Phoenix

Mark & I were talking about Phoenix at lunch today, and I recalled some things I hadn't thought of in a while, like the two main industries in Phoenix are land fraud and bank fraud. When I lived there my father-in-law came to visit. He was handling an estate, and part of the estate included a lot in a "development" in Eloy. It was Southeast of Phoenix, not too far, so we drove down to take a look at it. Middle of nowhere, a couple hundred lots laid out on a flat piece of sand. They had put down a thin layer of blacktop to make it look like there were roads, but that was the only sign of development we saw. Three or four lots had people living on them in trailers or something. I don't think there were any houses. This place was on the East side of freeway.

As for the name Eloy, it is asserted locally that someone connected with the railroad took one look at the barren desert there and named the place "Eloi," supposedly the Spanish pronounciation for the Biblical " Eli, Lama Sabachthani?" meaning "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Just up the road is Casa Grande. Rumor had it that it owed it's existance to a printing plant that printed Penthouse magazine. Meredith/Burda did have a printing plant there. They were acquired by RR Donnelly in 1990, who closed the plant a few years later. Who knows where Penthouse is printed now?

Charles Keating, infamous villain of the Savings & Loan crisis back in the late 1980's operated out of Phoenix. The guy wore cufflinks with sapphires the size of robins eggs on them.

 He was also a driving force behind the Phoenician Resort, the most palatial of the palatial. Rooms went for $1500 a night, and that was back when $1500 meant something. He might be dead by now. I hope so. Worthless scum-sucking sleazeball.

The city of Maricopa (as distinguished from Maricopa County), a suburb South of Phoenix, has been hit very hard by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

My cousing had a house in Paradise Valley. She is married to a doctor. It was a nice single story house, maybe 3,000 square feet, heated pool. They were not going to stay there forever, they expected to move within a few years. Her husband told me that when they did sell it, the new owner would probably tear it down and build a new house. The lot was worth more than the house. You see, Paradise Valley has no property taxes. Lots of rich people live there in really big houses for that reason.

Shortly before we left, a new shopping center sprung up not too far from our house called "Agua Caliente". What a cool Spanish name, eh? All it means is "hot water". I was shocked when I saw it. I thought how stupid these people must be to think that something is cool just because it has a Spanish name.

Central Arizona Project

The government built a concrete lined river (aquaduct) from the West side of Arizona clear across the state to Tucson at an untold cost. There are giant electric pumps taking water out of the Colorado river and pumping it over a hill and into this river. This is one of the big reasons there is no water running into the Gulf of California anymore. This project was done to supply irrigation water for the cotton fields South of Phoenix, the hundreds of square miles of cotton fields. Why do we need all this cotton? Probably so we can make gun cotton, or maybe just gun powder, so we our military can shoot millions of rounds of ammunition every year.

Phoenix also gets water from the Salt River. There is a government agency called the Salt River Project that manages this. They used to be a big customer of Stevens Water Monitoring, a company I used to work for here in Portland.

Some people say the desert has a beauty all it's own, and that can be true. But to me, Phoenix looks like a gravel pit.

The short lines on the map mark parts of the aquaduct. It can be a little hard to find if you don't know where it is.

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Update December 2016 replaced missing images, added new map.