Had the penny tax for transportation passed two weeks ago, the owners of construction companies and engineering firms (and their lobbyists) wouldn’t have been the only folks gleefully anticipating a twenty-year feast of riches. Reporters all over town would have raised a toast as well. In fact, as the election…
Think of Miami’s current hip-hop scene and bass-influenced figures such as Trick Daddy and the expatriated J.T. Money come to mind, with their machine-gun snare-popping rhythms and over-the-top braggadocio. Still, other styles do percolate around town, albeit with far less attention. MC Kenyatta raised more than a few eyebrows with…
Celebrating like members of a football team who had just won the Super Bowl, dozens of federal prosecutors and law-enforcement agents gathered on the back patio of Tobacco Road, reveling in the conviction a few hours earlier of Miguel Moya, the jury foreman in the 1996 trial of reputed drug…
The overwhelming defeat of Alex Penelas’s proposal to raise the sales tax by a penny leaves the mayor in strange and unfamiliar territory. Until now he had been the golden boy of Miami-Dade politics, his political savvy having always landed him on the winning side of important issues. Never before…
There’s no official word from the Phish camp yet, but the band’s singer Trey Anastasio let the cat out of the bag onstage during a Columbus, Ohio, show this past week. The group will be performing a millennium New Year’s Eve blowout at the 2000-acre Kirton Ranch, northwest of West…
Although investigators say they believe the victim, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has decided not to file criminal charges against North Miami Police Det. Fred St. Amand for allegedly exposing himself and masturbating, on three separate occasions, in front of a female co-worker. The State Attorney’s investigation, which was released…
“When I first read it, I just couldn’t even believe it. That story is the definition of bad research,” says Marc Christopher, director of Miami Beach’s electronica-focused internet radio station the Womb (www.thewomb.com). The story in question was a recent Herald profile of the Beach’s EyeQRadio (www.EyeQRadio.com) and its founders…
One of Pres. Bill Clinton’s few endearing qualities is his ability to adopt as his own the emotions of those around him. So it was when he came to Miami last week. At a state Democratic Party fundraiser the president couldn’t help but feel the pain of Miami’s Cuban-American community…
n June 29 Ramon Saul Sanchez was working at his day job as an office manager for a community development corporation in Little Havana when he first learned that something terrible was taking place off the coast of Surfside. Tellingly, the first person to call him was a TV reporter…
Disco music is a disease. I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague. — Steve Dahl It was with those words that Dahl, a Chicago FM radio DJ, opened a…
Lead Stories *In the course of a June report decrying the Canadian economy’s discrimination against people who do unpaid work (mostly housework), the feminist group Mothers Are Women called on the government to pay wages to women for breast-feeding to bring that activity in line with the production of other…
The day after the Coast Guard fiasco involving six Cuban rafters off the beaches of Surfside, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart went to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and called on the Clinton administration to suspend its 1995 immigration accord with Cuba. “This administration’s policy toward Cuba can no…
Lolita: A Whale Who Spins a Web Lissette Corsa’s recent article on Lolita (“Livin’ la Vida Orca,” July 8) was great! I am working for Lolita’s freedom along with Howard Garrett, though I do it differently. You mentioned schoolchildren from Washington and their letters and petitions to Wometco CEO Arthur…
At this inaugural meeting of a new Miami Beach homeowners association, the information table held cookies and juice as well as sign-up sheets where neighbors could leave their names and complete a questionnaire about their interests and concerns. I was there because it was my neighborhood. One of the organizers…
Cheryl Wolosz tells me she feels sick. “I just threw up,” she says, her voice trembling over the phone. “They told me he’s coming back to work next week. I cannot believe this is happening. They are not going to do anything about him. He shouldn’t be a cop.” Wolosz…
Fidel! Quick turn on the TV news!” “What is it? Can’t you see I’m watching the autographed copy of Titanic that Leo gave me last year.” “Please, Fidel, it’s important.” “Okay, okay. What station?” “Try Channel 10 out of Miami.” “Are you kidding? You want me to turn off Kate…
Welcome to Everglades National Parking Lot Regarding Jake Bernstein’s article “Swamp and Circumstance” (July 1), man is the animal who walks upright (when he’s not driving), the creature whose survival depends not on fangs or claws but on his capacity to use hand and brain to manipulate the world around…
Lead Stories *An evangelical Christian organization in Hereford, England, announced in May that it had set up a 24-hour-a-day camera on Jerusalem’s eastern gate to capture Jesus’ millennial return (www.messiahcam.org). Also in May the firm Triumph International Japan announced it would market the Armageddon Bra, with a sensor in the…
Entertainment-industry maven Peggi McKinley, our very own martyr for free speech, recently experienced a kind of harmonic convergence that could only happen in Miami. Just as the town was preparing to welcome the third annual MIDEM international music conference, McKinley received some news that was like music to her ears:…
Last week something remarkable happened. Something I wasn’t certain was possible. Last week Alex Penelas became mayor. Oh, sure, I know he was elected mayor back in 1996, but all that did was confer on him a title. Until now Penelas has simply been playing mayor. He dresses up in…
Lead Stories *In April the Unique Recoveries collection agency in Bombay, India, hired six eunuchs to go to the homes or offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up by dancing around and threatening to lift their saris to expose their “genitallessness.” Unique’s director said he expects his…
Miami May Be a Small Town, but It’s Home to One Very Big Ego Brett Sokol’s “arthouse” movie feature (“Missing the Big Picture,” June 17), while mostly excellent, also angered me. An anonymous local arts writer was quoted as saying, “Miami is the sticks. You don’t get art films in…
