Q: Why are sticks of butter sold here not the same as butter sold in the East? The Arizona kind is shorter and fatter. It doesn’t fit on the butter trays I bought years ago in Connecticut.

A: We have to confess that sometimes, in our darker hours, we sit alone under the light of a single naked bulb here at the shabby but genteel headquarters of Valley 101 and pull a bottle of root beer out of our battered desk and wonder if it’s time to give it up. Have all the great questions been asked? All the great mysteries solved? Are there no
mountains left to climb?

And then a question like yours arrives, and our faith in the essential oddness of our readers is restored. A new day dawns. Wiping the root beer foam from our lips, we turn our chiseled visage to face a new challenge.

And we learn, yes, indeed, butter is different here. Who knew? As it turned out, the exceedingly helpful Harold Metzger, sales purchasing manager for the United Dairymen of Arizona, knew.

Q: As a refugee from the cloudy Northwest, I have been introduced to pleasures of sun tea. But a co-worker says I am just setting a jar of germs out in the sun to incubate. Is sun tea safe?

A: Thank you for your inquiry. Immediately upon its receipt, we here at the research lab at Valley 101 immediately spit out a mouthful of sun tea, a la Danny Thomas, and went home to lie down with a cool cloth over our chiseled brows to await the onset of food poisoning.

The Arizona Republic columnist and Arizona Oddities contributor Clay Thompson has made a living out of answering the strangest questions in the newsroom and snarking on some of the people who ask them. Now, he’s gone one step further, asking his readers to submit recipes for a cookbook, just so that he can make money as a writer, but without having to do any of the writing itself. The Enormously Big, Official Valley 101 Cookbook will be available November 21. It retails for $9.95, but Arizona Oddities readers get the chance to win free copies!

Are cactus candy and cactus jelly really made out of cactus?

There was a time when we would have brought several samples of cactus candy and jelly back for testing in the Valley 101 Research Laboratory. But with the recent shrinking of the paper, we had to pack up lab equipment and put it in storage. It was either that or the bowling trophies.

So, in the absence of a detailed scientific analysis, we put all our trust in Amelio Cassiato, manager of the Cactus Candy Co. in central Phoenix, which, by the way, has a really cool cactus sign out in front.