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Best Ego

Tim Smith's

You'd think being landslid out of office might end the average would-be author's hope of writing a how-to on becoming a political success. But that didn't stop Tim Smith, who was routed by Jim Naugle in last year's Fort Lauderdale mayoral race. The former city commissioner didn't let the sudden and bitter end of his political career stop him from coming out with a vanity book called Politics 101, subtitled The True Story of the Life of a City Commissioner. Now if that tease doesn't prompt lines at the local Barnes and Noble, what will? "Required Reading for the Inspired Citizen," boasts the cover. What the hell does that mean? To give you an idea of the depth of the 176-page book, consider that it is virtually all in italics and contains more exclamation points per page than a 16-year-old girl's diary. It's actually kind of fun, though. Smith suffers from a severe case of inflated self-importance, but he also comes across as a naive, almost boyish fellow who thoroughly enjoyed every single minute of his six years in office. The problem is that the book doesn't deliver. Smith promises in the forward that he will tell tales, but either you already knew most of what he's telling or the stuff's just not all that interesting. For instance, he alleges that his arch-enemy Naugle, an out-of-the-closet homophobe, once inferred to him that he'd had a gay experience. Now, this should be quite scintillating, especially since guessing the mayor's true persuasion is one of Fort Lauderdale's great pastimes. But even that anecdote lacks a good punch in the saccharine way Smith tells it. (Naugle, of course, denies it). "I'm guessing that my experience was stranger and more unique than most elected officials," the washed-up pol writes in the forward. The problem is that it really wasn't.

Best Local Website

miami.craigslist.org

Ignore the text-only design that seems a throwback to the early days of the World Wide Web. The Miami section of craigslist.org -- which includes browsers from across South Florida -- is arguably one of the most dynamic in the online subtropics. Craig Newmark founded the nonprofit online community in San Francisco in the 1990s at the urging of friends. Over the past decade, the website has expanded to cover more than 30 metropolitan areas, including the website for South Florida, which launched in October 2002. What has made South Florida's craigslist.org so successful is its decidedly local edge. It's a communal bulletin board designed for neighbors to exchange opinions, advertise services, discover new loves, find an activity partner, or locate an activity partner for whom you have to, well, uh, pay. The site receives several hundred posts per day; a good number are from Broward and Palm Beach counties. Posting a message is free since craigslist.org is noncommercial. It costs money only to post a job advertisement, and the revenue is used to operate and maintain the site. Of course, you can be completely anonymous when you post, even if you're the 25-year-old straight dude who recently advertised for "someone to give me a prostate massage." So log on and talk politics, give away your old couch, adopt a pet, breed your snake, sell your car, find a job -- it's all possible at miami.craigslist.org.

Best Local Blog

www.hatless.com

We've often thought of starting a weblog to dump all of our mad, misplaced, and most brilliant thoughts, but the need isn't pressing as long as we have Steve Koppelman around. Koppelman, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, runs the wonderfully named www.hatless.com, a website where he unloads his mind on readers lucky enough to find him. Also called "Steve Koppelman's Catologue of Poorly Catologued Things," the blog basically serves as a condensation of one man's existence in South Florida and the world. The 34-year-old real estate agent by trade writes without a trace of pretense about whatever is inside his hatless head, whether it be the most recent crop of Indian River grapefruit or the time he vainly waited for a Broward County bus at the airport. He writes about music, film, media, politics, and barbecue joints. In the past few months, he's sounded off on the FCAT, Vladimir Putin, Haiti, the BSO crime report rigging investigation, Everglades restoration, and Halliburton. The relationship is simple -- he writes, we read. But we want to give Koppelman one bit of advice/encouragement: Keep that hat off, brother.

Best Science Fiction

Creation Studies Institute

If you can't beat science, join it. Or at least appropriate its patois, as this institute has done. The brainchild of Tom DeRosa, an acolyte of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Church of Intolerance, CSI wants to prove the Bible is fact using science; this is a somewhat inverted notion of how scientific discovery works. "Without Creation, then God's Word is not true," DeRosa has posited. "Without God's Word, there is no foundation for the Gospel." (Wait a minute, would that mean no more Mel Gibson films?) Anyway, that kind of logic can lead only to the conclusion you've already decided upon, which in this case includes a major role for Noah's Great Flood in laying down fossil deposits. DeRosa and gang have concluded that the seven-day creation scenario is the most difficult part of the Bible for nonbelievers to accept. Why? "Satan has deliberately vested huge amounts of effort in an attempt to cloud and/or obscure altogether its true significance," DeRosa wrote on CSI's website. Of course, the countless fossils layered in sediment over several hundred million years don't help the institute's case either.

