In fact, Arizona is among the safest places to drive in the country if you count years between accidents and are over the age of 20. Both the Phoenix metropolitan area and Tucson top Allstate's "Best Drivers Report" for cities of their size. Tucson also boasts the best drivers male, female, Baby Boomer, pre-Baby-Boomer, and Gen X drivers in the country. Among metropolitan areas of more than 1 million residents, Phoenix drivers take top honors for the fourth consecutive year.

Unfortunately, back in May, Allstate also identified the Phoenix-Scottsdale-Mesa area as one of the 10 most dangerous of "America's Teen Driving Hotspots". The Allstate study is based on fatal crashes involving teens are highest. Most fatal teen crashes occur during the summer months with more than 9 percent of all crashes occurring each month in May, June, July and August.

Adult drivers in the Phoenix area can expect to bump into each other every 9.8 years, slightly more often than the national average.

OK, these questions might be a bit deep for a long holiday weekend. Or maybe not, the Founding Fathers dreamed of freedom and we experience the reality of that freedom every day. Either way, the folks at No Festival Required and Space 55 are offering us the opportunity to delve more deeply into questions of time and dreams and reality with a screening of "The Fourth Dimension" at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 5 at Space 55.

"The 4th Dimension exemplifies the best of independent filmmaking by using intelligence and creativity to explore the very nature of existence and art," says Trevor Groth, CineVegas Director of Programming and Sundance Senior Programmer. "It marks the emergence of exciting new voices and deserves to be seen by a wide audience."
Writer/directors Tom Mattera and Dave Mazzoni take the audience on a meditative journey through the mind of an introverted genius named Jack who becomes compulsive about analyzing time and its relation to supernatural experiences, dreams and reality. It has been described as Kafkaesque, "stylistically channeling David Lynch and David Aronofsky" and "an Alice-like rabbit hole of suppressed memories". Watch the trailer at www.4thdmovie.org.
Space 55 is located at 636 E. Piece St. (just south of Roosevelt and west of 7th St.). Admission to the First Friday show is $6.

Monsoon season is not usually so straightforward. In past years, residents have been glued to the weather news, waiting for the dew point to reach 55 for three days in a row. Some years, it seemed the monsoon would never start as we endured hot, sticky days in bursts of one or two for weeks that seemed like months that never ended. Other years the monsoon arrived swiftly and hit us hard stirring up dust storms worthy of the national news. This year, it came upon without warning. Sure, there is a heat advisory today (temps reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit or 43 degrees Celsius) but the weather, this morning anyway, is relatively pleasant. I had my morning coffee on the patio and didn't bake. Then again it was 6 a.m.

This year the monsoon arrived courtesy of an announcement from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). This year NOAA has declared that Arizona's monsoon season begins June 15 and runs through September 30, 2008. No more waiting around for three days of hot, humid weather. The monsoon, it seems, is already here. What a great gift for Dad on Father's Day.

For more on Arizona's monsoon season, visit:  When is a Monsoon Not a Monsoon? or NOAA's new Monsoon  web page.

Oh, and keep in mind that despite this mild beginning, the monsoon season can be dangerous. Among the sever weather conditions associated with the monsoon are: excessive heat, flash floods, electrical storms/lightening, dust storms, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, flooding and high winds. Be prepared to experience any and all of these, sometimes without any warning, between now and the end of September. Welcome to Summer in the Valley!

It was inevitable that one of the Night at the Museum events scheduled for the second Friday of the month would fall on the 13th day of the month at some point. Rather than giving into superstition, the Arizona Museum of Natural History has decided to buck tradition by offering visitors the opportunity to pan for gold and win free prizes by participating in their special Wheel of Fortune activity. Admission is free for museum members. Non-members under 18 years of age can get in for $3 while those 18 years old and older will pay $5. Admission includes access to the entire museum including the two newest exhibits "Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origins of Flight" and "PSI: Poop Scene Investigation".

