Mmm, cacacha-y One year ago this week, the lush gardens on the grounds of Miami’s Villa Vizcaya were flattened by Hurricane Wilma to such an extent the estate was closed for some months to assess and repair the damage. Fortunately the foliage has managed to recover, and along with the…
Who’s gonna grease my palm? The Downtown Bay Forum couldn’t have known that their October 25 meeting — “Corruption & Scandals in Miami-Dade County: what are we going to do about it?” — would fall on the same day that former county commissioner Miriam Alonso would plead guilty to 20…
Leslie Rothenberg In the past, New Times has questioned the suitability of Judge Leslie Rothenberg for her seat on the Third-District Court of Appeal, given her tendency to mouth off on matters that will likely fall before her in court. Now Rothenberg is up for election. She’s not running against…
ho ho ho When we looked at this costume on A Mom, A blog, and the Life in-Between, we had to agree with this lady’s co-workers. have to say, the outfit you are about to rate seemed like a burst of creativity and funkiness (but total cuteness) on my part…
Let them wear corsets On November 1, churchyards and cemeteries around Europe are filled not only with the dead but the living; All Souls Day is a solemn sort of holiday on the continent, a day for visiting and showing respect for the resting places of the bodies that once…
Just take it in a little under the arms, please. An astute reader’s memory was triggered by “Mock Trial,” the article I wrote last week about Miami’s immigration judges. Judge Bruce Solow, who said of one asylum seeker’s case that it “was so vague and general you could vomit,” was…
The Office of Cuba Broadcasting begins its airplane-based broadcasts of Radio and Tele Marti to Cuba today, and Alex at Stuck on the Palmetto welcomes the news. He writes: “By personal experience I can tell you Tele Marti has only been watched a few times with heavy interference (looks like…
Clean as a whistle! Scarlett Johansson recently admitted to Allure magazine that she does it twice a year: “I’m not promiscuous,” she said. “I get tested for HIV twice a year…. One has to be socially aware. It’s part of being a decent human to be tested for STDs.” I…
Sticky Lingers Filed under: Flotsam Tired of dodging — or stepping in — those ubiquitous black lumps of desiccated chewing gum that pepper every urban landscape? A new invention out of Germany uses a high-pressure apparatus to vaporize the once-indelible clumps through steam and eco-friendly detergent. And there’s only one…
Part 1 described a federal sting designed to catch a bad lawyer named Israel Perez Jr. A convicted drug dealer named Antonio Monroy told authorities that Perez had promised to provide two DEA agents who would lie to reduce his sentence. Read the details in our archives from the issue…
When Tammy met Bill, she was a freshman at Miami Northwestern Senior High School, a pretty girl of medium height with long black eyelashes and pearly white teeth. He was a handsome senior who played basketball. The pair began dating, and a couple of years later, son Robert was born…
The Bicycle King of Miami was not born to his throne. He grew up scavenging the train tracks and trash piles of old Homestead — then a land of five lakes. “You didn’t’ have no money to buy you a bike back in the day,” he said while machining the…
wtf Dogma Grill? Critical Miami wants to know. The Miami eatery has successfully sued a hot dog establishment with a similarly punny name: Hot Dogma. The location of this weiner warehouse? Pittsburgh…
March 27 An anonymous guy from Miami Springs tells us that some Miami-Dade police officers have no respect for the law. This intrepid soul says parked cop cars block the sidewalk in his neighborhood almost every day between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. They can usually be found on the…
My life is informed by film, and when I am having a particularly terrible terrible awful experience, I often suspend the trauma by framing it through someone else’s celluloid suffering, conjuring an imaginary foil the way Jimi Mistry invented Kyle MacLachlan as Cary Grant in A Touch of Pink. On…
At the corner of Seventh Street and NW Fifth Avenue, young black men in baggy shorts and wife-beaters were scanning slow-moving cars for the next deal. It was Friday morning and, unbeknownst to the street corner hustlers, a renaissance was unfolding two blocks away. In a shaded quarter-acre lot behind…
INDEMAND What, Me Worry? Well, not really, but according to the National Enquirer, notorious Miamian O.J. Simpson is writing a “hypothetical” book in which he will “speculate” about the events of June 12, 1994 — the night Nicole Brown Simpson and friend Ron Goldman were murdered. “O.J. prefaces these key…
The building at 9851 Kendall Drive used to be just another gas station, contending with the Shell station across the street and the Chevron on the corner. But intrepid entrepreneur Michael Touma saw opportunity when the skyrocketing gasoline prices and glut of competition overwhelmed the Texaco station. He removed the…
What is a real Grove restaurant?Coconut Grove Grapevine asks the question today: “If a tourist asked you which restaurant in the Grove actually says ‘Coconut Grove,’ which would it be?”…
Since mid-September, Miami City Commission candidate Mark Sarnoff has been obsessed with proving opponent Frank Rollason is being less than forthright about what role, if any, he had in the creation of the controversial and unconstitutional fire fee. (If elected, Rollason has promised to do away with the fire fee…
Um, fill it to the top please! Your car is not a phone booth. Your car is not your office. As much as you would like to think you can multitask, the reality is you can’t. That is why the “gods” (Jobs & Gates) created computers… to fill the gap…
Pay Fray Filed under: Scanner As the zero hour approached this past Friday, Shawn Beightol sat in his classroom at Michael Krop Senior High School, pondering the end. Then the hallway outside Beightol’s door began to fill with fellow teachers. They weren’t going to allow a meeting scheduled for that…
