Life in the Fabulous Florida Keys – it can certainly foster an island mentality among its residents. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, like when idiot regimes and dictators in faraway places like Iran and North Korea threaten the rest of the world with their abject (but heavily armed) stupidity while we sip cocktails carefree by the shore (wait – maybe that’s not a bad thing). There is, however, a lot that happens off the islands that, while seemingly full of sound and fury, signifies nothing. And that’s…

Life in the Fabulous Florida Keys – there are certain things we take for granted here that just aren’t available anywhere else on the planet. So as we continue to enjoy the sun and fun of summertime surrounded by our pristine and unaffected-by-the-oil-spill-waters (Hear that, BP, NOAA, and the American Media?!?), let’s all pause a minute or two and reflect on why we came here, either as a visitor or a resident (or somewhere in between). As the Weekly’s resident curmudgeon, I’m not much of a “count your…

HEARTBREAKERS FIND THEIR MOJO

Petty & Co. deliver timeless, classic album

Remember albums? Those classic discs that contained the newest collections of songs from your favorite artists… you’d grab a bottle of wine and sit for a while to experience the work in its entirety (something that is totally lost on the MP3 generation). Well, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have delivered us a real album, classic and timeless, and its name is Mojo.

Mojo kicks off with “Jefferson Jericho Blues,” a rolling jaunt…

A recent news article concerning wastewater funding has really left me in a not-so-warm-and-fuzzy state of mind. Not that any article on the topic is a real feel-good piece, mind you – it’s just that I’m really left wondering what our Congresswoman, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), is thinking.

Here are the background details of the story that has left me puzzled. Remember back to the waning days of the Bush administration, when the economy faced all-but-certain meltdown? The President and Congress got…

Visitors to our islands (The Fabulous Florida Keys®) often notice that the various types of wildlife that inhabit these coral rocks are different that the species they have at home. No kidding. In that spirit, we here at Keys Disease Central are proud to present The Complete Simpleton’s Guide to Keys Critters.

No guide like this would be worth the paper it is written upon without mention of the kind of wildlife that truly gets up close and personal with humans. Two species are the common mosquito (…

Well, here we are over 50 days after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, sending 11 workers to their deaths and unleashing an uncontrollable gusher of Louisiana “light sweet crude” oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Luckily, I’m here to report that it’s been sealed off and that the worries are over, no problem, it’s all cleaned up and life is back to normal.

Well, I’d like to report that. The real news is that the “cap” they put on the sawed-off pipe is capturing a “significant” amount of…

The latest “Big Thing” to hit the Wonderful World of the InterWebs is the idea we now call “social networking.” MySpace was the pioneer social networking hub; its unfriendly interface, however, was unappealing to many users. (This is a columnist’s way of saying that he, personally, never liked MySpace.) A MySpace user can add as many friends as he or she wants, and can customize his or her site with strange backgrounds that never align with anything else on the page.

Then came Twitter. One can post…

There is nothing funny about the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Every day, there seems to be worse and worse news about BP (Beyond Patience, Bastard Polluters, Beached Petroleum, Basically Pathetic) and their Deepwater Horizon oil gusher. As I type the words for this column, the “top kill” operation of pumping mud into the broken well goes on, hopefully with a successful outcome. Unfortunately, news sources are already calling this the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Louisiana is getting…

I’ve always been partial to good British humor (humour?). I’m especially fond of the Monty Python stuff, particularly Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Who are you so wise in the ways of science?”) Even when people aren’t trying to be funny in Great Britain, they are oftentimes very amusing. My friend Wayne “Mac” McCormick from the UK recently sent me an e-mail with actual complaints from proper Brits, many of which I’ll repeat here so that I may fill up a column.

Tenants in housing often have issues and…

There’s good news: it seems that the better of the two oil pollution scenarios for the Keys (that I wrote about in last week’s column) is the one that is playing out. The Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico is moving farther south and away from the oil slick, which is being driven westward because of the prevailing easterlies. Most scientists are now in agreement that it’s increasingly less likely that we’ll see an oil slick disaster here in the Keys. (And we’re incredibly lucky that the Deepwater Horizon…