Muvico Baywalk 20 is going to seed. Worst of all, the hallways heading into the theaters stink — they reek like a giant bin of dirty sweat sox being washed in perm solution. The joint has smelled like dirty feet for awhile, and it gets worse every time I’m there.

I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, but perhaps management might want to hire a night crew to clean the carpets.

So far the stench has not wafted into the actual theaters — and the popcorn smell masks it in the lobby — but it’s only a matter of time.

I made my usual men’s room stop before the movie, and after washing (well, rinsing) my hands tried to get a slice of paper towel too dry them off. I hit up four of the dispensers. Nothing came out. Empty, all of them. I dried my hands on my pants, and went to tell the manager. I wasn’t mad, but I was a little sad.

I said yes, as I wasn’t going to disappoint a friend, even if it meant (as I thought it might) having to suffer through self-absorbed poseurs with limited knowledge ranting about how fucked up the world is while having little in the way of honest answers or solutions. But because I’d never been to a poetry slam – or any other kind of reading – before, I was honestly intrigued.

When we arrived at Studio@620 a little after 8 p.m. last night, only two or three people were in the audience, sitting patiently in front of a stage bearing two microphone stands. The host for the evening, David, didn’t bother using either mic as he circled the chairs and delivered a brief history of poetry slams (they apparently emerged as a response to the academic beats like Kerouac). He then warmed up those in attendance with a poem titled “Fuck a Poet,” which brought a smile to my face as it addressed all of the unspoken prejudices I harbored about spoken-word artists — self-styled tortured artists articulating their unfathomable ennui. As I listened, the thought crossed my mind, “Was this just irony designed to pander to close-minded first-timers?” No, I decided. David had admitted that spoken-word poets are, by the nature of what they do, egotistical. And so his words rang sincere as he knocked himself and his fellow artists down a few notches with an honest reality check.

And yet …

While the topics from the seven poets who took the stage over the course of two hours hit upon subjects I might have expected — the Iraq war, religious hypocrisy, former lovers — the quality of their work far exceeded my expectations. I could tell the performers had spent considerable time honing their prose, and I was left admiring this rather unassuming, brave and decidedly unpretentious group I never would have pegged as “artists” had I met them under different circumstances.

So to David, Brian, Patrick, Jimmy, Emma and Ozell (hope I spelled that right) — thank you for an enjoyable, intimate, mind-opening and artistically satisfying evening. While I’m not a poet, I felt I was among friends. Something tells me I’ll be back next month.

According to the Times article, Schramm’s bad day started with an enormous penis statue he had installed in front of his Grand Central District gallery. Responding to a complaint, police told Schramm to remove the penis. He refused, citing “art.”

Fast-forward a few hours: gallery patrons are drinking beer and viewing various erotic paintings and sculptures when police descend upon the storefront. Schramm tries to prevent an officer from entering and he’s slammed to the ground and arrested. The police walk inside, demand identification from patrons and then discover a nude model hanging from the ceiling in some sort of harness.

That’s a violation of a city (and county) ordinance that prohibits the display of genitals while alcohol is served.

This incident raises a number of questions. First off, if everything in the article is true, Schramm did violate the ordinance. Yes, it’s a stupid ordinance (and why strip clubs in Pinellas suck), but it is the law. But what about the earlier attempt by police to remove the giant penis statue? Who gave St. Petersburg police officers the authority to determine obscenity laws? And was Schramm’s refusal to remove it the precursor to police raiding the gallery?

Schramm just can’t catch a break. Last year, bigoted vandals targeted Erotic Lounge spraypainting “no fag porn” on the gallery’s windows. That was a few months after Schramm caught a lot of heat for his first erotic art show.

With incidents like these, it’s no wonder the ‘burg has a hard time keeping edgy, genre-bending artists in town. Perhaps someone should remind city leaders and the police department that there’s more to art than some melting clocks.

UPDATE: Looks like Schramm is closing his business and that huge penis is for sale on eBay. Check out the details here.

Just got a call from a friend of mine with a weird charge on her bank account. It shows up on her bank statement as “Source Limited” and charged her $9.60. She put the company name in Google and it looks like she’s not alone.