Friday, June 13 is also the date of the next "Night Out" in downtown Mesa. Approximately 50 shops and businesses along Main Street between  country Club Drive and Center Street will also be open late. The community events include an ice cream social and ice cream eating contests beginning at 7:15 p.m. at Main and Robson Streets. Many of the stores and businesses, some of which stay open until 10 p.m., offer discounts, special exhibits and other activities.

Feeling lucky or not it's a great time for everyone!

• Avenue of the Arts - Start the weekend off right with the Valley's newest art festival! Juried artists from the East Valley Art Guild will present original artwork in a variety of mediums along with roving musicians and food from Famous Dave's BBQ. Find it in the Mesa Riverview's Theater District at Dobson Rd. and the Loop 202 on Friday.
• WWII Internment Camp History Presentation - The award-winning documentary "Lessons in Loyalty: One American's Internment Camp Experience" will be shown at 1:00 p.m. Saturday at Chandler's McCullough-Price Hose (300 S. Chandler Village Drive). The 27-minute film will be followed by a presentation and discussion on the Japanese American internment camps in Arizona, including one camp located just 15 miles south of Chandler.
• SanTan Jam's Spring Concert Series - The Chadwicks will be performing alternative and classic rock during the final concert of the 2008 series on Saturday from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Bring your own bring your own blankets and chairs to Gilbert's SanTan Plaza located at Williams Field Rd. and the Loop 202.
• Campanillas Handbell Ensemble - The community handbell choir will perform at 3:00 p.m. Sunday at Valley Presbyterian Church (6947 E. McDonald Dr.) in Paradise Valley.
• Memorial Day Celebration - The Pioneers' Cemetery Association with Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department will honor those who have died in the service of their country in a ceremony at 9:30 a.m. Monday at Pioneer & Military Memorial Park (15th Ave. & Jefferson Ave.) in Phoenix. Representative from local historical societies will be on hand to discuss the role of Arizonans in the armed forces. Children's crafts and refreshments will be available.

These are just a few of the many events and activities taking place throughout the metropolitan area during the holiday weekend. Stay tuned to this blog for more!

On Tuesday, February 26, 2008, NOVA, the highest rated science series on television and Public Broadcasting System's (PBS) most watched documentary series, airs "The Four-Winged Dinosaur". The hour-long program attempts to resolve the standoff debate among scientists regarding the origin of flight in birds by presenting two distinct reconstructions of the fossils and conducting an unorthodox experiment to determine whether a replica of the creature is capable of flight.

Four days later, on March 1, 2008, the exhibit "Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origins of Flight" opens at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa. The exhibit includes a collection 35 fossils that are national treasures on loan from the People's Republic of China along with life-sized reconstructions of how the animals may have looked.

"The NOVA program and our exhibit 'Feathered Dinosaurs' could not complement each other more," Arizona Museum of Natural History Curator of Paleontology Dr. Robert McCord said. "Both examine fossils from Liaoning Province, China and both explore the question: how do all these feathered dinosaurs change our understanding of the origin of flight and birds?"

The debate over how flight and birds evolved is not new. In his 1973 study of Archaeopteryx, paleontologist John Ostrom revived the theory, first made a century before, that modern day birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. As one of the earliest proponents of the theory during the twentieth century, one of the "winged dinosaurs", the Rahona ostromi, was named for him in 1998. Fossil remains indicate "Ostrom's menace from the skies" had feathers, a two-foot wingspan and a sickle-clawed second toe, when it roamed or flew the Earth between 65 and 70 million years ago.

Ostrem is not the only supporter of the theory. Even among those who believe dinosaurs are the ancient ancestors of birds, however, it is disputed as to how flight actually developed. Some argue that two legged, ground dwelling animals developed feathers and wings which allowed them to become airborne. Others hypothesize that flight developed among tree-dwelling creatures who, after generations of leaping limb-to-limb, developed gliding structures to soften landings and extend the length of the leap. These gliding structures eventually became wings.

Whether flight developed from the ground up or from the trees done does not alter the central theory that birds descended from dinosaurs.Not everyone agrees, of course.

