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Tyson Gay, Olympic sprinter, has a problematic last name — at least for the anti-gay American Family Association, whose practice of replacing “gay” with “homosexual” in news reports has led to some big fun. The ramifications of AFA’s filter problems are detailed on the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits blog, the Sleuth blog at washingtonpost.com and Jock Talk at outsports.com. As Poynter points out, be sure to read the comments.
It was a good intentioned idea. Really.
On Saturday, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office let area residents turn in their rusty, broken and unwanted guns for a brand-new $25 giftcard to Publix or Wal-Mart.
True, it was a little badly-timed considering the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that unequivocally gives us, the common folk, the right to bear arms. (Bear arms, not bare arms, mind you.) But something else struck me: If the deputies were trying to rid the streets of guns, why did they hand out Wal-Mart giftcards? Doesn’t Wal-Mart sell guns and amunition?
MSNBC and MySpace team up to turn citizen journalism into yet another popularity contest.
Only in baseball: The Angels no-hit the Dodgers — and lose.
It’s Earth vs. the Atom Smasher in the ultimate doomsday showdown.
Gene genie: Woman ensures her baby will be born free of hereditary breast cancer.
The $2.1- million lunch: That’s how much a Chinese investment fund manager has paid to eat with billionaire Warren Buffet.
Send in the clones: George Lucas goes back to the well once again for more Star Wars.
Maybe it isn’t the conservatives Obama should be fearing, but the liberal pundits.
This morning the cardboard sign attached to the St. Petersburg Times newspaper box I use at the corner of South Howard Ave. and Swan read: “50 cents every day …. Effective Monday, June 30.”
In Tampa, a Times used to cost 25 cents Monday through Saturday and 50 cents only on Sunday.
A 100 percent price jump? Really? Shouldn’t we have had a stopover at 35 cents?
Of course, you can still get tbt* for free, which is a great read, if you have an IQ of, say, 54.
When I heard the news this morning that comedian George Carlin had died yesterday at the age of 71 (not bad for a guy with long-term heart problems and a love of cocaine), I was immediately overcome by the urge to stage my own all-day Carlin Comedy Festival. Alas, Carlin’s death has not yet been made a national holiday, so I am instead at my desk attempting to complete this week’s edition of Creative Loafing for your consumption on Wednesday. That’s an odd conundrum for me, since though I wish I wasn’t at work right now, I wouldn’t be sitting here had I not encountered one of Carlin’s HBO specials in the early 80s (when I was far too young and impressionable to be watching late-night cable TV).
The standard boiling-down of Carlin’s career is as follows: Straight-laced nightclub comic transitions to counterculture icon after seeing Lenny Bruce perform, writes “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” and ends up the impetus for a Supreme Court case that resulted from its airing, performed varied acting duties (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Prince of Tides and Mr. Conductor on TV’s Shining Time Station among them), but remained a dedicated stand-up comic to the end. As of last weekend, Carlin was still performing.
Though true, this rundown largely misses the point for me. Before all else, George Carlin was a linguist and a truth-teller, combining these skills to surgically carve up sacred cows and everyday life alike. The love of language runs through Carlin’s work — from stories of riding the NY subways as a kid listening to the multi-culti accents to his deconstruction of the evolution of the term “shell shock” into “post traumatic stress disorder” — and it was this love that most attracted me to his work. To my ear, Carlin’s routines are more musical performance than stand-up comedy routine.
So, in lieu of my Carlin Comedyfest, here (in no particular order) are 5 of my favorite Carlin moments from YouTube:
Check out this cool Google map, which tracks newspaper buyouts and layoffs.
Don’t want your unborn baby to grow up gay? The answer may be chemical.
1,500 bid goodbye to Tim Russert at memorial service.
Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama play the “Who’s a prouder American?” sweepstakes. Grand prize? A 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. address.
Wasn’t something like this to be expected? Former Bear Stearns managers get collared for shady dealings in the subprime mortgage market.
It’s not often I’m surprised by an article in one of our local papers. As a native Floridian, few things surprise me about this state anymore (News of the Weird — that’s all I have to say).
But a front page story in today’s Times did it:
Celebratory gunfire is a statewide problem
What?!
From the article:
Celebratory gunfire like the kind that precipitated the fatal shooting of Javon Dawson at a crowded graduation party Saturday night is on the rise around Tampa Bay and the state, causing injuries and even deaths, say law enforcement officials.
This is so much of a problem that St. Pete police even created a public service announcement in April warning party people about the dangers of celebrating with guns (as if the laws of physics are lost on these pistol-wielding revelers).
What is this? Pakistan?!
