“We’re a merged family, like the Brady Bunch,” says Lionel K. Lightbourne. But like the Partridge Family, they sing: Lightbourne, with fiancee Tanya, their children from previous marriages and even a neighbor or two from Liberty City, call themselves The Fans. The song they produced — “Miami Dolphins 4 Life!!!”…
Critical Miami recently called “BULLSHIT” on this article (registration required) by Larry Lebowitz about pothole maintenance on I-95. In a post called What’s up with the holes in I-95?, Critical Miami argues that they are man-made, not accidents in need of fixing. [The article] talks all about the difference between…
Muzzled beneath black tarp-like shrouds, traffic lights stand at the ready at 22 on-ramps along the I-95 corridor, from NW 62nd Street north to Ives Dairy Road. Miami’s ”Metered Stop Ramps” were scheduled to go online in 2005; now mid- to late-2007 is the time when motorists aiming to ascend…
Unlike anything in the multi-billion dollar porn industry, the only hardcore porn broadcast studio in the world is located — where else? — in Miami. In its nondescript warehouse, Pink TV, the brainchild of a 27-year-old entrepreneur named Jan Verleur, has been shooting original programming (e.g., a reality series called…
The Price of Victory Filed under: Scanner Let’s get this straight: Miami law firm Lydecker, Lee, Behar, Berga & De Zayas, where Mayor Manny Diaz moonlights as a freelance attorney, is not representing City Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones pro bono. And there are no billing rate discounts for city commissioners, either…
They rolled up in stretch limousines and chromed-out Hummers, tinted windows reflecting the neighborhood’s discount furniture stores, auto-body shops, and abandoned shopping carts. The party — a $150,000 bash — would be off the hook, they had been told. So dozens of porn industry bigwigs in town for last summer’s…
Every Thursday, hours before quitting time, a curious handful of men duck out of Miami’s construction sites, banks, and police stations to beat the rush-hour traffic to the edge of town. They take the Tamiami Trail out past strip malls, suburban subdivisions, and a few hundred yards of thinning wetlands…
Willy McQueen, 75, stood on the edge of the “story circle” set up outside the Stephen P. Clark government center, last night. McQueen, who grew up on a bean farm in Boca Raton, leaned his stout torso against an incomplete lamp post near the building’s exterior fountain and gazed through…
Today, candidate Marc Sarnoff channeled former University of Miami football standout Kellen Winslow Jr in describing his credentials as a legit neighborhood results-producing activist. Back in 2003, after a home loss to the Tennessee Volunteers, a ticked-off Winslow described himself to reporters as more than a football player. “I’m f—king…
Jennifer Nicole Lee Jennifer Nicole Lee has legs of Rebar. When the tall model and Fiu Fiu! swimwear designer stamped a high-heeled foot in protest of Monday night’s choking humidity, her limb rippled the way a girder dropped from a forklift hits the (soon to be nearby) Home Depot parking…
George Wackenhut never was much a fan of investigative journalism. The security mogul’s 800-page commissioned biography The Quiet American is practically framed as a condemnation of the field. The book’s introduction decries the media coverage of a 1991 congressional investigation into the company’s shady surveillance tactics in some rather colorful…
Lightspeed Champion This photo was brought to our attention a few weeks ago by basketball blog Free Darko. In Free Darko’s words: “As pictured above, some guy from Test Icicles or Arctic Monkeys or one of those ridiculously overblown bands started a new group with some castaways from some other…
Ray Carson, the American Cancer Society’s Florida Division’s vice president, provided the following statement Tuesday afternoon from the agency’s state headquarters in Tampa regarding the Hope Lodge closing: First, let me say that we are very proud of the Hope Lodge. Since it opened in 1993, it has served about…
Ray Carson, the American Cancer Society’s Florida Division’s vice president, provided the following statement Tuesday afternoon from the agency’s state headquarters in Tampa regarding the Hope Lodge closing: First, let me say that we are very proud of the Hope Lodge. Since it opened in 1993, it has served about…
The past 24 months have been excruciating for Michelle Baker, a free-spirited 23-year-old from Flamingo. In 2004 Baker was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and began a round of debilitating chemotherapy cycles. Alone in South Florida and unable to make the drive from her home near Everglades National Park to…
A Fish Called Avalon, the long-running seafood restaurant on Ocean Drive, has issued a press release trumpeting its boycott of all Canadian seafood products to protest the clubbing of baby seals. “Canada’s fisheries sell lobster, snow crabs, cod, mackerel, scallops, shrimp, haddock, oysters, herring, perch, mussels, sole, yellow perch, sardines,…
Tropical Greenways wants you: The American Institute of Architects is looking for volunteers (architects, designers and regular Joes and Janes) for this awesomely ambitious quality of life adrenaline shot. Brainstorm, serve on committees, and/or work on project initiatives including observation towers, overpasses, a visitor center, entrances, crossings and trail modes…
The Bitch had been having trouble figuring out what, exactly, elhood.com is supposed to be. Its early marketing forays using a Space Invaders-style skull logo were kind of allusional to some dark technology, the way those commercials for the Verizon Chocolate with the Goldfrapp song are … maybe elhood.com was…
On August 13 the Miami Herald printed the regular weekly column by contributor Glenn Terry of Coconut Grove. In that week’s edition of “The Grove Guy,” Terry voiced his obsessive disapproval of the Grove’s new bus benches (the main objection being that humans can’t lie down on them, though The…
Royal Dutch Shell (commonly known as Shell Oil) raked in $6.3 billion last quarter. That’s almost $2.3 billion more than they made last year during the same stretch of time. Meantime, we’re getting reamed at the pump, half of Asia wants our heads on a spear and God’s rolling out…
The local media has been mourning the demise of Fu Manchu Chinese restaurant on 71st Street in Miami Beach, which shut its doors after a near record-setting 71 year run (only Joe’s Stone Crab has been going longer). Longevity aside, however, Fu Manchu was a pretty lousy restaurant over the…
Riptide is a sucker for news stories that drown quietly in the media sea. Suddenly, something interesting happens and readers get story after story after story. Then months pass. Maybe even a year passes. And this oceanic phenomenon can’t help but wonder: What ever happened to… This time, it’s the…