"My idea," Larry Martin, Curator in Charge of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, said in 1997, "is that birds separated off early from the [evolutionary] stalk that gave rise to crocodiles and dinosaurs --- well before there was anything you could call a dinosaur."He points to Longisquama insignis a small reptile that existed in central Asia some 220 million years ago and some 75 million years before the earliest birds. Martin co-authored a study with several other scientists theorizing Logisquama had feathers and glided among the trees above the earliest dinosaurs.

Research published online on January 28, 2008 in the journal BMC Biology, appears to support a pre-dinosaur ancestor for birds."Scientists typically use two sources of information to date biological events: the fossil record, which contains physical remains of ancient organisms, and molecular genetic data," explains University of Michigan graduate student Joseph Brown, who is first author on a new study suggesting the ancestors of modern birds arose more than 100 million years ago, not the 60 million years ago indicated by the fossil record.  Brown and his fellow researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Mexico and Central America and Boston University explain that fossils tend to underestimate the amount of time since lineages diverged and that the molecular clock used to reconstruct evolutionary history isn't quite as precise as was assumed.

"What my colleagues and I did was apply all these new methods to the problem of the origin of modern birds, with each method making different assumptions about how mutation rate changes across the tree," Brown explains. He says the researchers hoped to narrow the gap between the fossil and molecular data but the results in fact underscored the finding that the forebears of modern birds emerged more than 100 million years ago.

Mark Davis, producer of NOVA's "The Four-Winged Dinosaur"  and its predecessor the "Case of the Flying Dinosaur" (NOVA, 1991), has been tracking the debate over the origins of flight and the search for bird ancestors for almost two decades. He doesn't expect to resolve it in a single hour.
"In 'The Four-Winged Dinosaur', we weren't trying to solve the puzzle but rather provide a glimpse into what makes it such a puzzle in the first place," he explains in the Producer's Story on PBS.org.

Viewers and visitors to the "Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight" which opens March 1, 2008 at the Arizona Museum of Natural History can decide for themselves.

The Arizona Museum of Natural History is located at 53 N. McDonald St. in Mesa.

"Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight" was organized by The Dinosaur Museum of Blanding, Utah in association with the Fossil Administration Office of Liaoning, China and the Liaoning Beipiao China Shihetun Museum of Paleontology.

On January 25, 2008, Arizona State University (ASU) entomologist and professor in the School of Life Sciences, Quentin Wheeler announced the discovery of a new beetle species during a Roy Orbison Tribute Concert. The concert was part of a weekend of tribute events hosted by ASU's Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture and the Tempe Center for the Arts which was attended by Orbison's widow, Barbara and sons Wesley and Roy Jr. as well as fans.

 "It's a token of admiration for Roy's body of work and all you [Barbara Orbison] do to keep his music alive," Wheeler said, presenting a unique artwork depicting Orectochilus orbisonorum, a new species of Gyrinidae.(Cloeoptera), to Barbara.

 Wheeler described the work, a painting with pixels on cotton water color paper featuring nine images of a whirling beetle created by Charles J. Kazilek, a senior research professional in ASU's School of Life Sciences who also holds a degree for ASU's Herberger College of the Arts, as "The style of the print is Warhol meets Carl Linnaeus".

Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU and vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, co-authored the research behind the discovery of Orectochilus orbisonorum with Kelly Miller of the University of New Mexico and Paolo Mazzoldi of Brescia, Italy. A scientific  paper describing the new species has been accepted for publication by "Zootaxa", an international journal for animal taxonomists.

The new rock 'n' roll beetle species "is unique among Indian Gyrinidae and Orectochilus Lacordaire, in general, since the ventral surfaces are white as the result of clear areas of cuticle allowing internal tissues to be visible," according to the trio of researchers.

The seminars are being held on 31 January, 2008 at the Red Mountain Library (635 N. Power Rd., Mesa, AZ, USA) beginning at 10:30 am and on 7 February, 2008 at the Main Mesa Library (64 E. First St., Mesa, AZ, USA) beginning at 7 pm. Both seminars will last an hour.