Anyway, the news about this surrounds the recent shooting of a 17-year-old black teen by a white St. Pete police officer. Last weekend, police responded to a graduation party after calls about celebratory gunfire. According to police, Javon Dawson had a gun and pointed it at police. They shot him twice.
Back to celebratory gunfire: the article above quotes a Gulfport police officer who says on New Year’s Eve, you can’t go 30 seconds without hearing gunfire. In fact, the department even has a special unit to deal with such crimes. I have to admit, I’ve been out of town for New Year’s the past two years. Anybody else hear celebratory gunfire in their neighborhood on New Year’s Eve?
Am I just close-minded and blind to the cultural differences in our state? Or is this quite possibly one of the stupidest trends in Tampa Bay, right after bead throwing?
The St. Petersburg Times has an interesting profile on Tampa’s favorite (confederate) son, Marion Lambert. The South Tampa beekeeper has been a media darlin’ the last week, ever since a massive confederate flag flew on his property at the intersection of I-4 and I-75.The Times article painted the man generally as a gentle Southern enthusiast, who snookered the county officials when he applied for the proper flag permits. But when I interviewed Lambert on Friday, I saw an angry, almost bitter man.
True, Lambert is a gentleman. Before he arrived at his house from a late bee removal job, his family showed me some true Southern hospitality. Then he gave me a nice tour of his five-acre farm.”I’m a very liberal person in my heart,” he told me during our first few minutes together. “I’m a very conservative person in my brain.”
He even used to be a hippie. Well, I’ll be …
But don’t let Lambert fool you: he knows full well that this stunt is divisive, even if he doesn’t believe in the flag’s links to slavery. In one of the most unusual analogies I’ve ever heard, he compares the flag going up to “childbirth,” in that the act will cause a lot of pain and agony, but in the end a more perfect truth will be born.
Did I mention the guy is a born-again Christian?
“We found ourselves marginalized, put on the back table of the community,” he said, railing against the decision to remove the confederate flag from the county seal and other slights. “The only way we could get their attention is to slap them in the face, and slap the community in the face.”
He knows the power he has over the commissioners, especially after they practically begged him to not fly the flag at last week’s commission meeting. This is how he describes county commissioner Rose Ferlita:
“I saw Rose Ferlita look at me like a puppy instead of an angry dog.”
An edited version of the interview will hit the streets and Web site on Wednesday, but for now, here’s the full version (after the jump): (more…)
Last night, I had to recycle something fierce.
I was on vacation in Iowa all last week, and when I came home there was a mound of soda cans, plastic jugs, beer and wine bottles against my back door. (Thanks roomie!) For the rest of Pinellas County, this wouldn’t present a problem: you just carry the items a few feet to the curb.
But, alas, I live in St. Petersburg, where the only thing lacking more than curbside recycling is police officers.
As the last bit of light left the sky, I loaded the recyclables in my car and trucked them to a nearby recycle center at Crescent Lake. I pulled in just as another guy in a red Jeep threw his last beer bottles in a huge green dumpster and left.
I parked and began throwing my own recyclables in. The cans clinked. The paper swooshed. And the beer and wine bottles crashed. Loudly.
As I strolled back to my car, I heard a disembodied voice yelling about “smashing glass.” It was dark and I couldn’t find the man with my eyes. I called out, “Where are you yelling from?”
“Right here,” he replied. I looked behind a dumpster toward the street and spotted him: A hefty, middle-aged man. Despite the lack of light, I knew his face was beet red.
There’s an obscenity brouhaha brewing in Australia over a prominent photographer’s use of 12- and 13-year-old models for a series of nude pictures that were hanging in a Sydney gallery until police seized them last week. Authorities are considering initiating an obscenity prosecution against photographer Bill Henson.
The Australian arts community has rallied to his defense. Among others, Cate Blanchett signed an open letter that said, in part, “The work itself is not pornographic, even though it included depictions of naked human beings …”
Here’s a link to the only online image that I could find.
Some of Henson’s backers have claimed that the photos are not sexual. I’m not buying that one. The pic I viewed didn’t do anything for me, but to my eyes it’s clearly sexual.
Is it obscene? I believe in the adage that you know obscene when you see it, and in this case, I do not see obscene. I don’t think Henson, who has shot a lot of stuff other than minors in the buff, should be hauled into court. As far as whether the 20 nudes should be hanging in a Sydney art gallery, I’m not so sure about that one.
But one of my colleagues did make an interesting point: That by seizing the artworks and condemning them, Australian authorities have sensationalized these photos. In effect, they’ve turned them into kiddie porn.
