Not for the first time, nor probably the last, Elizabeth Wurtzel has found a topic to set her to whining. This time it’s not the canopied bed that a local hotel was nice enough to set her up with (“repulsive”) or the Broward County scene (“shallow”) or even men in…
Sometimes You’re Paranoid, and Sometimes They Are Out to Get You You can imagine my concern upon learning of a reporter named Sean Rowe reading court documents and interviewing my neighbors regarding my family and our lawsuit against the City of Fort Lauderdale and its police department (“Sonny’s Last Stand,”…
To the Rev. Isaiah Clark, the facts were as clear as a church bell chime. If the city of West Palm Beach sold the Municipal Auditorium to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society — the Jehovah’s Witnesses — for $12.5 million, it would cast open the floodgates for a modern-day…
You probably answered this one years ago, but in 1973, I was in junior high. Fig Newton Cookies… who the heck was Newton? — William Killinger, via the Internet Much as I like Fig Newtons and the other fine products of the Nabisco company, you can appreciate that this not…
Sex and the Sun-Sentinel Co.: While the paper may lack passion in its pages, there’s more scandal on the staff. At City Link, Managing Editor Stuart Purdy, after writing a column about “another hell-raising year” inside “the City Link free-fire zone,” was himself fired last week. The apparent reason, according…
We’ve been having a heated discussion in the office, and we need to know how Spam luncheon meat is really made. Also, how come they never released a chicken or turkey version (i.e., Spurkey or Spicken)? Finally, what is Monty Python’s true relationship with Spam? — Steve Tolin, Sudbury, Ontario…
White tigers, blinking neon lights, dancing showgirls, Siegfried & Roy, a tower or two emblazoned with the name “Trump” — you’re not going to find them in Riviera Beach. While it’s true that the SunCruz V is, in essence, a floating casino, the boat’s home base is no Las Vegas…
It wasn’t until David Tory failed his second breathalyzer test of the day that he started to beg. Flunking the first test after his arrest had been bad enough. Tory believed he was well under the legal limit, yet he’d somehow ended up sitting in the Palm Beach County jail…
Biting Your Tongue-in-Cheek I am writing this letter in regard to the article “Biting Back,” by Paul Belden (April 16). I was shocked and appalled when I read that a police dog in pursuit of suspected felon Rusty Samarco actually bit a chunk out of his leg. I would like…
Michael Brasfield became Fort Lauderdale’s police chief in the summer of 1995 after a 30-year law-enforcement career in Seattle. In a deposition last December, he answered a seemingly bizarre question about his first days on the job in Broward County. The question was whether he had ever been accused of…
Amid cries of dollars down the drain, Broward County commissioners last week admitted they’re probably wasting $300,000 in taxpayer money — and funneling it to Republican hired guns responsible for the ugly “Big Sugar” campaign of 1996. “A lot of your constituents are going to be angry when they hear…
In their attempts to humiliate Broward’s Clerk of Courts last week, county commissioners may have gone too far. After all, giving Bob Lockwood sensitivity training is like giving an elephant ballet lessons. Still, when they made that demand, commissioners may have hit upon a way to recoup a little of…
Norman Ganz didn’t wait for an introduction before launching into an exasperated monologue on the phone. All he knew was that a news reporter was on the other end of the line. “I am not a bad person! I work for a living and I help people. I don’t steal…
Applauding the Hunger Artist’s Mom Your readers got to know Michael Krasnow from the in-depth story in the April 9 issue (“The Hunger Artist,” Bob Norman) of New Times, but they really didn’t get to know his parents, especially his mother Gail, who is one of the finest people I…
Greetings, Master. I’ve checked the archives and found no reference to the following story, which is supposed to have come from the Daily Texan, the University of Texas newspaper. This guy went out last Saturday night to a party and had a couple of beers. Some girl seemed to like…
To a casual passerby, the sight of Phillip and Doris Samarco probing and poking through the grass of their neighbor’s front yard on a summer afternoon might have seemed a familiar suburban tableau: a retired middle-class couple in West Boca Raton retracing steps in search of a lost set of…
David McMahon knew something was wrong with his breeding experiment with Florida shrimp when he saw dozens of his subjects lying dead on the bottom of their tank. Normally a glassy blue in color, the shrimp had turned bright orange, as if they had been cooked up for paella. The…
There are raw political calculations — and a mouthwatering power prize — behind the blasts of moral outrage Broward commissioners are firing at “Plantation Bob” Lockwood’s racial discrimination settlement. With an all-out assault, some Democratic strategists hope to drive the 76-year-old Lockwood into retirement — opening the Clerk of Courts…
You Spray, You Don’t Pay, So Sayeth the Greenskeeper This is regarding the article “You Spray, You Pay” (Lucy Chabot), which appeared in the April 2 issue of New Times. I felt that the issues presented in the story were very biased and based loosely on opinion. I found it…
In your recent column regarding stigmata [February 19] you failed to mention one very important fact. In most cases the stigmata displayed by “stigmatists” manifest on the palms and the feet. It’s well known that the Romans discovered very early that nails through the hands and feet (especially the hands)…
When the phone hadn’t sounded by 9 a.m., Gail Krasnow expected the worst. It was a practiced ritual, this daily phone call, born of a life-and-death struggle between mother and son that had continued for fourteen years. She could have given up on Michael years before. She could have tried…
Aside from the usual component of offering a free tote bag, WXEL’s recent on-air message to listeners had all the trappings of a traditional public broadcasting solicitation. First came the sober, stately voice of the public broadcasting station’s president, Jerry Carr: “Many of you have called to ask if we…
