Maurice Sendak was my first real author. Before Dostoevsky and Dickens. Before Fitzgerald and Alice Walker and Hemingway and Lermontov.

Now he is gone. And that makes me very sad.

Among his last books was The Miami Giant, Written in 1995, it was a send-up of the old people on Miami Beach. He just did the illustrations.

But the meat of his work was Where the Wild Things Are, and the sets of books that I kept under my bed and read in my grandmother's attic in northern Minnesota on cold winter nights: Chicken Soup with Rice was one of them. And then there was the the "I don't care" kid, who gets eaten by an alligator. Or was it a crocodile? Doesn't matter because the creature eventually spit him out. And then he did care.
More >>

A Hooters Girl hands out bananas at the Spartan race. No kidding.

​Miami's Spartan Race took place Saturday and continues tomorrow, Sunday. Thousands showed up. Many ran through mud, slipped under barbed wire, and pulled huge tires for two hours. It was amazing, though rather expensive.

After the jump a slideshow of Saturday's events with music.
More >>

​When Joe DeSena started the first "Spartan Race" in Pittsfield, Vermont, about eight years ago, he had no idea it would become an international phenomenon drawing 300,000 plus people.

Nor did the former Wall Street exec/pool cleaning company owner/exercise fanatic know he would be jamming Oleta River State Park this weekend with thousands of athletes who will crawl through mud, scale walls.throw spears and jump over fire.

"I thought, what if we create an event that brings us back to our roots, makes us become the people we have been the last 900,000 years," he says. "People who get shit done...not unlike Rocky Balboa, Braveheart, or Mother Theresa."
More >>

​Okay, so I admit it. As an old dad, I love Percy Jackson.More >>

Even by Real Housewives of New Jersey standards, this claim is outrageous. "Your father-in-law was murdered and chopped up and placed in front of the Brownstone."

This one is rather whacked out, too. "Your father did time in prison leaving 11 kids behind."

And then there's: Your sister is "miserable [and] has no husband."

The popular reality show's bad girl, Danielle Staub last week made the allegations about hated co-star Caroline Manzo to New Times freelancer Stacey Russell.

But Manzo called us yesterday and responded in that unmistakable Mid-Atlantic twang: "It's all wrong...I'm going after Danielle Staub."

Then she mentioned a lawyer and added as a clear threat: "I don't want your paper to be the sacrificial lamb."

More >>

​After more than 15 years at the same joint, Miami New Times is moving next week. It's not a big change. We are just rolling our stuff a mile north on Biscayne Boulevard to a pretty little building at 4500 Biscayne Boulevard, where we will occupy the second floor.

The space is larger than our present operation at 2800 Biscayne. Technology will be a bigger part of the new place, with flat screen TVs everywhere and website numbers raining down upon us like the monsoon that hit this morning. We circulate 70,000 newspapers each week these days. Our site gets about 610,000 page views over the same period. Our new location should help cater to the fast growing web audience.

The public should see no effect from the move. Our phone numbers and, of course, web addresses, will not change. The mailing address is slightly different, 4500 Biscayne Boulevard, Suite 200, but even the zip code won't change.

So if you want to stop by and take a look, c'mon down!

​

Ask a Domme rocks. Lera Gavin, the author, penned a feature for New Times earlier this year called "Notes from a Dominatrix" that provided an astute look into a lifestyle that any sane person wants to know about. 

For the last few months, she has provided weekly advice, satire and, well, you know, discipline in the Ask a Domme column. Hell, here at New Times HQ, we even know how to hold a whip properly.

Lately there's a been a lot of noise about the column on websites and in email and phone calls to me. I  want to clear it up. On September 9, in a post titled "Five Ways to Make Friends at a Fetish Party," we may have given an incorrect impression. Neither Lera Gavin nor New Times advocate touching anybody who doesn't want to be touched. Nor do we suggest molestation in a sexual sense. We've update the post to clarify this point.

So what do we support? The rights of consenting adults to do as they like as long as it doesn't involve violence or kids.