I’ve had this happen to me before, and if you buy anything online, I’m sure you have too. If you’re unlucky like me, you didn’t notice for four months and it was a real bitch trying to dispute the charges.

Most of the time these companies are legit, but use some deceptive tactic to get your credit card number. They claim you subscribed to their debt protection service, ringtone downloads, etc. just by clicking on some link or checking a box while you were checking out.

Then there are the companies that are simply fronts for credit card theft. Attorney generals in several states have ongoing investigations into these companies.

Either way, I’m convinced there is a special place in hell for the operators of these scam artists.

So check your statements for this Source Limited company (it looks like several Florida people have been affected) and check with your bank or credit card company on how to get the charges off your account. (Some tips here.)

Anyone else have similar stories?

Remember Pirates, that porn flick that gained local notoriety when reporters found out some of the scenes were shot at the St. Petersburg Pier? The groundbreaking 2005 Digital Playground film made history as the most expensive porn ever produced and is still one of the industry’s top selling movies.Well, Digital Playground will soon release a sequel — Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge — in September and the online buzz is the movie will break the standard porn mold again.

According to press releases, producers spent nearly $10 million on the project and it features all sorts of CGI special effects. There’s also a long list of adult actors, including Pirates original cast member Jesse Jane and award-winning star Belladonna (these links aren’t safe for work).

Check out a preview here (oh, and this link is work-safe).

By this point, I’m sure you heard about it. Thirty-six teams built would-be flying machines and ran them off a 30-foot high pier into the notoriously dirty ass Hillsborough River. One or more person piloted the aircraft  and took the plunge. Teammates typically jumped in the brown water after their apparatus for shits and giggles. I stood in the sun, cooking, cringing and losing faith in humanity, myself included.

I kept thinking of that old parental saying about if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you? In Tampa, apparently that’s the case. Organizers expected a crowd of 50,000 to witness people place themselves in a flimsy contraption and then be willingly hurled into a body of water deemed not fit for swimming. More than 100,000 suckers, myself included, attended.

One of those participants was my coworker, London, the woman pictured working on building an aircraft out of newspaper. Good gawd. Creative Loafing entered the competition as the Bread Winners. Countless hours went into building what they billed as the Flying Cuban Sandwich. “We are closing in on the big day,” reads a message from “The Captain” posted on the Bread Winners’ website July 14. “We still have some work to do in order to make everything originally envisioned a reality, but in another evening we should be all but done.

“The pilot [London] and I spent another night getting some finishing details knocked out after work with a couple of cold beers. We had a mock assembly of our flying Cuban and it was quite a site to behold.”

The damn thing didn’t even have wings. Well, kinda, but they were about as wide as oars. From where I was perched Saturday afternoon it looked like a giant coffin and had me seriously worried that London would not emerge from it, or if she did it would be with some kinda severe spinal or brain injury. Or with a limb missing.

“You know it’s not too late to back out,” I told her about 20 minutes before she took the fall.

“I can’t,” she said, more than a hint of fear in her voice.

Our entourage of friends and coworkers then wormed our way through the obnoxious, all ages crowd — who brings newborns to Flugtag? — and thanks to our group largely consisting of young women, were able to land last-minute, front row, waterfront seats behind a concession tent.

A bunch of David Hasselhoff-worshiping gym and sun freaks dressed as lifeguards dubbed Tampa Baywatch kicked things off around 1 p.m. They attached a glider to the top of their contraption and, with a person inside, it sailed 100 feet. Impressive, I thought. But then flying machine after flying machine dropped straight down into the diarrhea-colored waters.

I did some research. Flying 100 feet is not so impressive. The winner in Nashville last year traveled 155 feet. Even more disconcerting was learning that there were actual engineering students who entered contraptions that fell off the pier like bovines being pushed off a cliff.

“We built it a little too nose-heavy,” reads a quote in the this morning’s Times. It’s attributed to a Max Hirsh of DeLand’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The University of Florida and Florida State also had their engineering students present, only to be bested by Team Baywatch. “His zealous teammates finished their skit and began to push the aircraft,” reads the explanation as to why the UF team tanked. “They forgot that [John] Bornberg needed a few seconds to remove bungee cords fastening the glider to the rest of the gear.” This says a lot about why NASA hasn’t accomplished anything substantial in my lifetime.

