Margo Pellegrino looked unsure about swigging from a champagne bottle proffered to her Monday morning, but she didn’t stop to think about it. Sure, booze probably isn’t the best thing if you’re planning to paddle your outrigger canoe 25 miles or so up the Intracoastal Waterway. But, what the hell…
It’s Pat! We get no end of fundraising e mails sent to us at the Miami New Times. As touching as many of them are, there’s just no way to shine a light on all of the worthwhile causes. But eleven year old Patrick Pedraja is a special case. Patrick…
Driving through the intersection of NE First Avenue and Twelfth Street, near the I-395 on-ramp, a large banner hung on a chain-link fence caught my attention. It read: Space Made Downtown Happen. “Space and this new district attracted not only locals, but also tourists from all over the world, and…
Riptide is introducing a new feature that will allow readers to ask restaurant reviewer Lee Klein questions concerning the local dining scene. Is it true that Daniel Boulud will be opening a namesake establishment in downtown Miami? (Yes.) Can you get me chef Klime Kovaceski’s palacinka recipe from the now-shuttered…
Today, from 3 to 6 p.m. the waiters, cooks and housekeepers of Fisher Island are staging a protest at the Ferry landing off of MacArthur Causeway. Approximately 1000 underlings are pissed off, it seems, that their super-rich overseers have decided not to provide them with a living wage and health…
Meet the South Beach Man Whore. He hasn’t been on the blogosphere for long, and apparently before he appeared, he was a proud resident of LaLa Land. Amid posts about receiving massages, blow jobs, and T-shirts from women that he paints to be clueless, he says: I’m thinking, “wow, she…
All Hail, the King of the Smurfs Filed Under: News Thousands of Miamians were forced to wonder this past Saturday: Why in God’s name was George W. Bush providing the commencement for a former community college in the middle of West Kendall? Commencements were taking place simultaneously at Miami Dade…
On February 11, shortly before 6:00 p.m., a heavy-set African-American man clad in a Department of Juvenile Justice-issue black and gray uniform wandered through a near-deserted common room at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle. The bespectacled guard, identified by DJJ as 23-year-old Alvin Speights,…
Sweetwater, Florida was founded by a band of Russian circus midgets just before the outbreak of World War II. Hoping to transform their patch of lush swampland into an international midget haven, they threw up a handful of tiny houses and planted vegetables. Floods and wartime belt-tightening put the kibosh…
Early one afternoon in June 2003, a bushy-haired, 28-year-old sergeant from Miami sat down on the hard floor of a steamy, furniture-less room in Ar Ramadi, one of the most dangerous locations in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. The space, on the second floor of the city’s government center, had been previously…
When’s dinner? We didn’t give Johnny Vinczencz a very enthusiastic welcome back in our review of Johnny V South Beach, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate his long-time, big-flavored contributions to our local dining scene. After all, since the mid-1990s the man has been boldly going where no chef…
Miami’s recent explosion of murders among black youths is about to go prime time. CNN recently took an interest in Queen Brown, host of “What’s Going On?”, an anti-violence program Sundays at noon on WTPS-AM 1080. Brown started the show after her 24-year-old son, Eviton, died this past October when…
John Connolly – a 66-year-old retired FBI agent who is awaiting trial in Miami on murder charges – told a judge Tuesday that his lawyer, Manny Casabielle, wasn’t spending enough quality time with him. “I have no problem with his ability to defend me,” Connolly told Judge Barbara Areces in…
There’s absolutely no reason to show up to a reggae show on time. You can almost guarantee that no matter when such a gig is supposed to start, it won’t get going until a couple of hours later. Maybe more. And such was the case at Wednesday’s band show featuring…
Beware Miami, a beast most foul roams the streets of the design district, preying upon innocent victims. This past Friday I saw it with my own eyes. As pair after pair of stiletto heels and crocodile print loafers clicked down the sidewalk toward the Moore Building (en-route to the Inside…
Last week, I nearly stopped breathing when I took my cat, Luna, to the vet and the receptionist told me the bill. “$340,” she said, casually. I sighed inwardly and pulled out the plastic. You do what you gotta do for your pets. Later that night – not having learned…
Miami resident Richard Strell recently told the Bike Blog about a little amendment to the Miami 21 plan that troubled him. Here it is, as faithfully copied and pasted from a list of Miami 21 amendments posted on April 19:…
Something like that I often ignore the ball-busting demands of Fortune cookies. Pursue your wishes aggressively. Ummmm, ok. And online horoscopes are vague and inconsistent. And don’t get me started on a disappointing late night call to a psychic hotline – how long can you expect a girl to ignore…
At about one o’clock a.m. last night, I got a call that the Umoja Shantytown had burned to the ground. The call came from an a friend, someone tied into the haphazard network of activists that came together around the common cause of the shantytown. “I’m in for the long…
T-Bone and his muse When people started screaming about the flames that swept through Umoja Village last night — a homeless shantytown in Liberty City — T-Bone grabbed his radio and ran. T-Bone was one of the 44 people who lived in the camp. He had been there four months…
Last year Congress negated habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees. Now the U.S. Department of Justice has requested that a DC appeals court limit civilian lawyers’ access to Gitmo clients to three visits. The DOJ has also requested the right to read correspondence between lawyers and detainees. When it opened…
Eleven 40-caliber shell casings lay just beyond the front lawn of the little white house on Service Road. Blood ran like latticework from the street, up the driveway, and pooled in the doorway, where 23-year-old Major Johnson lay dying. His aunt stood back in the darkness of her house, her…
