Jacksonville

We Enjoyed the Space Shuttle a Lot

This picture was taken on Saturday in Titusville, Florida. If you look closely, you'll see the space shuttle not taking off in the background as thousands of people watch with excited anticipation along the banks of the Indian River, 19 miles across the water from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. I'm standing in a field on U.S. 1 just south of the Miracle City Mall, which the Unofficial Space Shuttle Launch Guide recommends as one of the best places to not see the shuttle take ... (read more)

Jacksonville's Year-Old Blogging Community (Est. 1998)

Today's Florida Times-Union has a front-page feature on the Jacksonville blogging community. I've been following local weblogs for seven years, so I was curious to see how many of our long-time bloggers were profiled. Answer: None. The story treats Joey Marchy's Urban Jacksonville as if it was the area's first blog: Approaching its first anniversary, this is possibly the oldest ongoing blog in Jacksonville. The piece missed all of the well-established Jacksonville bloggers who've been ... (read more)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)