.
It’s encouraging that Goddard’s count shows only a whisker of difference from the county’s initial tally. But shouldn’t they be identical?
A few votes here, a few votes there, pretty soon you’re talking about real clout.
Judy Carlock is an online and copy editor at the Citizen. Contact her at jcarlock@tucsoncitizen.com or 573-4608. For more on these stories, see this column at tucsoncitizen.com.