Florida

Hey, Kids! Comics!

During a recent road trip the kids and I stormed two geek stores: Lone Star Comics in Dallas and Cosmic Cat Comics in Tallahassee. This is a foolish thing to do, because I have poor impulse control and my sons have a serious Yu-Gi-Oh jones. The clerk at Lone Star was exceptionally friendly, digging up free comics for the kids and teaching them how to slam Pogs, which are undergoing an attempted revival. We did $80 damage at Lone Star on cards, comics, manga and a $13 box that contained three ... (read more)

2006/06/16

A Florida company has received an $112,500 fine for violating the state's do-not-call list:A lawsuit filed in 2003 accused Fort Lauderdale-based Sports Authority Florida, a chain of sporting goods stores, of making 77 calls to state residents on the list and playing a pre-recorded message to many of the consumers who answered the calls. Under Florida law, it is a separate offense for a telemarketer to play a pre-recorded message when a consumer answers his or her phone.I wasn't aware Florida ... (read more)

2006/04/13

Are You Ready for Some Football?

I've begun following FC Dallas, the Major League Soccer team originally known as the Dallas Burn, as part of my embrace of all things soccer in the run up to the World Cup. My friend Wade Duchene has been after me for years to start following international football, which he discovered while stationed overseas during the first Gulf War, and I run a sports community weblog that has attracted a bunch of Premiership fans. Resistance was futile. Soccer in Great Britain is as huge as any pro sport ... (read more)

2006/04/10

Watch Out for the Guns

The Jacksonville Barracudas hockey team has been run the last several years by Ron Duguay, the former New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings player. Duguay was a '70s heartthrob who skated without a helmet, relying on big hair to protect his head. In a story about Duguay stepping down from the team, the Florida Times-Union included a photo of Duguay in his office, where he hung a bare-chested poster of himself showing off Ron Burgundy-like guns and a total eclipse of the hair. If you'd like Ron ... (read more)

2006/04/10

The World's Most Beloved Coroner

I chaperoned a field trip this week to a high school production of The Wizard of Oz, which was fun because kids love getting out of school to see plays. This one had winged attack monkeys roaming the audience, the Wicked Witch singing Michael Jackson's "Bad" and a climactic scene involving water guns. At the end, they brought a surprise guest on stage: Meinhardt Raabe, the 90-year-old who played the Coroner in the movie. Raabe, who lives in a retirement community south of Jacksonville, may ... (read more)

2006/04/06

The Dodgers Will Never Forget Hiroshima

I attended Sunday's spring training game between the Dodgers and Nationals at Vero Beach, the first time I've seen a game at the legendary Dodgertown. There are no bad seats, the atmosphere is completely laid back and you're right on top of the players. I sat so close to Eric Gagne warming up along the third base line I could've made a beer run for him. The history of Dodgertown dates back to the years the team played in Brooklyn, and I found a very unexpected relic from those days in the ... (read more)

2006/03/20

A Case of Sticker Shock

I was driving behind a new-looking Hyundai Sonata on State Road 312 in St. Augustine yesterday when I spotted a simple black sticker along the top edge of the car's window: ANAL INTRUDER Anyone care to venture a guess as to what the driver was trying to convey with this sticker? I was so surprised I nearly rear-ended him. ... (read more)

2006/03/07

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Wired News is running my story today about the center of the world: the Shamrock "K" Horse Center near Coffeyville, Kansas. Maggie Dew, the geocacher who journeyed to the center and brought back photos, has planted a cache not far from the city at a '60s landmark called Peace Point: Some friends and I had a little shop in downtown Coffeyville called the Hobbit Hole. We had a peace flag in the front window, and it wasn't long before someone decided to lob a brick through it. During the same ... (read more)

2006/02/22

St. Augustine Cages Tiger

A local man in a Bengal tiger costume climbed atop the 165-foot-tall St. Augustine lighthouse Tuesday morning, stayed up there four hours and placed a 4Myduke.Com flag on a lightning rod to protest Internet pornography and publicize his children's book. Frank Feldmann, who's selling a self-published book about Myduke the magic tiger under the pen name Dusty L. Cage, published a "Legal Defense Fund" page on his web site before storming the lighthouse: If you are visiting this page Myduke ... (read more)

2006/02/08

My Lunch With Tyson Tomko

When I took the kids to Chick-fil-a for lunch yesterday, we sat down next to this imposing looking man and his family. With his bald head, six-inch-long Fu Manchu goatee and bad-ass tattoos running from wrist to wrist over tree-trunk arms, I'm thinking he had to be one of three things: professional wrestler, rock musician or crazed South Floridian drug lord. The latter was admittedly a long shot -- my only experience with South Floridian drug lords comes from Miami Vice and he was eating with a ... (read more)

2006/02/01

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