Florida

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

Astronaut Launches Tirade

I visited Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, last July, spending an afternoon at the tourist exhibits and launch pads. The original countdown for space shuttle mission STS-114 was underway, and we were taken by bus to see Discovery on launch pad 39B. Though the pad obscured everything but the top of the shuttle's external tank and booster rockets, the sight of the spacecraft was the highlight of the trip. I think I started to cry a little. Science rocks. ... (read more)

2006/01/23

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

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

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school has dropped its football program midseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned 13 starters from last year's 0-11 team, still had the toughest part of the schedule to come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride. ... (read more)

2005/10/19

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