A smattering of cricket fans occupied the bar stools at Churchills Saturday morning. Mostly Australians, with a few New Zealanders and Indians thrown in, they were there to watch the Cricket World Cup Final between Australia and Sri Lanka.
The game was scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. The Australians had won the coin toss and had opted to bat first. Unfortunately, God had other plans. A tarp covered the cricket pitch at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, Barbados, and all that could be beamed via satellite to millions of fans around the world were a few miserable Indian bowlers stretching their quads.
Last week, I nearly stopped breathing when I took my cat, Luna, to the vet and the receptionist told me the bill.
“$340,” she said, casually.
I sighed inwardly and pulled out the plastic. You do what you gotta do for your pets. Later that night – not having learned my lesson about taking on additional animals -- I tried to rescue a gray bunny that was foraging in the garbage and also fed a wayward kitten in the backyard. I never caught the bunny. The kitten is still hanging around, eating my food. I’m trying to give it away – any takers? – because I can’t commit to another animal.
Please do enjoy “Chongalicious,” a video by a pair of Hialeah girls who are either chongas themselves or do more than passable impressions of the young Latinas with “hoop earrings big enough to fit your arm through.” The song turned up on YouTube recently, and is picking up steam. Miami’s Power 96 started playing “Chongalicious” yesterday, and it soon became the station’s most requested. --Frank Houston
Are you a real chonga? Send us photos of you or your friends in all your Chonga glory. Email photos here.
Cigar Afficionado magazine is rolling out a June issue packed with Cuba news that is sure to raise hackles in our banana republic.
Last time the magazine did a similar series – in June 1999 -- county bureaucrats pulled it from news racks at Miami International Airport. That issue featured photos of Fidel Castro and then-President Bill Clinton on the cover along with the headline, ``Cuba: Is it time to end the embargo?''
I often ignore the ball-busting demands of Fortune cookies. Pursue your wishes aggressively. Ummmm, ok. And online horoscopes are vague and inconsistent. And don’t get me started on a disappointing late night call to a psychic hotline – how long can you expect a girl to ignore Miss Cleo’s “Call me now!”? So I’m no fanatic, but I'm also not a supernatural skeptic; Ghost is one of my favorite movies of all time, okay? So during a particularly interesting interview with Wiccan High Priestess Rev. Sandra Cheryl Richardson of Thirty Two Paths, I couldn’t resist the urge to ask her for a little reading of my own. For the record, this woman didn’t know me from Eve -- not my birthdate, not even my last name -- and the entire interview and reading were all done over the phone.
But she must have done some mystical Google-like search on my spirit, because after just two minutes of the tarot card reading, girlfriend had me in tears. Yes, I cry at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but this was different. She told me things about my life that I had never even spoken out loud. I’m employing the birthday-cake-candle-blowout rule for my reading in fear of throwing off my chi, so I will not reveal what she said, but I will give my own Fortune Cookie-like demand to all. Go get a damn tarot card reading. --Raina Mcleod
The idea of Tigertail releasing a fifth anniversary "best of" volume of its annual poetry periodical was concieved early on in the publication's life. "It was Mitchell Kaplan's idea," says Mary Luft, founder of the local cultural institution. So it's only fitting that tonight, Tigertail will celebrate the launch of its fifth annual poetry journal at Kaplan's indie literary bastion Books & Books (265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables). Guest editor Max Winter selected some of the most preeminent locally residing talents for this special volume.
At about one o’clock a.m. last night, I got a call that the Umoja Shantytown had burned to the ground. The call came from an a friend, someone tied into the haphazard network of activists that came together around the common cause of the shantytown. “I’m in for the long haul,” she said. “I’ll stay all night to help out.”
But when I got there, between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m., there wasn’t much helping out to do. Umoja Village had been built out of thin wooden palettes and cardboard – the whole place had burned to the ground; there wasn’t a scrap left. The lot– which had once housed the Scott Carver Homes, then nothing, and then the ambitious, defiant shantytown – had been soaked down by the Fire Department and the air for blocks smelled like wet, burnt wood.
When people started screaming about the flames that swept through Umoja Village last night -- a homeless shantytown in Liberty City -- T-Bone grabbed his radio and ran.
T-Bone was one of the 44 people who lived in the camp. He had been there four months before the fire, which was started by a candle, destroy edeverything. All of the huts, makeshift kitchen and portable toilets -- gone.
Last year Congress negated habeas corpus rights for Guantanamo detainees. Now the U.S. Department of Justice has requested that a DC appeals court limit civilian lawyers' access to Gitmo clients to three visits. The DOJ has also requested the right to read correspondence between lawyers and detainees.
When it opened Guantanamo as a detention center, the Bush administration determined that so-called enemy combatants do not have the privileges of the Geneva Convention, nor the legal status of civilians. Instead, says the DOJ, the U.S. military has the right to detain combatants indefinitely, until they no longer pose a threat or until the war on terror is over - a nebulous timeframe, given the conflict in question.
On Tuesday night, I found myself sequestered inside a cacophonous display of mediocre reggaeton and rap performances at Mansion on South Beach. The nightclub was hosting the third leg of the Cuervoton nationwide talent search showcase of “up-and-coming Latino talent in hip-hop, reggaeton and urban musica.” Headlining the concert was Miami rapper Pitbull and girl act Nina Sky, which says a lot about this Jose Cuervo scheme to market bottom feeder tequila.
The night started badly. The press release said festivities would start at 7 p.m. Of course, being a “Latino” event, the show didn’t begin until almost three hours later.
As with most things organized by teenagers and twenty-somethings, Tuesday night’s Battle of the Kicks at Buck 15 started with a flurry of last minute phone calls to figure out the grand prize and tie up loose ends.
Miami’s sneaker fiends lined up outside wearing their flashiest kicks. Once the doors opened at 9:30, the small and stylish club filled up with vintage and limited release sneakers attached to owners, who clearly coordinate their entire evening outfit around their shoes.
In my upcoming restaurant review of Acqua, in the Four Seasons Miami, I write of having ordered a main course of Szechuan-glazed “White Marble Farms pork shank,” and then go on to explain that this pastoral moniker is a brand name cooked up by Sysco marketers for industrial pork from Cargill Meat Solutions. White Marble Farms’ literature boasts of using “unique animals”, “raised on Midwestern farms and specially bred”. Hogwash! These pigs never see a pasture. They are raised indoors just like most commercial pork -- shuttered within concrete pens, fed offal, their tails hacked off to prevent other pigs in close quarters from chewing them. This is not only a far cry from the humane practices of sustainable, ethical producers, but also makes Acqua’s $33 tab for a low-end cut of meat (pork shank) seem less than justified.
Diners (and chefs!) beware: Assigning fake pedigree names that conjure falsely idyllic images is a trick being used with more frequency these days. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, there are almost 3,000 current trademarks containing the word “farm” in their names.
Since the late 70s, Miami has endured hurricanes, homicides, and cocaine wars. The city is a survivor, to say the least. It also may be an example for another down and out metropolis, one with just as much character and potential: New Orleans.
According to a Big Easy business magazine, city leaders are looking to Miami as an economic development template on how to pull the crime-ridden, flood-ravaged area out of a major slump.
Former Hialeah abortion clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez is scheduled to be arraigned today in a Broward circuit criminal court. She is charged with practicing health care without a license.
New Times published a story about the clinic this past October.
According to police, forty one-year-old Gonzalez and her business partner Siomara Senises -- who was arrested and charged with the same third-degree felony crime this past March -- provided abortion services at three facilities in Hialeah and Miramar.
