Here’s a startling confession: I never set foot inside Zuma Beach. Unlike a lot of other people, I didn’t bear the club any especial ill will; every college kid deserves a place where he can look up a coed’s dress and drink beer through a funnel. But it just wasn’t for me. As The Pursuit…

Steve Schneider

Love to eat? Love to write?

Writing about restaurants is harder than it sounds. One, you hardly ever get to eat at home. Two, though you may find a favorite spot, you can never really enjoy it because you’re constantly on the lookout for something new. Three — oh, the burden! — someone else is always picking up the bill. Sound…

Jeff Truesdell

Unlocking the evidence

No one disputes that the crime occurred. On Dec. 17, 1981, a 17-year-old woman in the Atlantic coast town of Cocoa returned to her mobile home on a weekday afternoon. She put her packages down and turned to see a man hiding behind a door. For the next 45 minutes he never spoke a word.…

Sally Watt

Flipping for Flipper

Who has always wanted to swim with the dolphins?” In the “debriefing hut” at Discovery Cove, Sea World’s new park where you can actually swim with dolphins, about 18 hands shoot up like they’re catching a fly ball. The perky group in the hut is made up of people mostly in their Wonder Years, that…

Liz Langley

Not in their back yard

Audubon Park neighbors received disheartening news from AT&T Wireless Communications in their fight to keep the company from placing a cell-phone “monopole” in their neighborhood school (Electro-magnet school, June 1). AT&T told neighbors that it could not place its pole on an alternative site at the abandoned Orlando Naval Training Center (NTC) because the developer…

Orlando Weekly Staff

A first on the agenda

June 12 marked the end of a nearly two-year battle for city councilman Ernest Page. It was the first time the council’s agenda meeting was held in Council Chambers (City Hall to go?, April 27). The agenda meeting, held an hour before the council’s 2 p.m. meeting, is considered the forum where city governing actually…

Orlando Weekly Staff

Make your own kind of ‘Music’

“Teeming” is a word with a claustrophobic feel. “Teeming with life” is the kind of terminology overheated scientists use when describing heartily grown mold on a petri dish, like the little spores are going to break out of the stands and riot a la fans at a European football match. Leicester Square in London is…

Liz Langley

Prison threads

In April, alleged Mafia boss Vincenzo Curcio broke out of the high-security Vallette prison in Turin, Italy, by patiently sawing through the bars with dental floss. (Bars made of abnormally soft iron had been installed when the prison was built in the 1970s.) And in March, Texas inmate Antonio Lara used a makeshift, dental-floss-like substance…

Chuck Shepherd

Customary changes

Walk into the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art’s “Head, Heart and Hands: Native American Craft Traditions in a Contemporary World” exhibit, and you might notice what a strange, eclectic mix of objects lie around you. From displays of silver jewelry and glass-blown vessels to wall hangings and constructions of found objects, it immediately becomes…

Vivien Kim Thorp

Snap decisions

Photography is presented as an art form as vibrant and inspirational as painting or sculpture in the Southeast Museum of Photography’s “Photography=Art.” Through three distinct exhibits, the museum showcases styles ranging from 1950s black-and-white Polaroid film to gum bichromate prints and digital imaging. “Fresh Work,” the best of the three, offers the impressions of 16…

Cameron Meier

Little ways

Smallness doesn’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to artwork, unless it’s really small. Making something, say, thimble-sized can cause you to be boggled at the technique or enamored by the fun change in perspective. At the fifth annual “Small Works Invitational” at Valencia Community College’s East Campus, the dimensions — nothing measuring more than…

Theresa Everline

Rebel yell

Movie: The Patriot

Orlando Weekly Staff

Balanced meal

Japanese cuisine is all about harmony. Everything – from the food to the presentation to the restaurant’s decor – is suppose to work together to create a flawlessly integrated and refreshing experience. But since my kind of sushi joint is the sort that blares music and uses Godzilla as a mascot, this concept of harmony…

Orlando Weekly Staff