These are outstanding seminars for anyone who has ever wondered how to capture up-close images of wildlife. You will learn valuable tips regarding where to go and what to look for to get great shots as well as how to capture those great wildlife photo opportunities. No registration is required and the event is FREE.

The Arizona he sees is a complex world of stone and water, air and light, almost totally devoid of people. It is an Arizona few urbanites or visitors see because they do not have the patience to spend 200 days a year in wild places waiting to capture that one moment when light and land and sky and spirit unite into an image of unspeakable beauty and undeniable truth.

Fortunately for us, many of Muench's images have been collected in Arizona, the first of the state series of books from Graphic Arts Books to be fully redesigned. Even better, David himself will be on hand to sign your copy of this wonder-full coffee-table book on Tuesday night, December 18, at Changing Hands Bookstore between 7:00 and 8:30 p.m. Changing Hands is an independent bookseller located at 6428 S. McClintock Dr. in Tempe.

The 192 page book contains more than 120 color photographs revealing the strength and striking beauty of natural Arizona. From the Grand Canyon to the Sonoran Desert, Muench's sweeping landscapes bring the spirit of the land to life and shows iconic Western images from saguaro cacti to mysterious cliff dwellings in new and unique ways.

It is difficult to describe the Arizona Muench sees and photographs.

"What I aim for, I couldn't put into words for a long time," Muench explained to Photomedia.com in 2005. "I'd rather speak through images."

His images have been speaking for more than 40 years making him one of the most renowned landscape photographers. He is also something of a maverick, following his senses and intuition. The son of Joseph Muench, a pioneer in color landscape photography and, like his son, a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways, the grand dame of Arizona travel magazines, David is a constant innovator travelers can learn a great deal from.

He spends significant amounts of time pre-planning his trips, especially as he gets older. It isn't just getting the right permits and permissions or making sure to pack the right gear. It's talking with locals, researching the cultural and geological history of potential destinations and seeking out expertise from rangers and visitor centers that prime his travels for success.

Muench is also emphatically dedicated to the preservation of wild spaces. Through his breathtaking and awe-inspiring landscapes, he hopes to educate others about the value and importance of preserving such places across the American West and around the world.

As he told the Arizona Republic: "For me, making photographs is always a total and continuing involvement. Underlying my need for expression of a spirit of the land are certain patterns of discovery and exploration. Intense creative awareness, along with the patience in waiting for dramatic forms of sun and shadow, unusual angle of light, or a decisive moment of mood challenge my mind's eye."

It's not just the edible version that's a tradition in Phoenix, although it does have a role. The Valley's Christmas Pudding tradition is a star-studded charity affair hosted by rocker and restaurateur Alice Cooper.

The 7th annual Christmas Pudding festivities begin at 7:30 p.m. tonight, December 15, at the Dodge Theatre. Among the "ingredients" in this year's pudding are:

• Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers
• Jordin Sparks (2007 American Idol winner and Valley resident)
• Whiskey Falls
• Rock Demarco (the world's fastest painter)
• CTA
• and more!

Also performing will be the winners of the Proof Is In The Pudding Contest, which recognizes local bands and individuals before they become famous. This year's winners are Brewed to Perfection (group) and Shaun Patrick Moe (individual). By the way, Jordin Sparks was the 2004 Proof Is In The Pudding winner in the individual category.
This year's pudding chef is Iron Chef America winner and local restarateur, Mark Tarbell, who will be whipping up his own delicious version of Christmas pudding for the audience.

Ticket prices range from $33 to $303. Christmas Pudding proceeds go to the Solid Rock Foundation is a non-profit Christian  organization dedicated to helping troubled kids and teens. Specifically, the funds raised will go to help build The Rock Teen Center, a flexible needs structure that will center around music and be the kind of place teens like to hang out. Founded by Alice Cooper and Chuck Savale in 1995, the Solid Rock is based in Arizona.