Miami Metblogs » mia_franklin

Madhur Jaffrey just dissed our mangos

mia_franklin — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:28:54 +0000

She mentioned the “fibrous, unyielding, supersized Florida creations that boast long shelf life and easy handling and shipping but little else” in the NYT. Link: Fairchild Mango Festival. And let’s not forget this.

I’m sorry, I take it back

mia_franklin — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:21:14 +0000

I thought Miami drivers were out of control, but I just got back from Taiwan, and Miami drivers have nothing on these guys. My cab driver, prevented from turning left, went through the intersection and immediately did a U-turn, stopping the oncoming progress of three lanes of traffic. Incredibly, nobody honked. That’s the thing – people drive with no respect for the law, but they’re extremely polite.

The motor scooters were the worst. I saw a scooter drive against the direction of traffic, in the spaces between the cars. I saw a family of four on another scooter: dad driving, mom hanging on dad, junior hanging on to mom, and littler sister standing between dad and the steering column, facing backwards, hugging his waist. Of course, no one was wearing a helmet.

So I take it back – Miamians are not the worst drivers on the roads of the earth. They’re the loudest. Maybe the dumbest. But not the worst.

whew

mia_franklin — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 14:19:29 +0000

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.

Taiwan

mia_franklin — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:18:09 +0000

I’ll be indisposed for the next month or so while I do an artist residency in Taiwan. But I plan to check in to keep up to date on Miami’s goings-on, so keep it busy here!

If you want to follow along, check out the reports at Artblog.net.

Herald edits letter to editor with crowbar, publishes

mia_franklin — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:54:42 +0000

My letter of comment, before some fourth grader at the Miami Herald got a hold of it and turned into this.

Dear Editor:

I am an alumnus of the University of Miami, with a Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting, 1994. I also publish Artblog.net, a blog that covers the art world locally and abroad. I was dismayed to learn that Kyle Munzenrieder, a fellow writer at miami.metblogs.com, was removed from UM student housing for his blogging at Miamity.com.

Mr. Munzenrieder published a post that hyperlinked to what the Nov. 23 article in the Herald described as a rap song that “included several males describing lewd sexual acts in detail, including group sex references.” The creators of the nine-minute song were current members of the UM football team and former UM housing residents. The post was picked up by ESPN and bad publicity ensued, although the reported behavior surprised few of us familiar with the culture of college football and the history of this specific team.

On Nov. 28, the Herald published a response from Jerry Lewis [sic], vice president of communications at UM, saying that “there is no connection between the Seventh Floor Crew rap song issue and the student being returned to his parents’ supervision.” Rather, “UM officials discovered that the student had used university property and its computer network to post highly inappropriate and explicit photographs and, as the student indicated in the story, he also posted a suicide note.”

Munzenrieder has already explained to UM officials that the suicide note was a joke; Lewis undoubtedly knows this, and chose not to share it with your readers. Munznenrieder characterizes the other assertion as a lie, and points out convincingly that had he violated UM’s technology usage policies, he would have been subjected to a hearing as afforded by the school’s student rights policies. Nothing of the sort took place.

The prospect that my alumni donation might go towards keeping one of the Seventh Floor Crew poetasters in kneepads leaves me extremely reluctant to give to the university. I remain grateful to Munzenrieder for his indifference to the cult of football, and feel bad that its high priests at UM were able to disrupt his academic career with such impunity. If the ‘Canes are so sensitive to bad publicity, they may want to reconsider their regular provision of source material.

Yours,

Franklin Einspruch

Sensitivity Training Time

mia_franklin — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:44:49 +0000

Also via Tyler via Barry, Miami Police Take New Tack Against Terror.

Police are planning “in-your-face” shows of force in public places, saying the random, high-profile security operations will keep terrorists guessing about where officers might be next. As an example, uniformed and plainclothes officers might surround a bank building unannounced, contact the manager about ways to be vigilant against terrorists and hand out leaflets in three languages to customers and people passing by, said police spokesman Angel Calzadilla. He said there would be no random checks of identification. “People are definitely going to notice it,” Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said Monday. “We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don’t want people to feel their rights are being threatened.

Shock and awe, eh? Funny you should mention threatening peoples rights. From the ACLU website, a Nov. 17 press release entitled Police Trampled Civil Rights During 2003 Free Trade Protests in Florida, ACLU Charges.

