I cannot for the life of me remember the first time I watched Jeopardy! I do remember a few games of Trivial Pursuit in which I mopped the floor with my family, my friends, and my family's neighbors, who used to be their friends until one night I whooped a...
Few groups have taken more critical abuse in recent years than Phish, if not in the form of outright animosity from hipsterdom-at-large, than in the guise of backhanded bemusement on the part of the mainstream media, ready to dismiss the band as nothing more than a curious replay of Sixties...
Keith Moss emerges from the garden of his north Coconut Grove home carrying a hose. "Not many people water their car," he says, while drenching more than twenty species of herbs, flowers, vines, and weeds that completely cover his 1980 Toyota Corolla station wagon. Plants such as mallow, Moses in...
A pile of 34 shoes sits just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell's comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the seventeen people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell's living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall...
Two of Miami-Dade County's top high school football teams -- Northwestern and Jackson -- are stocked with ineligible players who employ dubious addresses in order to attend and play for their schools. Numerous student athletes on both teams, which are among the best in the nation, claim to live within...
UPDATE: In 2013, director Michael Bay released an adaptation of this three-part series. That same year, New Times revisited Pain & Gain and tracked down what's become of the Sun Gym Gang two decades later. Miami businessman Marc Schiller disappeared from his Schlotzsky's Deli franchise in mid-November 1994. A month...
She's convinced it's bound to come, the high-tech hurricane of the Y2K computer bug, and so Melissa, a well-educated professional with two teenagers, is selling her three-bedroom Miami-Dade house, quitting her white-collar job, and fleeing the area for her mother's north Florida farm. "Oh my God," she says, half-jokingly, "I'm...
The drive from Miami to Meridian, Mississippi, takes fourteen hours, but Tag Purvis doesn't mind. He likes to make the trip to his hometown behind the wheel of the baby-blue Lincoln he has on long-term loan from his father. When he passes the Alabama border into Mississippi, a place he...
On the morning of January 6, on the ninth floor of the James Lawrence King Federal Courthouse, the man for whom the building was named, Senior U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King, presided over what will long be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments in South Florida's...
Lead Stories *In August a Virginia Circuit Court, ruling in the divorce case of Glaze v. Glaze, said that "sexual intercourse" was not a legal requirement for having "sexual relations." The court did rule, however, that sexual intercourse was necessary for the ground of "adultery," and since Mrs. Glaze was...
This is a story about a baseball man. His name is Lou Haneles. He's 82 years old, lives along a canal in Kendale Lakes, and is married to a lovely woman named Evelyn. Back in the old days he possessed strong arms and reflexes so quick he could hit a...
Chucho Valdes had figured that on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 25, he would be doing a sound check at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Instead he was at home in Havana sitting by the phone, a vigil that he and the thirteen members of Grupo Irakere had been keeping...
His hands cupped to the sides of his face to block out the late afternoon sun's glare, Paul George peers through the glass doors of a small mausoleum with the words "Somoza/Portocarrero" cut into the mottled marble just above his head. Inside, a four-foot-wide by eight-foot-long space. Mostly white marble...
The story of Eduardo Padron is one of the best-known local-boy-makes-good yarns in town. After emigrating from Cuba in 1961, Padron enrolled at Miami-Dade Community College and went on to earn a doctorate in economics from the University of Florida. He then worked his way through the ranks at his...
In their classic soul ballad, the Persuaders persuaded pop fans that "there's a thin line between love and hate." In their fine cover of that classic soul ballad, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders pretended to agree. But the truth of the matter is that there's a wide gulf between love...
Shanie Jacobs turns over a giant plastic garbage bag and out tumbles Ed Wood's idea of Heaven. Angora sweaters pile up on the sofa and fall onto the floor, enough fuzzy rabbit fur to have sent the cross-dressing B-movie director into a tizzy. Jacobs is having quite a time herself...
Xavier Suarez's first incarnation as Miami mayor didn't go that well. The Harvard-educated lawyer came into office in 1985 with a host of proposals and a promise to control the city commission's notoriously circuslike meetings. But he neglected to bring along the ability (or perhaps the willingness) to patch together...
Info: Coming of Age on the 50-Yard Line Most of the boys who play in Gwen Cherry Park's pop warner football program live in the Scott Projects, but they do their growing up on the gridiron By Robert Andrew Powell What politics is to the Cuban community, football is to...
Elegantly Wasted INXS (Mercury) It's sort of endearing the way Michael Hutchence thinks he's still sexy, kinda like that fading jock who gets all decked out for a sandlot game and insists on hitting cleanup. The ball may not carry as far as it once did, but the swing's always...
A twilight downpour slicks the potholed streets, and for the moment this crumbling bit of Hialeah glows like a busted rainbow. The huge magenta cube named Foxxy Lady is surrounded by guys braving chain lightning for live, nude girls. One corner down, cigarette smoke, music, and watery gold light spill...
Lead Stories *Veterinary breakthroughs: In February surgeons in Washington, D.C., removed a cataract from the eye of the National Zoo's six-foot-long Komodo dragon Muffin in hopes that she could better see how studly the male was and thus would mate with him. And in January doctors in Johannesburg, South Africa,...
A dispatcher's call crackles over the radio: Shop owner threatened, suspect is armed, location is one-seven and six-nine. Miami police officer RRonni Harris steps on the gas and zooms through the darkness toward the scene, which translates from police argot as NW Seventeenth Avenue and 69th Street. Harris knows that...
