BEST OF ORLANDO® NOMINATION BALLOT IS OPEN THROUGH MAY 6!

Apr 25 – May 1, 2001

Apr 25 - May 1, 2001 / Vol. 17 / No. 17

Care packaged

Quick – think of the words “franchise” and “food” at the same time. Not very appealing, is it? Now consider “cafeteria” and “Vietnamese food,” add “French patisserie,” throw out all your preconceptions, and you have Ba Le. The franchise was started by Vietnamese immigrant Thanh Quoc Lam in 1984 in Oahu, Hawaii. There are now…

Orlando Weekly Staff

It takes a Village (Person)

“Young man, there’s no need to be down,” once thrusted the painted pelvises of the Village People. And while I’d love to thrust myself into a pelvic tantrum of construction-worker abandon, right now I don’t feel so well. There’s a big dilemma this week in the celebrity-lite cesspool of wordy personality baiting, and I am…

Billy Manes

Watered down

Combine massive development and a statewide drought, and you get a water shortage — a “crisis,” as state lawmakers see it. But their likely fix has alarmed environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who fear it may pollute the state’s drinking water. The lawmakers’ solution: During the rainy season, capture billions of gallons…

Jeffrey C. Billman

Towering objections

New York police officers call it “testalying.” In L.A., it’s the “liar’s club.” Witnesses, usually cops, provide false testimony to paint defendants as more criminal than they really are. The perjury usually works because most judges and juries believe cops tell the truth. In Orlando city politics, testalying is so common that some city commissioners…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Pulling the plug on higher power

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and found that U.S. currency now read “In Buddha we trust,” Christmas had faded off the government calendar but the banks were closed on Yom Kippur, and prayer had been brought back into schools: all classes were required to start the day by facing east and bowing to Mecca. Suppose…

Liz Langley

Fast forward

You’d think a multimedia extravaganza featuring the voices of Oscar-winning funnyman Robin Williams and TV favorite Rhea Perlman would run forever at Disney World. Well, forever isn’t as long as it used to be. Less than seven years after “The Timekeeper” debuted in the Magic Kingdom’s revamped Tomorrowland, word came out of California last week…

Jim Hill

Games people play

Against my better judgment, I forced myself to watch the new TV game show “The Weakest Link.” It’s billed as a cross between Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The premise is that a “team” of players is enlisted to answer absurdly arcane, nonsensical, general-knowledge questions, rapidly fired at them by the show’s…

Al Krulick

News hole

The stock market went down, then up, then down again. Survivor’s ratings went up, and up, and up. And for weeks it was impossible to tell whether George W. Bush or Al Gore was on top. And the mainstream media never averted its gaze for an instant, afraid to miss a single bump or dip.…

Gabriel Roth

Following the letter of the law

An Alachua County (Fla.) sheriff’s deputy and a law-enforcement intern were reprimanded in March because they were not acting professionally during a drug bust in Gainesville in which 16 marijuana plants were recovered, along with 160 grams of dope and various drug paraphernalia. Superiors caught the two, in the middle of the raid, seated at…

Chuck Shepherd

Signed, sealed … delivered?

After years of thoroughly saturating the local circuit, Donovan Lyman of Blue Meridian knows the stories all too well. Virtually all of the polished purveyors of the “Orlando sound” — that strummy, polite, guitar-driven singer-songwriter brand of nice-guy rock — have inked deals with a major label. Everyone, that is, except for Blue Meridian. But…

Mark Padgett

Sip the Nectars of the gods

The blender was invented by a Mr. Fred Osius in 1936, who probably had no idea how popular fruit and a handful of ice would be. One of the best blenders humming away today is at Nectars in Altamonte Springs (931 State Road 434; 407-865-6788). Aside from wraps, rice bowls and great “San Francisco Nectar…

Joseph Hayes

‘Bush!’ whacked

I’ve always felt that the problem with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone isn’t that their animated Comedy Central show is obscene, offensive, inappropriate or immature, as naysayers have been naysaying since it premiered in 1997. It’s that Parker and Stone seem to be so friggin’ lazy. They took an inherently anarchic and…

Adele Marley

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