“I never considered myself a maverick” — John McCain

McCain faces a tough reelection in AZ, up against JD Hayworth, and isn’t helping his case by getting the date of the election wrong.

The McCain Mutiny — Newsweek

Even more disgusting pictures of the Arizona Bark Scorpion.

It’s winter, such as it is, in Phoenix.  What that means is that we get to sleep with the windows open, which makes it deliciously cool at night.

The Wife^® sleeps closest to the window.  Recently, she’s become a cat magnet at night.  We have two cats, and it’s not uncommon to find both of them snuggled up with her.

There was a touch of disagreement about whether the heaping of cats could be attributed to an abundance of cat love for The Wife^®, or the temperature at night.

Last night we solved that debate.  It’s the temperature.

I took the spot closest to the window, and awoke several times during the night with two cats piled on me, while The Wife^® had no cat visitors on the far side of the bed.

There was a story a few years ago about a cat who was a Harbinger of Death.  There are many theories as to why the cat seeks out dying patients, but I’m going to guess it has something to do with blankets and/or a really comfy place to sleep.

I wrote about the family that had their kids taken away for a month because of some pictures they took of their kids in the bathtub the other day.

Fox News had the family and their lawyer on a few minutes ago.

They showed the pictures. As expected they were innocent. Of the “found in every photo album in America” variety. Not even a hint of creepy or wrong.

They also explained that they are suing Wal-Mart on the grounds that their failure to disclose to the family that they had a policy of turning over “objectionable material” in photos to the cops violated Arizona Law governing business transactions.

Again, best of luck to the family.

Unbelievable.

A Peoria couple is suing Walmart and the state after they were accused of sexual abuse for taking bathtime photos of their daughters, according to court papers.

“The Authorities” took their three daughters away for about a month. Their crime? Taking pictures of their little girls in the bathtub.

You know, like every parent ever since the invention of photography.

[T]here were seven to eight bath- and playtime photos of the girls that showed a “portion or outline or genitalia.”

Uh, you mean like the seven or eight pictures of me as a baby that my mom has in her photo albums?

The couple was never charged with a crime, and they eventually regained custody of their kids.

They are now suing the state, and Walmart, who handed over the pics to the state to begin with. Best of luck to them in their endeavors.

Now, I should mention that without seeing the pictures, it’s hard to say whether these things were borderline creepy, or as innocent as my baby book.

But for some reason I just have no trouble believing that a Walmart clerk and some state employees, not one of them with any common sense, were out of control in this instance.

All this thinking about Swamp Coolers made me wonder how the regular old A/C unit on my house works.

Turns out the A/C works just like a refrigerator. So you get a two-fer on this one.

The process of cooling the air involves a refrigerant, typically Freon, that can easily turn from a liquid to gas.

The Freon is compressed by a compressor, which heats it up and turns it into a high pressure gas.

The hot gas runs through coils to cool down, and turns back into a liquid.

The liquid goes through a valve which turns it into a cool, low pressure gas.

The cold gas runs through coils which absorb heat, and in the process cools down the air, which is then blown into your house.

During the process, the hot air in your house is sucked out through the air return vents. The A/C unit blows the cold air through the air ducts.

An A/C unit also removes moisture from the air to keep the humidity low. And you stay nice and comfortable, despite the fact that it is 115 degrees outside.

Source: here and here

Yowza.

The average temperature for July will be 98.2 degrees. That includes the morning lows and afternoon highs. The previous record was 97.6, set in July 2003.

This July will also set the record for the highest average minimum temperatures for the month. The average low will likely be 87.1 degrees.

The average high temperature is expected to be 109.4, the third highest on record.

But it’s only supposed to be 108 today. So, things are looking better.

If only I hadn’t bought that SUV, maybe my carbon footprint would be smaller, and it would be cooler around here.

We were in Lake Havasu City, AZ this weekend, home of the world famous London Bridge, which is no longer falling down.

Lake Havasu City is also home to the largest concentration of RV Garages that I’ve ever seen.

OK, it’s actually the only place I’ve ever seen an RV Garage.

The RV Garage, which can also be used as a garage for a huge speedboat, is a common feature around Lake Havasu.

On the street that we drove down, only one of many streets, every single house had one of these garages.

Glendale, AZ is an interesting suburb on the Westside of the Valley. After a 6 month stint in Glendale, I don’t think I’d move back.

ShotSpotter is acoustic surveillance technology that the city employs to detect gunshots.

The system relies on an acoustics-based, GPS-equipped system that automatically locates the origin of the shot and notifies authorities. A series of acoustic sensors picks up the sound waves of a muzzle blast that radiate outward from the barrel in all directions.

Acoustic Triangulation
ShotSpotter uses 10 to 12 sensors spaced evenly throughout each square-mile section of the city it’s covering, and each sensor is capable of hearing the sound of gunfire within a 2-mile radius.

1. A shot is fired somewhere in the city. Sensor 1 picks up the sound of the shot.
2. One second later, a second sensor picks up the sound waves of a gunshot. If sound in this city travels at about 0.21 miles per second, we now know that the shot was fired approximately one-fifth of a mile farther away from Sensor 2 than from Sensor 1.
3. To figure out which of these two points is the location from which the shot was fired, we need to find a third sensor that picked up the sound of the shot. A third sensor, located to the south of Sensors 1 and 2, picked up the sound waves a half-second after Sensor 2 detected them. This would put the origin of the sound about one-tenth of a mile farther from Sensor 3 than from Sensor 2.

Source: Howstuffworks

I live in Maricopa County, in which the Maricopa Freeway (typically referred to as “The 10″) passes through the middle.

Junior has been spending some time in the city of Maricopa, which oddly enough, is not in Maricopa county.

All this Maricoping made me wonder, what’s the origin of the name Maricopa?

According to wikipedia, the world’s most reliable source of information, Marciopa is the name of a Native American ethnic group that is located in Arizona. They are also known as the Piipaash.

So there.