Never let it be said that Tailpipe doesn’t occasionally jump-start the motor and floor the accelerator to get moving at top speed. The “high-octane” approach goes with living in a 21st-century urban environment, n’est-ce pas, Speedy? But when it comes to kids, the ‘Pipe likes to keep it under the…

On Jonathan Lederman’s MySpace page, he cites as heroes Nelson Mandela and Golda Meir. He describes serving in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and he estimates that he’s raised $1 million for charity in 30 years of volunteering. He enjoys self-help books, and at the end of his outgoing…

Here’s the question: Is it safe to fly during times when commercial airlines are under grinding economic stress? American Airlines Flight 48 had just taken off from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport at the start of a nine-hour overnight flight to Paris on April 20 when flight attendants heard an alarming…

Racehorse Inc. Dominating the, uh, Market This is at the Palm Meadows thoroughbred training facility in Boynton Beach, early last Thursday. For the past two weeks, the place has clattered with the sounds of an army leaving a battlefield. Stablehands load tack into the trunks of cars and the backs…

Tailpipe has seen enough sappy B movies to believe that the world’s knottiest problems just might be solved by amateurs tinkering in their garages. Face it, between the Apple computer duo of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and the electronic equipment inventors Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, there was probably…

Tailpipe missed those palmy scotch-on-the-rocks days when Fort Lauderdale was a civilized little haven for celebrities like Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, Bob Hope, and Jackie Gleason. Celebrity golf tournaments at the Coral Ridge Country Club, big-name television broadcasts, tennis tournaments of the stars at the now-defunct Le Club International, impromptu…

Antoine, You’re Grounded Blondy McColister Williams, age 48, is a familiar figure around Deerfield Beach High School, where she’s done everything from work as an on-site security officer to drive a school bus to coach the girls’ softball team. A hearty, bluff, good-natured woman, she’s most notable nowadays for being…

SpongeBob and Saint Patrick Star, Too Ever since the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005, the ritzy Town of Palm Beach has been angling to pull off a $9 million project to widen a section of the beach known as Reach 8. The battered stretch starts at the town’s public golf…

Step Away from the Vehicle, Sir The music was superb at Langerado Music Festival this year, and the mood was mellow — once you got in. Last week on the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, 17 miles north of Alligator Alley, you had to run a gauntlet of beefy security workers…

How They Help Investors in Hollywood This was so 2003. The South Florida real estate market still churned like a deep-sea fish mosh, with investors snatching up worthwhile properties like barracuda lunging at flashes of silver. Downtown Hollywood, with some coddling from the city government, seemed to have an especially…

Marlin Munchies Oy, the resonant crack of wooden bat on ball, the pop of fastball into catcher’s mitt, the soft murmur of Big Leaguers comparing hedge funds. Spring training brings a feeling of deep-seated well-being to Tailpipe, like eating a doughnut fresh from the fryer. But when the ‘Pipe got…

The Phantoms of Oakland Park Somebody was worrying recently about the sanctity of the vote in Broward County elections. Who was that? Oh, yeah, that would have been Tailpipe. The emissions-spouting cylinder was saying he was particularly stressed out by non-functioning, error-prone voting machines. Well, nobody was passing around chill-out…

It was just before halftime on Super Bowl Sunday when a passing car apparently decided to try to climb up the back of My Warhaftig’s new Mercedes E350. Warhaftig and her husband were at a football party in Fort Lauderdale’s upscale Sunrise Intracoastal community, where neighbors had set up a…

DIY Vote Counting Raise your hand if you think, without a shred of doubt, that your vote will be counted. Tailpipe sees a lot of unraised hands. A lot of doubtful looks. Florida voters are, of course, oft-snakebitten in the voting booth, without even looking back to the 2000 fiasco…

The Big Republican Schmoozefest has moved on, but for a few hours last week, Palm Beach County was electrified with political discourse — electrified like, say, your daughter’s Easy-Bake Oven, with the 60-watt bulb on high. By 2 p.m. last Thursday, FAU’s drowsy Boca Raton campus was shut down and…

Actual Horses You won’t hear many complaints from the crowd at Gulfstream Park on a balmy weekday afternoon. The clientele at the track, which opened its 89-day season this month, is heavy on folks from New York and Michigan. For the most part, these are smiling, middle-aged dudes in Hawaiian…

Depends on Your Definition of Rescue There’s something about an organization that uses the word rescue in its name. You gotta figure it’s going to take measures — maybe even extreme measures — to save lives. Well, live and learn, Tailpipe says. Thereby hangs a distressing South Florida tale. Sharon…

Spacey Choices A strange device recently appeared on the beach near Sebastian Street in Fort Lauderdale, like a visitation from space. It sported a long ramp, with steering wheels and ratchets and an open cockpit with a wide-screen view of the Atlantic, and hardly anybody noticed. This was a children’s…

Manatees are everywhere now, slow-moving, bovine, as graceless as hippos in ballet slippers. So prevalent have they become that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the American Watercraft Association lobbied to get manatees downgraded to “threatened” from “endangered.” There are an estimated 3,000 manatees roaming Florida waterways, they…

A couple of weeks ago, Tailpipe got mental flashbacks to those famous pictures from Tiananmen Square where a lone man stood in the street defying four Chinese Army tanks. That’s kind of what it looked like on Fort Lauderdale Beach on the evening of November 30, when bicyclist John Bochino…

The News From Tobaccoville What’s a little bitty cigarette butt when measured against this big, cluttered world of ours? Well, add up all the debris from the world’s 1.2 billion smokers and you’ve got a serious litter problem, to say nothing of lethal chemicals killing plant and animal life and…

Superman dat Song They’re doing it at Dolphins games. They’re doing it at house parties. They’re doing it at middle school talent shows. They’re doing it everywhere. It’s the latest dance sensation. Fort Lauderdale real estate agent Jane Snyder says she first saw the Superman dance at a talent show…