University of Arizona

Boy: If I had to choose between water and Keystone, I would choose Keystone. It has more water than water!

- Coronado Hall

It was during recess on the playground around the third grade when Sheilah Nicholas decided to give up her native tongue to fit in with the white kids.

“I remember coming home one day crying,” she said. “Some kids had been making of me because I couldn't speak English right.

Who can say no to dessert? If anything, dessert should be its own special meal. Tucson offers up plenty of delightful and sugary options that will leave even the sweetest of sweet tooths satisfied.

Stop by Beyond Bread for a killer chocolate chip cookie.

It took 10 hours of unloading semi-trucks loaded with flashy costumes and set pieces to transform the Tucson Convention Center into a circus.

“It's not bad, just a lot of pointing and getting organized,” said Robinson Alrutz, production stage manager for the Cirque Du Soleil performance, Saltimbanco.

If kids don't want to color inside the lines, nobody's going to be able to make them; such is the nature of graffiti art. In a perhaps well-intentioned but tritely ironic gesture, Tucson's Graffiti Removal Program provides an anti-graffiti coloring book for printing from their Web site.

Working out doesn't always have to involve a treadmill and a weight set.

Now that it's cool enough to head outdoors during the day, it's time to break free of that gym routine and look outside the box to several of Tucson's simple exercise alternatives.

Hiking

Go outside and check out one of Tucson's national forests, Sabino Canyon.

Cookies: You gotta love 'em. And especially during the holiday season, cookies are a very important part of life. So what better way to bring your posse together than to have a cookie-making party?

It's simple to pull off and it doesn't matter what gender you are.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…but that's no excuse to let your fashion guard down, especially in Tucson. Slipping into sweats on chilly winter mornings is cozy, but who wants to look like she or he just rolled out of bed? Bundling up to brave the desert cold doesn't mean you have to compromise style.

Appearances can be deceiving, especially in the film industry. This is what you might expect if movie posters accurately advertised the content of movies…

The political thriller “Frost/Nixon” dramatizes President Richard M. Nixon's largely unpublicized foray into the world of competitive skiing known by those involved as the Jack Frost Fiasco.

Womanizers want to be him, feminists want to beat him. Tucker Max's novel is the ultimate guilty pleasure. Max does not beat around the bush; instead he shoves his self-serving dark side in your face. Originally a blogger, Max filled his novel with anecdotes from sloppy nights out.

Julie Dela Cruz hasn't always been writing poetry.

“I only recently added that major, the creative writing major,” Dela Cruz said. “I didn't think I was a poetry writer until I took classes my junior year.”

In fact, the psychology and creative writing senior still hardly considers herself a poet.

Artie Lange's “Too Fat to Fish” is a compilation of cleverly raw stories based upon the memoirs and failures of Howard Stern's fat comedian friend, Artie Lange.

Lange's crude humor self-mocks his drug and alcohol addiction throughout the book. Intertwined with some insightful passages about Lange's family and career choices, this is an easy read but not for the faint of heart.

You've seen it in depicted in artwork: the rings of Saturn, the cloud belts of Jupiter. But what if you had the chance to see the real thing?

“There's a certain glory to the night sky, and some art tries to reflect that glory in nature,” said Mike Terenzoni, astronomy coordinator at Flandrau, the University of Arizona Science Center.

With Thanksgiving dinner officially out of America's system, one thing to do: go buy stuff! Last week, a plethora of new albums, ranging from Paramore to Paul McCartney, Trace Adkins to Tom Jones, were released in the spirit of the season of consumption. Take a look at some of these representative tracks and decide for yourself which artists will become your 2008 designated stocking-stuffers.