CL’s Flying Cuban Sandwich was the third contestant of the day and fell apart before it even hit the water. But that should be expected from an alt-weekly newspaper’s team. Especially one featuring a “world traveling bootlegger,” an “honorary Loafer based on her love of drinking and SOG cred,” and a woman “cool enough to party with Creed on their tour bus.”

It took what felt like about a half-hour in between each liftoff. We left when our booze supply ended, which occurred right when the concession stand we were practically sitting in ran out of beer. We didn’t miss much.  Baywatch won.

I have yet to speak to London since she braved life and limb for a cheap publicity stunt but did see her being pulled out of the dark waters and wave to us, so, y’know, she survived. But who knows about the whole brain damage thing. I’ll have to question her at the office Monday. And question my own sanity for attending such an event.

Cross-posted from TampaCalling.com.

You have to hand it to Gotvmail; these are sure to get a ton of play across the Web in the next few days. And for all that publicity, I’m sure they only had to shell out an 8-ball or two.

I’m not the only one to think so. Time writer Lev Grossman recently editorialized on these hostile trolls, highlighting a guest blogger for the Stranger, an alternative weekly out of Seattle, who abruptly quit her gig because commenters had become too cruel. But it’s not just newspapers, he writes, but everything on the web from Flikr to YouTube:

A random example: on June 11, a user called way21337 uploaded a video to YouTube. It’s titled My new gerbil, and it shows, in fact, a black-and-white gerbil snuffling around cutely in somebody’s hand. It is 11 seconds long. By press time, it had acquired 102 comments. Let’s take a look! They begin with NewTyhuss, who writes, “sweet!” Things start going south with comment No. 4: “id hit it.” (Good one, ZRace67!) After a week, we’re down to eldergod: “why dont u shove that gerbil up yur ass and quit posting stupid videos.” bwalhof writes, “kill yourself. fast.” And so on.

Grossman sums up my feelings fairly well:

The horribleness of commenters isn’t really a mystery: Internet anonymity is disinhibiting, and people are basically mean anyway. Nor is it a mystery why the people who run websites put up with commenters: the economic model for Internet content is based on advertising, which means it’s based on traffic volume, and comments mean traffic. They’re part of the things that make online publishing work. TIME.com enables comments on its blogs, including mine.) It’s just hard to tell whether they’re ruining the Web faster than they can save it.

(As for the Stranger blogger, looks like she’s back up with a little extra dough from her employer …)

According to growth management watchdogs 1000 Friends of Florida, Florida’s largest metro areas pump out more greenhouse gases per person than in other large cities. They’re basing the info on a recent report by the Brookings Institution that ranks the carbon emissions of 100 metro areas.

From their press release:

Florida’s metro areas increased their per capita carbon footprints much more dramatically than average in the period between 2000 and 2005. The biggest increase was from transportation, ranging from a 4.6 percent increase in Jacksonville to a whopping 58.6 percent in Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice. By comparison, the average increase in per capita footprint from transportation in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas was 2.4 percent.

Well, damn. Like any Floridian, my first response is to blame the tourists, but I don’t think that explanation flies on this one. It’s our growth patterns. It’s our sprawl. Our short-sighted government leaders.

So, which Florida cities fared the worst in the report?

Jacksonville, Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice and Cape Coral-Fort Myers. Surprisingly, Miami did the best of the Florida cities mentioned, ranking 30th in tons of carbon emited per person.

Good news though: Overall, we aren’t the worst. That distinction goes to folks in places like Lexington (Kentucky), Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Toledo, Louisville, Nashville and Oklahoma City.

Ha! Take that Rusty Belters! Al Gore is gonna run wild on you!

Ahem. As for us in the Tampa Bay area, we rank a mediocre 53rd.

Check out the full report here.

Now, CNN finally gets to the bottom of this viral marketing hoax, including an interview with the CEO behind it all. Their video is here.