Best Free Parking

Street meters just off Las Olas Boulevard

Parking on Las Olas Boulevard is a renowned pain in the derrière. The finicky, quarters-only meters prompted one restaurateur over the holidays to hire an 18-year-old fellow on a full-time basis to stand around a side lot making change for customers. The ravenous meters on the street slurp down spare change like Pac-Man gobbling power pellets. Fail to feed these steel sentries and your reward is a $25 ticket, which, come to think of it, would buy you a mere 20 hours of street parking anyway. The only chink in the system is to hit the meter spots on the side streets after dark, when those meters aren't monitored. Maybe it's the fear of parking a $60,000 SUV slightly off the beaten path that keeps the gentry coming back to the expensive spots along the main drag. Whatever. If you're hitting the Floridian for a slab of pie after a night of wine-fueled suck-face, you deserve at least the option of gratis parking on somewhere south of Las Olas. Because you, dear friend, are keeping it real.

Best Fundraiser

St. Joseph's Episcopal Church

Imagine God giving you his blessing to play a practical joke. That's what it feels like -- even if it's clearly not the case -- when you give the kids in the youth group at St. Joseph's 30 bucks and the street address. They'll arrive at your buddy's abode in the middle of the night with their truck full of two-foot-tall plastic flamingos and spread them throughout the front yard. Thirty flamingos for 30 bucks, 60 flamingos for $60, 90 for $90, and so on. Your friend wakes up to find that his home is a major source of rubbernecking. Since your money helps the junior God Squad organize church-related events and the kids even come pick up the flamingos after a few days, you get all of the amusement and none of the guilt. Besides, how many times will your friends fall for "Pull my finger!"? This particular St. Joseph's fundraising occurs only in the fall. Set up a prank with the youth director, Steffi, in November.

Best Tourist Trap

Hollywood Beach

You just spent three months chipping ice off of your front steps and hunching your shoulders against the frigid north wind, which keeps coming like a sumo wrestler. Those Anglo-Saxon, winter-resistant genes are wearing thin. So jump in the car and drive the 2,500 or so miles to Hollywood Beach, mate. See what a doughty little Florida city can do for your battered Northern soul. Well? For starters, stick your bony white feet into the Atlantic. It's the icebreaker. It's also the only thing that comes cheap. That and the free playground and a few pizza joints, where the pies are thin and acidic. Hell, if you're Québecois and speak French, greet thousands of your pale fellow countrymen, who dominate the Broadwalk seven months a year. Au revoir, you locals. This place is ours!

Best Retro Video Games

Boomers!

Remember when you were 10 years old, sitting in a pizza parlor with your parents as the large video games in the corner beckoned you with their bells and flashing lights? You'd get a quarter from Dad, your hands greasy from pizza, and then slide that silver coin into Centipede. It would light up; the sounds would blare. You'd wrap your hand around that joystick and -- beep, beep, beep -- you were destroying that fast-moving creature. Forget today's Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy. Centipede was a real video game. But don't get too remorseful. In the age of $2 arcade games, a place still exists where you can slide quarters into such classics as Centipede, Donkey Kong, and Pac-Man. At Boomers! you'll find an impressive collection of the kind of video games that will remind you of pizza parlors, greasy quarters, and (yuck)... girls!

Best Use of Subliminal Advertising

Keno Bros. Jewelers

This small jeweler on the corner of Sunrise and 20th Avenue looks like a modest mom-and-pop joint, but if you've ever been stopped at that light and let your eyes drift to its marquee, you would see hilarious phrases like "We Accept Visa, AMEX, and Sugar Daddies" and "Buy Her a Diamond or Someone Else Will." Who says romance is dead?

Best Place to Beat the Heat

Glacier Ice and Snow Arena

Hockey at this hot spot is played in several forms. One, the ice version, which requires skates that may be rented for a couple of bucks on top of the $6 rink admission. The others, of the dome and air varieties, require quarters. But you're here to beat heat -- why sweat? Grab a beer from the snack bar, prop up the bladed dogs, and watch some ESPN on that mammoth big screen. At midday, the Zamboni evicts skaters to take a turn around that frozen cement pond. The air inside the arena settles and thickens. Walking in feels like the blank, brisk frost blast when a freezer door first opens. But this is full-body, a chill you can swallow in and wallow in. Exhale slowly, from the deepest, hottest pits of your lungs. Breath looks cool in summertime. Free skate is Monday through Friday 9:20 to 11:50 a.m. and 1:40 to 4 p.m.; Friday night from 7:30 to 10 p.m., Saturday from 1:30 to 4 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m. And Sunday, it's 1:30 to 4 p.m.

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