Reporter Henry Brean's Fave Five of 2020

Sure, it seems like just a silly story about some punked-out potholes. But it's really a slow-burn mystery about who did it and why.   

— Henry Brean

Maybe the grass isn’t always greener in Armory Park, but the potholes certainly are.

Some merry pranksters have filled the potholes at Fourth Avenue and 16th Street with carefully cut patches of fake grass. Ten of the crumbling craters now sport bright green turf toupees.

The illicit landscaping appeared in early January, much to the delight of some nearby residents. They assumed it was a protest aimed at drawing the city’s attention to all the road damage in their historic neighborhood south of downtown.

“I’ve never seen them fix a single (pothole). They just keep getting bigger and bigger,” said Jackie Lanni, who paused to admire the small patches of grass as she walked her dogs.

The holes are especially bad on Fifth Avenue, she said, and there’s one on 21st Street that’s “big enough to bathe a small child in.”

“You can’t miss it, especially with your car,” Lanni said.

Peaceful pothole protests have become a viral sensation in recent years, with residents around the world highlighting the holes in their streets by posing dolls in them, pretending they’re bathtubs or turning them into planters for flowers and Christmas trees.

Last year, graffiti artists in Middlesbrough, England shamed authorities into fixing their potholes by spray-painting the pavement around them with giant penises.

The patches of fake grass in Armory Park seem downright tame by comparison. Plus you can still drive over them without damaging your car.

Read the full story here.

Here's a trade secret for you: News organizations only write about viral internet videos as an excuse to post the videos themselves. In this case, though, the footage and the story behind it were pure Tucson — and so was the animal friendly reaction to it.

— Henry Brean

A certain viral cellphone video from Tucson continues to spread across the internet like, well, swine flu.

Since it first hit the web a week ago, the now-famous running javelina has spawned international news reports and parody Twitter accounts that have gone viral themselves.

Tucson real estate agent Damion Alexander captured the 17-second clip on Feb. 21 as he rode in the passenger seat of a client’s car, on the way to look at a house.

The video follows an adult javelina as it bounds at surprising speed across the landscaped entryway of the Los Portales Apartments complex on Prudence Road just north of East 22nd Street.

Alexander posted the footage on his real estate company’s Facebook page the next day, and it took off from there.

“It came in from all directions at once,” said Alexander, who is also a major Tucson cycling advocate and a self-described wildlife enthusiast. “When your 18-year-old daughter tells you it’s gone viral, then it’s official.”

The footage has now appeared on SportsCenter and MSNBC.

Alexander said an uncle in Colorado called to tell him he’d seen it on the nightly news there.

It has also been liked and shared on social media tens of thousands of times, prompting clickbait national media stories from everyone from Time to The New York Times.

Read the full story here.

This story has it all: a wealthy and litigious collector, a sketchy New York art dealer, a treasured African sculpture and an unlucky UA scientist who got sued for doing science. Rarely does a tip about an odd court case pay off this well.

— Henry Brean

A University of Arizona researcher has escaped from the grasp of the Baga Serpent, at least for now.

An appeals court in New York has dismissed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against UA radiocarbon-dating expert Greg Hodgins over a prized African wood carving of a snake that might not be as ancient — or valuable — as originally thought.

The unusual case involves a wealthy collector, a sketchy New York art dealer and some hapless scientists who stumbled sideways into an ethnographic mystery turned legal mess.

According to court records, Dr. Martin Trepel bought the 8-foot-tall serpent in 1992 from a dealer named Mourtala Diop.

The retired radiologist and self-described “investor in rare and valuable African tribal artifacts” paid $15,000 for the sculpture. But he later insured it for $15 million after experts told him it had been carved from a bark cloth tree at least 200 years ago by a member of western Guinea’s Baga tribe.

To fully authenticate his purchase, Trepel turned to Hodgins, director of the UA’s Accelerated Mass Spectrometry Lab, to conduct a carbon-14 analysis of the serpent.

Twice in 2016, Hodgins traveled to New York to collect tiny samples from the carving — first for the initial testing, then to confirm his startling results: This supposedly ancient work of art came from a tree cut down sometime around 1975.

Read the full story here.

The job of a journalist is to cut through the spin and get to the truth, but I'm still not entirely sure how many of the people in this story might have been pulling my leg. Luckily, this might be one case where it really doesn't matter all that much. 

— Henry Brean

Despite what you may have read on the internet, one of Tucson’s most beloved fast-food landmarks is not about to be torn down by an angry mob of dinosaur deniers.

The snarling Tyrannosaurus rex in front of the McDonald’s at Tanque Verde and Grant isn’t going anywhere, according to Lizzeth Alvarez, area supervisor for Dias Management Inc., which owns the bustling franchise.

“Absolutely not,” Alvarez said. “People really seem to like it. It’s a landmark really.”

Concern for the life-size replica cropped up earlier this month when a post targeting the T. rex on Tanque Verde showed up on the Facebook page of a group called Christians Against Dinosaurs.

According to the page — as well as the group’s website and occasional YouTube videos — CAD is dedicated to the belief that dinosaurs never existed at all but are, in fact, a scam perpetrated by scientists, possibly as part of some liberal plot against religion.

There’s nothing factual about any of this, of course. It flies in the face of mountains of fossil evidence collected, studied and cataloged since the 17th century.

On the other hand, it is on the internet. And since Aug. 15, so, too, is the following post on the Christians Against Dinosaurs Facebook page:

“Please help! This McDonald’s has this dinosaur and refuse to remove it! This is in Tucson, Arizona. Call the manager and demand the removal of this blasphemy!”

Read the full story here.

My favorite kind of quirky story is one that starts with some small, strange, maybe even trivial thing and expands from there to teach us about something bigger — in this case the history of our city and some of the people who literally put it on the map.

— Henry Brean

We have left turns from Michigan and potholes from the pits of hell, but one local traffic oddity is an Old Pueblo original.

What do you call a road that runs diagonally between an east-west street and a north-south avenue? Here — and nowhere else in America, apparently — that’s known as a stravenue.

Pima County is home to 40 of them, mostly in mid-century neighborhoods built around Tucson’s angled arteries — Aviation Parkway, Benson Highway, the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Interstate 10 east of I-19.

The U.S. Postal Service even has an official abbreviation for the stravenue (that would be STRA), though mail carriers outside of Southern Arizona don’t need to concern themselves with it.

“Our records indicate the name is only found in Tucson, Arizona,” said Roy Betts, national spokesman for the Postal Service.

Read the full story here.