Letters from the Issue of March 19, 2009

Deserters Get Their Just Deserts You darn crybabies: In response to Megan Feldman’s March 12 story, “Move Out!”: I have no sympathy for people who volunteer for duty and then want to use bullshit excuses like “illegal war” to shirk their responsibility. During Vietnam, many were drafted and in spite…

The Woman Whisperer

It’s an easy, breezy Tuesday evening at Monty’s (2550 S. Bayshore Dr., Coconut Grove) when Chris, a short, 27-year-old Cuban-American with a handlebar mustache, jitters past a circle-jerk of about 15 middle-age shrimpers hunched over the tiki-thatched patio’s main bar. Their necks are the same color as the pink sunset…

Chuck Rules, Bill Bites

Today Bill Cooke at Random Pixels took a shot at New Times and editorial jefe Chuck Strouse. He wrote: I used to love Miami New Times. When I lived in Coconut Grove I knew where the paper was delivered on Wednesday and usually snagged a copy by early afternoon. Since…

Solo Sushi Needs Soy Sauce. Akashi Has Soy Sauce.

9:39 p.m. last night, my friend texted me, “Loving [Lil’] Kim on Dancing With the Stars!” While he was home watching B & C-Listers do the cha-cha – wasabi, crab and fresh-out-the-water tuna was doing the electric boogaloo on my tongue. Akashi’s South Miami outpost is potentially one of the…

BET’s College Hill: South Beach Premiers Next Week

College Hill is basically BET’s answer to the Real World, but with a lot less transsexuals and eye-liner wearing boys from Utah, and a lot more students from historically black universities. Seven students from throughout the country live together for a semester. In the first few seasons I think they…

Organic hipness

When Banana Republican is not out trolling the streets of Miami in search of corrupt politicians, inept bureaucrats, scoundrels, outlaws and other riff-raff that deserve exposing, I like to check out the hipster scene. I’ll roll up a nice fat banana peel, pour a little Macallan’s malt scotch whiskey into my…

The Week That Was

The Herald started out its week on various death lists, cut 175 people (including one on her birthday), and left people questioning whether Miami will even have a daily paper anymore. Meanwhile, one of the paper’s more infamous famous employees landed a job, because there is no justice in the…

The Real Housewives of Various Governor’s Mansions

I was just checking the ol’ RSS reader, and discovered that Naked Politics has a post up alerting readers to outtakes from The Real Housewives of New York City featuring Florida’s First Lady Carole Rome.  I am insanely jealous we did not have this first (btw, anyone notice that the…

South Florida According to Brooklyn: Spring Break Is Here

To read past installments of South Florida According to Brooklyn, click here. Spring break is here, and the streets of South Beach are filled with jackasses. I’ve noticed more and more as I get older and wiser, that the people who come here from out of town care less and…

Shear Genius at D&L Salon

If Dee Adames – Miami’s mohawked winner of  the second season of Sheer Genius – could describe herself as any animal, she’d choose a cat. “They’re mysterious and slightly territorial,” she laughs as muted episodes of the Bravo reality show in which she won plays on a flat screen inside…

The Friday Burrito Weekly Wrap-Up

Last week was crazy. Find out what Gail Shepherd was sayin’ ’bout your mom, why Michy is bent over the kitchen counter, and how to get cheese in a recession. Welcome to the Friday Burrito Weekly Wrap-Up…

Glenn Straub: Too little too late

Hey Glenn Straub. I WANT to watch baseball downtown,. I WANT to TAKE the Metromover to games,But I wish you would just shut up.Straub penned a letter to the public (which you can find on the jump) defending his idea for a downtown stadium. But we’ve moved too far with…

Inspect no commissioners or the mayor

This past March 4, the Miami-Dade County Inspector General’s Office announced it had nailed a county vendor falsifying his insurance paperwork in order to get a county contract. Thanks to the inspector general’s investigation, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office was able to charge Eddy Joe Allen Sr. with eight counts…

Letters from the Issue of March 12, 2009

O for O’Barry Hero: Ric O’Barry, as described in Natalie O’Neill’s March 5 story, “Free O’Barry,” is indeed a hero. There is no doubt about that. There is also a villain, and it is the marine captivity industry that makes millions of dollars off the misery and deaths of intelligent…

1048 Condoms on the Beach. And we’re no. 3.

Now comes the news that Florida — thanks, Curtis Morgan — is number three in the nation for trashiest beaches after California and North Carolina. Come on! One thousand, three hundred and forty-eight condoms. That’s nothing for South Beach. (A friend of mine from NY used to call em Coney…

George Burgess needs another vacay – a permanent one

Okay I just finished reading the Miami Herald’s latest report on the Florida Marlins stadium boondoggle and Miami-Dade County Manager George Burgess needs to call it quits. Seriously. There comes a point when a top executive just has to come clean and tell his shareholders – in this case Miami-Dade…

Marlins Balk in Overtown

Recently, I noted the Florida Marlins were in desperate need of a good closer to seal the deal in the team’s decade long quest for a new ball park. Well, they have an opportunity to get themselves one of the wealthiest relief pitchers in the real estate game to help…

Restaurants Must Die: A Poem

Restaurants die, it’s as basic as thatAs with people you just never know.Some exist as long as a mountain flatOthers have lifespans like snow.”High rent and costs,” the owners say”Competition is obscene.”Yet some joints rock both night and dayWith a bar scene in between.So many theories have been passedBut it…

North Bay Village = Quid Pro Quo

In the Fifties and Sixties, North Bay Village was a place where seedy mobsters and corrupt politicians came home to roost.  At one point in its 63-year history, a law-enforcement report concluded North Bay Village, a man-made three-island city along the John F. Kennedy Causeway, had “Dade’s largest concentration of…