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...
Info: They Owe It All to Odio Miami's infamous ex-city manager hired more than 100 staffers entirely at his own discretion. Guess who's paying them. By Robert Andrew Powell Ramon Conte prides himself on his toughness. The Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran endured 25 years in Fidel Castro's...
"Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!" That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year -- watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by...
Squat and hefty, at first glance Miami lawyer and civic activist Dan Paul doesn't look like a man who would take on the combined forces of the Miami Heat, the Dade County Commission, and the chairman of Knight-Ridder. But think bull terrier. When Dan Paul sinks his teeth into the...
Molson Ice at twelve o'clock. The sky is bright, the breeze onshore. A charter fisherman -- white shorts, turquoise shirt, gold chain -- kicks off his Topsiders and swigs from the perspiring bottle. "Fishin's slow today," he sighs, extending his arms like outriggers over the back of a bench. The...
This article was not conceived as a thorough computer-assisted analysis of South Florida wine lists. Thus, while an index of the wine lists compiled appears below, the tables that accompany this story do not single out restaurants by name. Their purpose is merely to illustrate the vast variation one is...
In keeping with the absurdist temor of U.S.-Cuban relations over the past 35 years, at the very moment President Clinton was approving harsh trade sanctions against the island last week, Cuban technicians were putting the final touches on the national website of the Republic of Cuba. Their handiwork can now...
