Glad that police got this settled before I, and more importantly, the woman I refer to as SuperGirl, got back into town. They refer to Reynaldo E. Rapalo as the Shenandoah Rapist because, it is supposed, he followed a girl home from Shenandoah Junior High to commit his third attack. Shenandoah Junior is across the street from my house, so I found out about this when news trucks parked en masse outside my front door and I awoke at 4:45 AM to the smell of diesel exhaust.

I don’t like local TV newspeople. I call them the newsbunnies – yuk-mouthed talking headshots who sound perky even when describing death and do to the English language what mulchers do to downed trees. But I had to admit that they did their jobs on this one – incessant, hyperbolic coverage of this in the TV news got the word out and they caught him, frazzled and harried, even though my house appeared all week in reports about a rapist, filling in the background of faux-live news coverage. (Finally, I knocked on the window of one of the news trucks, after about three days of getting awaken before 5 AM, and explained that there were laws that prevent me from, say, mowing my lawn at 4:30 in the morning, and they were breaking them. They agreed to move down the street a little.)

Rapalo broke out of jail on a rope made from bed sheets. No word yet if he cut through the bars with a file that had been smuggled in inside a cake.

Last week I downloaded Firefox 1.5 for Mac and was finally able to easily import Explorer bookmarks. I bid farewell to that antiquated flaky browser. Firefox was developed by a Miami high school student ( at one of the top schools in Miami ). He now goes to Stanford. You can read the story in Wired 13.02.

The 2006 Predictions in Jason Calcanis’ blog are optimistic for Metblogs. Read point #3.

I have a love-hate relationship with Cafeteria, the chic 24 hour diner on Lincoln Road imported from NYC.

On the up side they have a pretty good atmoshphere. They play that kind of trendy ambient music that you can play loud as the hell you want, but is easy to ignore. The lighting is nice, the minamilist furniture looks pleasingly enough. They have the cool factor down.

However when it comes to the traditional measures of a restaurant, y’know things like food and service, it falls a little bit short. The food is of the comfert variety, but portions could be a bit bigger. If I’m paying over $4 for a smoothie it better be bigger than my head.

The service always seems pretty bad. The user reviews on Miami Beach 411 seem to agree.

“The food being good a few times the service being bad every time. ”
“Horrible Rude Service”
“Okay food, HORRIBLE service.”
“Awful slow service. waiter was unseen we had to ask other servers for help.”
“The hosts couldn’t have been less enthusiastic to have us as customers”

So when it comes to Cafeteria: the style is cool, but the service and substance need some improvement.

By the way it’s located at 560 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139.
Phone: 305.672.3663

Miami is no longer the youngest member of the MetBlogs family, as this week MetBlogs for Paris and Singapore were launched.

Visit:
Metroblogging Paris
Metroblogging Singapore

I know alot of people still feel bad for my man Stan Van, but dude if a guy who is the star of his own 16-bit sega basketball game wants to couch your team how are you going to say no?

Besides Gundy can still get work as Ron Jeremy’s stand in.

It’s hard to imagine any other local band who would deserve the title of “Local Miami Band of the Year” more than Awesome New Republic.

As there e-press kit states

Awesome New Republic (ANR) is making important music at an important time in a city that damn well needs it. Miami, a city better known for tourism, corruption and sipping Cristal behind velvet ropes, is in fact also home to a strong, steadily-growing independent music scene of which ANR is a crucial element.

This year they realeased their first LP (ANR So Far) on the newly created Sutro label, became in my observation WVUM‘s most requested band, appeared at CMJ, and palyed in pretty much every venue in Miami befitting a band like this.

Here what all the fuss is about over at their myspace profile, then go pick up their album at the newly reopened Sweat Records, and then of course see them at their last appearence in South Florida (at the culture room on New Years Eve) before they head out for a SE-USA tour.

::ANR’s Official Site

There’s an interesting article about Art Basel in the New York Observer – one of our bloggers is quoted – read carefully.

Instead of this, here is what I would have done if I were the MPAC administration:

1) Hire and keep Alesh, Critical Miami’s MPAC coverage notwithstanding.

That’s an easy one. Here’s the evil employer thinking behind it: people become a lot more loyal to an organization once they start receiving regular paychecks from the organization. Also, this adage is certainly wise: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Alesh, though, certainly is no enemy of MPAC, and that is pretty much obvious to anyone with a brain who read any of his coverage. The non-evil thinking goes like this: Alesh is obviously very concerned about and interested in MPAC’s future, and MPAC would do well to have staff that actually are desirous of making it the best establishment it can be.

2) Sic Alesh on the new internet marketing strategies: MPAC Blog, anyone?

How great would that have been? Alesh could have given MPAC a different voice, something along the lines of “yeah, we’ve got some construction issues, but think about all the great stuff that comes after the center is up and running”. Imagine interviews with performers, pieces on the success of other cities’ performing arts centers, bits about downtown revitalization, etc. Alesh could have even given them a MySpace presence–there’s a huge market of young people who love live music, and isn’t that key to the success of a performing arts center, to draw in not just the symphony season subscribers, but new, younger audiences? Building loyalty, you know? So far, the regular, Herald-associated IMPACT emails are doing very little to pique my interest in anything about the MPAC.

3) Fire the staff who thought it woud be a smooth move to unhire Alesh because of some entries on his blog. If the staff whose job it is to promote and assemble the best team for the center can’t wrap their heads around the decentralization, democratization and open-source-ification of information, then you can bet that they are not going to be contributing to the creation of a vital, creative or flexible performing arts center. As it stands now, I’m fully prepared for the announcement that we can expect The Magic Flute 24/7.

A person who regularly jets back and forth between NY and LA is considered Bicoastal. What should the terminology be for a person who jets to and from NY and Miami ? Any suggestions ?