The third lawsuit, Delgado v. Miami-Dade County, stems from the unlawful arrest of Celeste Fraser Delgado, a reporter who was covering the demonstrations for the Miami New Times. She was walking with four demonstrators near the intersection of North Miami Avenue and 20th Street, and was confronted by four Miami-Dade police officers who jumped out of a squad car and ordered all of them to get down on the ground. They all immediately complied. Delgado told the officers she was a reporter, and showed them her identification badge. They handcuffed her anyway, and forced her to lie down on the ground for more than an hour. She was frisked while still on the floor, and then arrested for

The UM Thought Police Speak Up

mia_franklin — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:02:11 +0000

This is beginning to make me angry.

The suicide note was a joke, so that just leaves the “highly inappropriate and explicit photographs.” I would like to decide this for myself, and not just because I like dirty pictures. I would also like to understand how a one-time offense on this issue necessitates the removal of the student from school property.

I’m a UM alumnus and I regard football as trivial. UM apparently regards the Constitution of the United States of America as trivial. I’m prepared to debate their relative importance with anyone who is confused about this.

FPL: Spreading the Blame

mia_franklin — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:26:22 +0000

Florida Power and Light, who is not my favorite utitlity entity at the moment, who oversaw the loss of power to 3.5 million customers during hurricane Wilma (a brief, expected Category 1 event), and who just sought and received permission to raise its rates 20%, has been trying to determine why so many poles failed during the storm. After careful study, they have determined the culprit: BellSouth.

Preliminary results have sparked a growing argument about who bears — or shares — responsibility for South Florida’s largest power outage ever. FPL’s reports suggest BellSouth may hold a large responsibility. [snip] …28 percent of those [poles] studied — were creosote-treated. More than half of these (52 percent) were BellSouth poles, the FPL engineers reported. ”The majority of these poles [88 percent] had some amount of weathering/deterioration but we do not know if that was the main cause of failure as some of these were next to good . . . poles that also broke,” the report said.

Check the math – FPL’s attribution of “a large responsibility” to BellSouth applies to 14% of the total poles.

There was a lot of discussion about burying power lines and whatnot to reinforce the grid, but at this point I fully expect FPL to let its customers eat cake to whatever extent they can do so without the legislature disbanding them or taking them over. There’s already talk of making the PSC board an elected body, an idea being pursued by Attorney General Charlie Crist.

Something I haven’t seen yet, though, is to subsidize efforts to get off the grid. Solar panels did very well during the storm and South Florida would seem like a natural place for them – imagine heavy rebates for purchase and installation with money from FEMA. Of course, that would bite into FPL profits. Which, to me, would make it worth doing just for sport.

Threat to Civilization as We Know It Removed from University of Miami Student Housing

mia_franklin — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 03:31:20 +0000

Now this I haven’t seen yet: Dooced out of your dorm.

Kyle, I’m sure, has something to say about this.

So do I: UM, grow a brain.

Cold Front

mia_franklin — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 23:11:21 +0000

Weather plays a big part in our lives in Miami. Many of us, or our families, came here because of it – it hardly ever freezes, we have sunshine most of the time, and the Gulf Stream often makes it cooler than some parts of northern Florida.

We pay for it in hurricanes. I spent sixteen days this year without electricity because of hurricanes. Barrel tiles litter my roof. The yard has tilted and downed trees. A join separated on the fence. Nothing like what our friends in New Orleans had to endure this year, but nevertheless a seasonal, persistent worry and the source of nearly insoluble troubles. It seems that I will get the Pope on the phone before a roofer. We thought the storm season was busy last year. This year we got our heads kicked. It looks like we’re in for more, and worse.

We also pay for it in summer heat. The humidity gets so intense you feel that you could suck the water out of the air if you wanted a drink. You break into a sweat at 6:30 PM doing anything more strenuous than parallel parking with the windows down. Either it gets hotter every summer, or I’m getting older and having increasing trouble dealing with the heat, and we know it’s not the latter.

When a cold front comes, like the one we’re expecting this week, temperatures drop into the high fifties at night. People shiver and break out their sweaters. They complain.

But I welcome it. I wonder if I have a reverse case of seasonal affective disorder. When it cools off and becomes gray, I feel a sharpening of focus, optimism, and excitement. Prolonged sunshine makes me feel sluggish and scattered.

We’ll have cold spells off and on through April. I will do my best work, and feel the most at home in Miami as I ever do. Come February, New Yorkers will lament their fate, that they live in a giant popsicle storage warehouse, and we’ll be going for bike rides, feeling smug. This is the most beautiful time of year in Miami.