Well, Turkey Weekend is winding down. For the Pulp, Thanksgiving isn't a day, it's a four-day binge of bird and football. Anyway, John DeGroot has sent along a Thanksgiving letter in which he celebrates the feast of life found here in South Florida every day of the year. I should have published it a few days ago, but I was too busy watching Joey Harrington throw it in his old team's face, a cartoonist lose it at One Herald Plaza, Kentucky rule Tennessee at Neyland Stadium (but still blow the game), South Florida pull off a beautiful upset of West Virginia, and eating enough to clog the arteries of an African wildebeast.
No more about my shameful commission of two of the seven deadly sins, sloth and gluttony (I won't get into the others I toyed around with). Here's DeGroot's letter, which in itself is a reason to be thankful: ---------------------------------- Dear Bob Norman:
Happy Thanksgiving.
And shame on you for not writing a gratitude-filled Thanksgiving column.
Truth is, you of all people should know how much you've been blessed as a guardian of truth, justice, journalism and such stuff here on the western edge of the Devil's Triangle.
That said, I have taken the liberty of listing a few of the more absurd chunks that regularly feed your surreal grist mill — and for which you should be lighting a bonfire's worth of candles in thanks.
Or, more to the point, consider just how far up the old feces creek you would be without:
One — The Sun-Sentinel's Help Team. Journalism by the impaired for the impaired where Forrest Gump trumps Bob Woodward.
Two - The Miami Herald's allergy to all things Cuban, Castro and Communista. Or Tom Fielder's karmic payback for digging through Gary Hart's trash can to
expose the Presidential candidate's tabloid sex life.
Three - Florida Governor-elect Charlie Crist's loose loafers as described by a gathering of equally loose sources.
Four — Broward Prosecutor Mike Satz. Toss a puppy off a balcony and your ass is grass. But screw local taxpayers six ways from Sunday ....?
Five — Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne. Downwind from BSO's fraudulent crime stats, rumor has it the agency's PR types are under orders to say the Sheriff is six feet tall -- an accurate number if Jenne is wearing a hat.
Six — Broward County Commissioner Ilene Lieberman, the undisputed queen of local lobbyists. Okay. So she's actually a good old fashioned yenta-style marriage broker who earns mega bucks by arranging tax-funded love matches.
Seven — All the other lobbyists in South Florida who daily give a bad name to chutzpha — while confirming H.L. Mencken's sad conclusion that elected government operates on "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
Eight — A whole mud-wrestling freak show of city officials, including those in Deerfield Beach, Hollywood, South West Ranches, Fort Lauderdale and so on all of whom serve as living proof that Carl Hiaasen so-called "comic novels" to be more non-fiction than not.
Nine - Earl Maucker's Op-Ed columns where the Supreme Pontiff of Whitebread Journalism in South Florida preaches every other Sunday.
Ten — Earl Maucker again, this time for not transferring your wife to the Sun-Sentinel's Belle Glade Bureau.
Eleven — The North Broward Hospital District which proved Jeb Bush can and will pull the plug on a vegetative state; that after he dumped the District's old Board of Trustees in response to your hard-hitting series exposing an epidemic of tax dollar waste, incompetence and sleaze politics at Broward's largest public health care system.
Twelve — Your bosses at the New Times for having the cajones to turn you loose and pay you for having so much fun.
