There sure are a lot of blogs focused on Miami these days. In addition to various personal sites I’ve recently discovered, there are a lot of community event and commentary sites cropping up, some of them parts of growing blog empires. The Metroblogging empire has set up shop with Metroblogging Miami, and the -ist organization [...]
I briefly entertained the notion of doing something resembling journalism and getting in line at 4:00am Friday, just so I could report back to you all on the madness. Fortunately I came to my senses long enough to know that 20% of the people in line at Best Buy were likely to be journalists doing [...]
This is perhaps the fourth year I’ve done this, so just like Uncle George getting drunk before dinner and falling asleep at the table, you just need to get used to it and be thankful it only happens once a year. And if you are new to Hidden City, I hope you enjoy William S. [...]
The book fair is over, but I’m still determined to pass along those anecdotes and bits of wisdom I gleaned from the sixteen writers whose presentations I attended. I found them interesting, but your mileage may, of course, vary. I wonder if shy writers simply refuse to tour? All of the authors I saw ranged [...]
Still no time to write, between the book fair, a birthday celebration, a visiting friend, and personal fatigue. However… Just to piss off Pat Robertson, Gamma decided not to visit South Florida. The book fair has been great. So far this year I’ve heard Margaret Atwood, Mike Wallace, Terry MacMillan, Maureen Dowd, Eric Bogosian, Gregory [...]
Here are a few scattered notes regarding Sunday afternoon’s kickoff of the 22nd annual Miami Book Fair International. The first event was An Afternoon With Margaret Atwood, author of dozens of books but best known for The Handmaid’s Tale. She is touring to promote her new book The Penelopiad, a retelling of the Odyssey from [...]
Life has not returned to normal in South Florida, although most people are pretending that it has. All day Saturday and Sunday there was earth moving machinery in my neighborhood, scooping up piles of branches, waterlogged furniture, and other debris from the street. I guess these crews have been at it for a while, since [...]
I have returned from the biosphere weirdness of Orlando, and have power at home. Actually, I returned Wednesday night, but betweeen catching up on work and taking care of some other business there’s not been a lot of free time. One odd and entirely unwelcome side effect of Wilma is that my internal timer is [...]
I am currently attending a conference at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee, Florida. Once I get back to Miami I’ll write more about it, but here’s the short version: I feel like I’m staying in one of the domed forests from Silent Running. It’s pleasant enough, in a Splenda kind of way, but still [...]
I received a phone call at 11:46 pm Sunday night. Diana had gone to feed HobGoblin, and found that my power has been restored. Now I just have to wait for this conference to end, so I can get home and start swabbing out the refrigerator with bleach. Do I know how to live or [...]
At about 1:00am I woke up to the sound of my neighbors talking on their porch. They are usually pretty quiet, so the shouts of “¡Oye! We need you!” were out of character. I threw on a shirt and headed outside. An FPL truck was stopped in the street in front of their house. The [...]
Typing and reading in the darkness has apparently affected my eyesight. Even in a friend’s well-lit kitchen today I was having trouble reading. Ah, well, I needed new glasses, anyway. There was a fleet of power and landscaping trucks in my neighborhood today. Two very large Australian pines were chainsawed across the street, and now [...]
I still don’t have power, and the word on the street — where the street is defined as a acquaintance’s father who works for FPL — is that I might not get electricity back until December. I am so very terribly tired of all this, but I don’t feel as though I have a right [...]
Things are weird here in lovely South Florida, which could support the thesis that nothing’s really changed since Wilma’s arrival. You know, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to think of candlelight as romantic again after all this? That’s right, still no power. Two of my co-workers found interesting solutions to getting their power [...]
That’s a map of the North Miami area, as provided by FPL. Each of those red triangles represents a home without power, and that’s only the small section I cut for this post. South Florida doesn’t look like it has freckles, it looks like it has third degree burns, with no relief in sight. [Edit: [...]
The brown windows on the back building in this photo are plywood. This is not atypical of high-rises in downtown Miami. I don’t know the construction year for the building in question, but I would guess it dates to the late ’70s, back in the golden age of contracting graft, exceeded only by the cocaine [...]