According to Miami Police Department public information offier Robert Williams, the metal detector New Times recently wrote about being non-functioning and unattended is now working and manned at all times. According to Williams, in the past, “during a certain period of alert, it was manned and activated.” Now it’s fully…

Mmm, frothy! For ten years, the Miami Area Society of Homebrewers (MASH) has battled the Ft. Lauderdale Area Brewers (FLAB) in an epic annual contest of brewing mastery: the Coconut Cup. And, after three nights of tasting and sampling in private homes, the battle will spill out onto the beery…

I met Venezuelan blogger Luis Carlos D�az at a media conference at University of Miami last week. He told me that he had just published a post about my article on Patricia Poleo. It seems he thought it was pretty skewed. A rough translation of his comment: “The press in…

Holy environmental building, Batman! Miami remains one of the last places on earth to disdain pretty much any form of environmentalism. There seems to be an unspoken equation here that goes something like this: alternative energy + recycling = Fidel. The equation may be changing. Plans are underway to build…

The Seminole Sun Sets on Anna Nicole Filed Under: Scene The day Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse was wheeled from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, tribe members were setting up for their annual powwow. The 36th gathering, which began last Thursday, is a celebration of Seminole culture that includes…

Couey The media frenzy surrounding the trial of John Evander Couey — the five-foot-four-inch man charged with kidnapping, raping, and killing nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford in 2005 — continued yesterday. During a break in jury selection Monday, Circuit Judge Ric Howard rejected a motion filed by the Miami Herald that sought…

Pucker up Due to the damp weather, the outdoor wall of stuffed animals at Rios Flowers has been under a tarp for most of the week. The street in front of the store has been reduced to a sand pit, a perilous habitat of orange and white traffic barriers and…

Attention, Miami: This is what a bike lane looks like At about 1:30 late one night this past weekend, I was leaning on my bike, staring tipsily at my plastic Streetwise Miami map, trying to figure out how to get onto the Venetian Causeway. I’m new in town. I have…

For 17 years, Tony Wayne Dixon worked for the Miami-Dade school district, monitoring computer systems and ensuring no inappropriate material made it through web filters to impressionable kids. This past Friday, Dixon was sentenced to five years probation, having been convicted on 17 counts of possession of child pornography and…

Last fall, Florida employees of BellSouth were told they would have to submit to fingerprinting or be terminated. That’s because a state law called the Jessica Lunsford Act, passed in 2005, mandates that all “noninstructional school district employees or contractual personnel” must have criminal background checks before being allowed to…

Welcome to my world This past Friday night, the imposing gates of Star Island stood open to the rich, the famous, and the lowly media — all invited to the splendiferous casa de la Gloria Estefan to attend a fundraising gala. Three hundred guests were expected; tickets cost $5,000 a…

That’s one way to do it The Florida International Bankers Association, better known by the acronym FIBA (and unrelated to an international basketball league with the same initials), has its annual Anti Money Laundering Conference today and tomorrow at the Radisson Hotel downtown. Expecting Scarface-inspired crime narratives, New Times attended…

Eeek! When I moved into my dee-luxe Miami Beach apartment in the sky, I figured that the most I would have to worry about would be prudish neighbors complaining about the hard bass lines pounding through the walls. But recently, when I heard a scratching noise in my cabinet, I…

Producers pf the uber-popular reality TV show Top Chef were in town recently looking for a few good cooks to compete for a $100,000 grand prize in their next season. And one local chef looks like he could be a prime candidate. Mike Sabin, 36, executive chef of South Beach’s…

“You’re tired!” Why the urge to label everything? Why can a vacation no longer be just a vacation? Things are just getting silly. Case in point: the vacation-moon phenomenon. First we had the basic honeymoon. Fine. But then some Hallmark brown-noser came up with anniversarymoons (repeat honeymoons). The divorcemoon was…

In Brazil it’s called o jeitinho and it means “the little way.” When you are a tourist who gets caught smoking pot on a beach in Rio, you employ o jeitinho and offer a courtesy tip to the police. They accept your offering and you avoid languishing in jail a…

Nowak, in better times As Valentine’s Day approaches, we’re all left to wonder: are we really, truly in love? Do we still get that warm, fuzzy feeling when we snuggle up close to our partner? Do we still take joy in the little things, like a shared laugh, or an…

G. Murillo/Univision Online The contestants hoping to win a spot on Our Latin Beauty — the new Spanish-language counterpart to America’s Next Top Model — sat on metal bleachers under a canopy outside of Univision’s studios in Doral last Saturday morning. Dressed in a dazzling array of animal prints, lace,…

(Insert joke here.) I recently attended a sausage party. Literally. Guests were encouraged to bring over all manner of meats and spices —anything they would like to see in sausage form. The event mainly involved staring intently at a pink output of ground meat, and making poorly timed jokes. The…

Super Brawls Filed under: Flotsam Last week they outlawed tailgating at Dolphin Stadium. The reason might be all of this past year’s fun and frolicking in the parking lot. In 2006 the Dolphin Stadium precinct of the Miami-Dade Police Department received hundreds of calls for lost property, vandalism, theft, narcotics,…