Daily Loaf

There will be no runoff election in Afghanistan this weekend (I know, we were all looking forward to the revote between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah).  Karzai’s in, but what, if anything, will this mean for the U.S. interests?  Reportedly President Obama will meet at least two more times with his advisers on the strategy going forward.

As those discussions continue, the  young State Department official whose resignation was made public is getting  lots of face time.  Matthew Hoh appeared this morning on The Today Show, and yesterday on CNN

St. Pete Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9 released a series of polls over the weekend, and it’s policy more than policy-makers that is most provocative in those results.

And on Sunday talk, Fox News gave Rush Limbaugh a platform for the first half of their one-hour program yesterday.  Too bad nothing interesting came out of it, other than the odious comment that President Obama’s appearance at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware last week was nothing more than a publicity stunt, according to Rush.

Most interesting was Joe Lieberman on CBS, saying he’d rather have nothing happen with health care reform than to allow for a government-run public option.

Download the report here.

Florida is getting some love from the toughest audiences in the world: New York City dance fans. The Miami City Ballet, headed by legendary dancer Edward Villella, is making its NYC debut this week, and the reviews have been ecstatic. Alastair Macaulay, the New York Times‘ usually hard-to-please critic, followed up his enthusiastic review of the troupe’s first program with an even more admiring writeup of their second, describing one dance as an “an accumulating series of… wonderful shocks” and proclaiming that “these dancers made these dances young again.”

Accolades like these are a big deal for a regional company. But I have to admit to a little intra-state jealousy. Miami gets all the attention. What about Tampa Bay? Will any of our homegrown dance or theater companies, our museums or our festivals or our individual artists, ever reach this same level of undeniable national importance? Maybe some already have — remind me if I’m overlooking someone. But I’m also wondering what needs to be done to ensure that this kind of progress occurs.

Money is one answer, of course. And it’s worth noting that even with all the support from critics and audiences, MCB is facing “one of the most difficult financial periods in its history,” according to the Miami Herald.

It’s tough all over. Go see some local art or dance or theater or there won’t be any left to see. Use it — or lose it.

As we ruminate further on the decline of newspaper journalism (Holy Smoke! The Detroit papers will be available only online five days of the week!), let’s celebrate something that makes newspapers so important to us – great columnists.

Florida is blessed with several of the best in the nation, and luckily the University Press of Florida has begun a program of preserving great newspaper columns as part of a series on Florida culture, edited by University of South Florida professors Gary Mormino and Raymond Arsenault. Mormino and Arsenault offer a master’s degree  in Florida Studies. Woo hoo!

Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersburg Times is one of Florida’s greatest blessings and his latest collection, Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators (University Press of Florida, $24.95), is another entry in his “Real Florida” crusade against anything false and manufactured with the stench of a theme park attached.

Klinkenberg — that’s him wrestling an alligator at right — hits the road to find off-the-beaten trail people and places, examples of the old, weird and wonderful Florida.

Imagine this scene: You pull up at a desolate Florida Panhandle gas pump to fill up the guzzler. There’s a picture of that bad-ass cop on the pump, warning you that if you drive off without paying you are dogmeat. Then the real-life cop pictured on the gas pump pulls up next to you. What happens next, of course, is a great story.

Great, serendipitious things like that happen to Klinkenberg.

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