Jeff Belmonte / CC BY-SA 2.0

Budget Wounds

A standing-room-only crowd showed up to the Monday, May 24 meeting to remind the Council that cuts are losses to essential services for real people.

Betty Sprocket

If m’lady is hankering to pedal her penny-farthing down a bucolic country lane, I'd advise her to stay away from the North Diversion Channel. This trail runs alongside the enormous eponymous arroyo, and the views are all concrete and desert sky. The trail starts at Balloon Fiesta Park, but you can pick it up at Paseo del Norte and head south, looking out over that mysterious industrial area around Jefferson where you've never had any reason to go in your car. (Has anyone?) After you cross Menaul, the urban terrain gets really interesting when the North Diversion Channel converges with another massive arroyo. You'll negotiate a swoop, twirl and dive through an underpass on your bike. I like to pretend that cars were never invented and all roads look like this miniature version of a mountain highway. You'll start to gain altitude and crest near the Big I. Gaze down upon all the pollutey motorists and enjoy a surge of smug cyclist's superiority. The trail ends at UNM's North Campus, but you'll be so close to the Frontier, it'd be foolish not to go get some huevos. You have to fortify yourself for the ride home, don't you?

I am best known for my investigations into paranormal topics such as ghosts, monsters, crop circles and so forth. But my skeptical antennae start to tingle at any extraordinary claim.

Dateline: Italy—Investigators in Naples are looking into the possibility that pizzas in the famed city are being baked with wood stolen from a local cemetery. “Pizza, one of the few symbols of Naples that endures ... is hit by the concrete suspicion that it could be baked with wood from coffins,” wrote Italian daily Il Giornale. Neapolitan pizza is traditionally cooked in a stone oven over an oak-wood fire. The newspaper reports that local police believe criminals may be offering smaller, low-end pizza shops a cheaper alternative. “A gang might have set up a market for coffins sold to hardhearted owners of bakeries and pizzerias looking to save money on wood,” Il Giornale said. Naples’ historic graveyard has long been a target for thieves. Last year, some 5,000 flowerpots were looted from the cemetery grounds.

Letters

Republican candidates for the state's top job got heated over the issue fortifying right-wing politicians nationwide: immigration.