It scares people silly. It makes cool-headed adults wonder if witches are real. It draws hundreds of thousands of hits to its Website. It drives a local historian in small-town Maryland crazy. The Blair Witch Project, a first film by two canny young Floridians, has developed a reputation as the...
On most maps of South Florida, civilization simply ends somewhere out west. In Broward County the demarcation line is I-75 in the south and the Sawgrass Expressway in the north. In southern Palm Beach County, State Road 7 is pretty much the end, though some development straggles west of the...
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid -- a blend of Footloose and Schindler's List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank -- pitted big bands versus arm bands; it was a...
For more than six years, Marti Forman has been searching for a permanent home for Cooperative Feeding Program Inc., the nonprofit agency she heads up that provides hot meals to the needy. And for more than six years, she's encountered nothing but resistance and frustration at every turn. This year...
I'm a sucker for homemade pasta, but I don't necessarily want to (a) go out to a restaurant to get it, or (b) unearth the difficult-to-use pasta machine I received for my wedding. So I was delighted to discover Four Star Ravioli (2143 N. State Rd. 7, Margate, 954-974-2444), which...
You might think that an artist who spent most of his life around blackboards would be weary of them. Not John O'Connor. The Idaho-born painter has been a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville for the past 30 years. Before joining the faculty there, he studied and taught...
The Make-Up I Want Some (K Records) Exchanging pith for pizzazz, three former members of the clever hard-core-renaissance quintet Nation of Ulysses joined with ex-Frumpies bassist Michelle Mae in 1995 to create the shtick-laden soul of the Make-Up. Considering the rudimentary R&B of the band's early singles, few could expect...
Port EvergladesIf you hang out at Port Everglades and watch as the three immense cranes offload containers from supercargo freighters, you’re witnessing the refueling of South Florida’s economy as needed goods and products and raw materials pour into the region. What you may also be watching is the feeding of a drug habit. Last year Port […]
Port EvergladesIf you hang out at Port Everglades and watch as the three immense cranes offload containers from supercargo freighters, you’re witnessing the refueling of South Florida’s economy as needed goods and products and raw materials pour into the region. What you may also be watching is the feeding of a drug habit. Last year Port […]
By all accounts Greg Scott, a solid, 37-year-old "gym boy" with a dirty-blond tuft of hair under his lip and a stylized biohazard symbol tattooed on his midriff, should be dead. Twelve years ago, approaching graduation from nuclear-power school at the naval training center in Orlando, he found out he...
Neil RogersFinally a reason to turn on AM radio again. Neil Rogers, the self-proclaimed fat fag, has no peer as far as we’re concerned. His timing couldn’t have been better for returning to the airwaves after a seven-month hiatus resulting from his nasty spat with WIOD-AM (610). Armed with a new million-dollar contract, Rogers took up […]
Neil RogersFinally a reason to turn on AM radio again. Neil Rogers, the self-proclaimed fat fag, has no peer as far as we’re concerned. His timing couldn’t have been better for returning to the airwaves after a seven-month hiatus resulting from his nasty spat with WIOD-AM (610). Armed with a new million-dollar contract, Rogers took up […]
The two teenage friends, one in Plantation, Florida, and one in a suburb of New York City, were watching TV and conversing with each other via a computer chat room when they saw the first horrifying pictures of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado. A cable news channel...
What's most striking about "The Water's Edge: A Painting Installation by Margaret Ross Tolbert" when you first view it is not so much the content of the exhibition as the way it's displayed. The nearly 150 six-by-eight-inch panels that make up the show, now at the Art and Culture Center...
Like every town in Broward County, Dania Beach has an official city seal. But you can't see it. They won't let you. The logo you can see -- the one that's painted on their trucks and printed on their letterhead -- isn't actually official. It's just a drawing that was...
Gold's Gym of Pembroke PinesIf your daily vocabulary includes words like reps, sets, grams, cardio, and pounds, it should also include one more, Gold’s. The self-proclaimed “Mecca of Bodybuilding” sprouted up in July 1990, thanks to partners Ed Benson and Bob DeLuca. Over the last ten years, Benson (now sole owner) has turned the original 10,000-square-foot facility into an […]
Gold's Gym of Pembroke PinesIf your daily vocabulary includes words like reps, sets, grams, cardio, and pounds, it should also include one more, Gold’s. The self-proclaimed “Mecca of Bodybuilding” sprouted up in July 1990, thanks to partners Ed Benson and Bob DeLuca. Over the last ten years, Benson (now sole owner) has turned the original 10,000-square-foot facility into an […]
Thursday April 22 England's King Henry VIII wasn't taking chances with wife number four. The Catholic Church had banned divorce, so he created the Church of England in order to legally unload Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. Displeased with wife number two, Anne Boleyn, he had her beheaded. His...
To pizza purists the last decade or so has been a nightmare. First pizza was taken out of Italian pizzerias and put into shopping mall food courts and kiddie arcades. Then chain restaurants like Pizza Hut, Little Caesar's, Papa John's, and Domino's began competing with each other intensely, offering novelties...
"Wow," declares Derek Hyde, squinting at the vision of Will Trev's black '66 Plymouth Barracuda, as Hyde stumbles out of the darkness of the Creepy T's rehearsal space in a Fort Lauderdale warehouse. Stooped over like some tall, walking question mark, the singer-guitarist's face breaks into a crooked smile as...
Teens who like punk rock have a power base of about nothing. Therefore, when their interests go up against strip mall landlords and insurance companies, their chances of coming out on top are nil. This could lead to a nihilistic approach to life or a punk philosophy of "Hey, who...
Here in South Florida, we all have our ways of noting the arrival of spring. Some return to the beach, and others, like my husband, hide in the house to avoid hay fever. As for me, I dig up one of my favorite poems by Jane Kenyon. It's called "Philosophy...
