Last night we went to Tempe to The Sets, a venue we had never been before to see Vayden performing live.  They are one of my wife’s favorite local rock bands and I really dig their sound too.  Their first album “Children of Our Mistakes” is starting to take off and they get radio air time on local rock stations as well as Sirius Octane.

The show was enjoyable though the first opening bands were just okay, the most impressive band was Vayden with Bruce being one of the most outstanding drummers I have ever seen.  Curtis the lead singer does powerful vocals and their cover of The Beatles “All Together” I like better the way Vayden sings the song than The Beatles themselves.

Stereoside was a rock band in from Florida and had an amazing sound, they were the 2nd best band in the show in my opinion and I am really glad I got to see them play.  Afterward my wife introduced me to the Vayden band members and we spoke with the Stereoside guys again and invited them to come and play for our production company some time next year when they are heading back this way.

Getting home at almost 2am, now I am up by 6am with the kids and preparing for Turkey day, trying to get some blogging in before the real day starts.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone,

Justin Germino

Saguaro Cacti, you know the classic western cactus that grows up to 50 feet tall and sprouts the arms that you see in classic western movies and roadrunner cartoons are in danger of theft. Saguaro’s are native only to the Sonoran Desert, which limits their native land to Arizona, California, Baja Mexico and Sonora. They take fifty years before they first flower and seventy years before growing their first limb.

Everyone wants a nice 6-7′ Saguaro in their front yard and people don’t want to pay full retail prices, so there is huge black market for thieves who go into the Sonoran Desert and steal Saguaro’s and sell then to nurseries or directly to consumers. A typical 4 - 7′ Saguaro can fetch $1,000 or more on the market which is quite substantial for a plant.

In an effort to reduce Saguaro theft the National Parks are implementing a microchip tracking device that is similar to the ID chips put in pet dogs and cats. This chip will be implanted about 1 inch deep in the cactus and can be read with a scanner from about a foot away. This allows officials to walk into nursery’s and scan over Saguaro’s to see if any are stolen property, and when policy or park officials stop trucks with Saguaro’s in the bed, they can quickly run the scanner’s to determine if the Saguaro’s are stolen.

I had no idea there was such a demand and market for these cacti, I mean sure they are everywhere, and sure they are really nice and scenic to look at. Microchip implants for cacti aren’t new in Arizona, there was a similar program implemented in The Lake Mead National Recreation Area which performed the same tracking for Barrel cacti to reduce poaching there as well.

Thought this was an interesting tidbit of information to share with my readers.

-Justin Germino