Jacksonville

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

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

Living La Vida Del Boca Vista

On one of the Seinfeld episodes where Jerry visited his parents' insane retirement community Del Boca Vista Phase II, a map showed that it was in North Florida in the vicinity of St. Augustine. I was reminded of that yesterday when I faced lines 10-15 people deep to buy two-cent stamps and mail some overdue bills. First-class stamps increased from 37 to 39 cents on Sunday because of a 2003 law requiring the Postal Service to put $3 billion in escrow. There's no stated need for this "rainy-day ... (read more)

2006/01/10

Stone Cold Lock: Jacksonville Over New England

I'm one of the founders of SportsFilter, a 4,500-member sports community weblog built on the MetaFilter code base that's been football-crazed as the NFL playoffs begin. I wrote a column this afternoon on Saturday's Jaguars-Patriots wild card game: Before Super Bowl XX in 1986, all-pro defensive back Raymond Clayborn predicted that his New England Patriots would defeat the Chicago Bears. I don't know who Clayborn likes in Saturday's wild-card playoff between the Patriots and Jacksonville ... (read more)

2006/01/06

Congress Studies Cruise Ship Disappearances

On Tuesday, two Congressional subcommittees will hold a joint hearing on the subject of cruise ship disappearances and crimes that take place aboard the vessels. My wife M.C. Moewe, a reporter with the Jacksonville Business Journal, spent six months tracking down information on cruise ship passengers who disappeared or went overboard, an elusive subject because most incidents happen in international waters or foreign jurisdictions. She found 12 passengers since 2000, including five within the ... (read more)

2005/12/12

Black Friday: More Than I Bargained For

Once the doors opened just before 5 a.m., hundreds of people poured through, breaking down the police tape. Dozens of others cut the line and ran through the exit door before Wal-Mart employees were able to stop them. Inside, Wal-Mart workers were throwing boxes with laptops and portable DVD players to the people who were pushing and shoving to get the merchandise. A lone sneaker lay on the floor, lost by an anxious shopper in the scrum. My name is Rogers and I am a recovering doorbuster. ... (read more)

2005/11/26

Strip Club Owner Gets Something Off His Chest

If you take the southbound State Road 207 exit on Interstate 95 near St. Augustine, Florida, you'll see Café Erotica, a decrepit rural strip club. The café, which reportedly shut down in September, has been engaged in a bitter fight with St. Johns County code enforcement supervisor James Acosta. I know this not because I keep abreast of the club's activities, but because you can't miss the huge 10- by 40-foot sign it recently erected. Whenever we drive past this sign, my kids laugh like ... (read more)

2005/11/16

A Target on My Back

I was publicly humiliated at the local Target store this afternoon by one of the employees, a young woman who yelled at my children from a distance of 25 feet for being improperly respectful of Spongebob Squarepants decorative microbead pillows. Unbeknownest to me, Target Team Member Emily had stalked us all the way from the toy section to housewares, enraged when we haphazardly reshelved Parasol Kids foam chairs. If you're ever in Target and your demand for the manager is met by an employee's ... (read more)

2005/10/15

Tropical Storm Ophelia is hanging out off Florida's east coast, awaiting further orders from God. Yesterday's projected path was due west across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico. Today it's predicted to wiggle towards South Carolina, but Jeff Masters believes it will head northeast for a few days, do-se-do, alaman right, and come back to the U.S.: After heading east for a few days, all the models except the GFS agree that Ophelia will eventually loop back and hit the U.S. as a hurricane, perhaps ... (read more)

2005/09/08

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