Riptide put up somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 posts this year, so before we get started on writing 3,000 more it's time to sit back and look at some our successes: Our top ten posts by pageviews.
Yeah, it's a collection of slightly seedy stuff, with abortion doughnuts, rape tunnels, and XXXrays. We might have written it, but don't judge us. You were the ones who clicked on it tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of times.
1. Pro-Life Group up in Arms over Krispy Kreme's Abortion Doughnuts
This is one of the few posts we didn't even try to put a local spin on, but when you get a press release as crazy as this, and see no one else has touched it, you have to run with it. A couple of emails latter it got on some blogs, and from there was linked everywhere from Wonkette and Jezebel to Salon and The Guardian. The end result is that we're just about the only people in the entire world who aren't deeply offended or perplexed when their boss asks them for more abortion doughnuts.
2. MIA Security Workers Might Get to See You Naked
We read a detail in a New York Times travel piece about these things being in MIA, and we just had to know more. Unfortunately, we found out that the TSA might know more than we wanted them to by using full-body imaging machines that leave little to the imagination. Of course, one of these things could have come in handy before last week's undie bomber incident. So maybe now we don't mind so much if a security screener can tell whether we're Jewish or not.
3. Nudists Save Lingerie Bowl
Come late January, Riptide is usually left with a football thirst that the Dolphin's didn't quench. So we latched on to the Miami Caliente, who were scheduled to play in the Lingerie Bowl, an unofficial half-time event during last year's Super Bowl. Tampa Bay residents didn't want anything to with it, so a nudist resort stepped in to save it. Unfortunately, the story didn't end there, as the bowl was canceled when organizers realized that the nudist resort intended to let its visitors spectate sans clothing.
4. More Anti-Obama Idiots in Florida Can't Spell
We're not going to make any claims that Miami is full of geniuses, but for the real idiots in this state you have to head north. There you'll find this guy in Fort Walton Beach who put an anti-Obama sign up that only identified the president as "Hussen." He tried to justify his mistake with this reasoning: "American people are the stupidest people in the world, but something like that I think they can figure out."
5. Teenage Employee Duped in $26,000 Heist
6. How Hoops Hero Rumeal Robinson Lost His Guns, Cars, Stripper Girlfriend... and Even His Mama's House
When Gus Garcia-Roberts was preparing this for the print edition of New Times, we got word that a major daily in the Northeast was also pursuing the story of the fallen hoops hero, so we got it up on Riptide. The links from sports blogs helped it into our top ten.
7. Artlurker Explains Rape Tunnel: "Our Intention Was to Spark Conversation"
Miami-based arts blog may have scored one of the best art hoaxes of the year by reporting on a fake project in which an artist promised he would rape anyone that made it through a treacherous tunnel. We called it for what it was pretty quickly, but not one, but two major blogs took it for fact and ended up linking to us once they realized their mistake.
8. Feds Indict Miami Man Who Tried To Steal $14 Trillion from the IRS
Sometimes we're not sure if Miami appreciated subtlety, but restraint is a virtue when you're trying to rip-off the IRS. If you're like our man Marlon T. Moore here, and submit claims stating that the IRS owes you $14 trillion, they're probably not going to be pleased.
9. Che Guevara's Granddaughter Poses Topless for PETA
Miamians hate Che and love meat, so we thought this might stir up some local emotion. Instead it just stirred up things in internet geek's pants. Hey, we'll take what we can get.
10. Apple Yanks iPhone Porn App
For a brief second you could buy a legit iPhone App that delivered topless ladies to your phones. During a slow news day we put a local spin on it, only to find that it had pulled from the appstore the following day. This follow-up post, for whatever reason, must have been at the right internet place at the right internet time. Don't worry, you can still read Riptide on your iPhone, which judging from this list might be just as dirty.
