Greg In The Desert

• Police: Argument over better father ends in shooting – A man shot his former lover's new boyfriend in the leg early Saturday morning after the two men argued about who was a better father to the first man's son, police said.
• Home invasion suspects tied to border group – KVOA News 4, Tucson, Arizona - – The trio are alleged to have dressed as law enforcement officers and forced their way into a home about 10 miles north of the Mexican border in rural Arivaca on May 30, wounding a woman and fatally shooting her husband and their 9-year-old daughter.

  Their motive was financial, Dupnik said.

  "The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs," Dupnik said.

  Forde is the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a small border watch group, and Bush goes by the nickname "Gunny" and is its operations director, according to the group's Web site.

• News : Intel fined for hazardous waste – The New Mexico Environment Department fined Intel for violating the state’s hazardous waste management regulations in March.

  On March 25, NMED conducted a hazardous waste compliance evaluation inspection at Intel Corporation. Inspectors discovered that Intel failed to close several containers of universal waste lamps. Universal waste lamps are bulbs used for standard office lighting and can contain levels of mercury and lead that make them hazardous waste when disposed.

• Growing the Poison Pepper – Boing Boing – I ordered naga jolokia pepper seeds from the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. The naga jolokia, sometimes called the bhut jolokia, the ghost pepper, or the poison pepper, is the world's hottest chile pepper. My brother, the expert gardener, is growing them right now. These are pretty difficult to grow in Minnesota; they take forever to germinate and the drop flowers at the slightest provocation.
• Bare-bones warning to Boulder cyclists – The Denver Post – Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner warned Thursday that police will ticket bike riders if they expose their genitals during the World Naked Bike Ride, which is planned for Saturday as a protest against oil dependency.
• Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down – The Denver Post – The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming—the very problem wind power seeks to address.
  The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.
• Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T – With the iPhone 3G S news now in the wild, the discussion digressed from the announcement of the 3G S itself to AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the U.S. (at the moment). Without a doubt, this relationship is where Apple's weaknesses lie.
• Three Things the Palm Pre Does Better Than the iPhone 3GS | Popular Science – Arguably the Pre’s biggest draw is its super-elegant multitasking schema—apps fill up “cards” as they’re launched, which you can quickly scroll through horizontally by pressing the main button, which zooms out into a “card”view. Closing apps is done by flicking it off the top of the screen, which feels great. Aside from the five icons in a quick-launch bar and those within the three drawers of the app launcher, there is no icons-on-a-desktop conceit.
• Al Jazeera English – Europe – WHO declares H1N1 pandemic – The World Health Organisation has declared a H1N1 pandemic, the first such annoucement in more than 40 years, as infections continue to rise around the planet.
• Atomic Warfare – Intel last week bought for $884 million Wind River Systems, a venerable embedded operating system company — yet another of the chip giant’s recent forays into software. The reason for this purchase is both simple and grand — to help Intel vertically integrate and to further its Linux ambitions. Intel’s ultimate target with this purchase is Microsoft. It’s all about kicking Redmond out of the netbook business.

Charles Platt has had a number of posts on Boing Boing about Arizona (Unfortunately there’s no way for me to link to just his posts on Arizona or just his posts on Boing Boing). Since I am from Arizona, I have particularly enjoyed these posts. Arizona is so much more than the heavily populated and oppressively hot Phoenix Metro area.

His latest is about the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona. I have never heard of either. Sahuarita, Arizona is located south of Tucson near Green Valley. There are about 1000 pictures related to the museum on Flickr.

I also liked his post with a view from a “former mining town” somewhere in Arizona. It could from a number of places. He doesn’t mention where exactly (probably Jerome).

I also have a number of photos on Flickr about Arizona and posts here on this blog you can check out.

Titan Missile photo from Telstar Logistics on Flickr.

Boing Boing had this today

I walked from the arrival gate towards baggage claim, and when I was about halfway there, all of a sudden about a dozen or more TSA personnel and private security staff appeared, shouting STOP WHERE YOU ARE. FREEZE. DO NOT MOVE. Not just at me, but all of the travelers who happened to be wandering through the hallway at that moment.

I made a comment on that post that the exact same thing happened to me.

This happened to me when i was in PDX a few weeks ago. I was leaving the secured area after getting off a plane, i was near the screeners but not yet through. The TSA people started yelling and did the same thing you described and had everyone freeze.

It only lasted a few minutes for me.

My tax dollars at work. Whatever.

Via Boing Boing, the Santa Fe find three CD players. Blows two up. Keeps the third. Why didn’t they blow up all three or keep all three? I hope the SWAT team stormed the church with machine guns out.

Three CD players hidden under a cathedral’s pews blared sexually explicit language in the middle of an Ash Wednesday Mass, leading a bomb squad to detonate two of the devices. Authorities determined the music players were not dangerous and kept the third one to check it for clues, said police Capt. Gary Johnson. The CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of the pews, were set to turn on in the middle of noon Mass on Wednesday at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. The recordings, made on store-bought blank discs, featured people using foul language and “pornographic messages,” Johnson said. He would not elaborate because of the ongoing investigation. Church staff members took the CD players to the basement and called police, who sent the bomb squad, Johnson said. The bomb squad blew up two players outside and kept the third one to test for fingerprints or DNA and trace its components, he said.