White people are all alike
If you haven’t made your way over to “Stuff White People Like” yet, you’re really missing out. This is an obsessive mission to catalog everything that, well, white people really latch onto, then analyze exactly why it registers with the caucasian persuasion. Things that white people like have included: Threatening to move to Canada, Gentrification,…
Smells like God’s vagina
What do you do when you make a couple stoner comedies and you’re suddenly hailed as the second coming? That’s the favorable dilemma Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan now face after the mega-smashes of 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad. So…how do you follow? Make the biggest guns-n-explosions, Cheech ‘n’ Chong-style stoner adventure…
SURE SHOT
Simple strokes keep the Tap Room in the game
REINVENTING THE SPORTS BAR
If you think that any restaurant bearing the name of a sports legend has to be adorned with flat-screen TVs that only show ESPN and serve only heaping plates of chili cheese fries: think again. Dan Marino’s newly refurbished Tavern on the Lake is one classy joint with some killer comestibles. Whoever designed the two…
THE WALL OF HATE
A major policy shift is underway on the Mexican border. It’s been called the Berlin Wall, the Wall of Shame and even the Wall of Hate – Muro del Odio. Following the failure of Congress and the Bush administration to forge new immigration policies, those looking north have only the face of Homeland Security to…
ORAL EOLA
In the looming shadow of downtown Orlando’s metropolitan dreams – the Erector Set sways of slow-moving cranes, the hollow skeletons of dark-windowed condos – a Tuesday-night call to arms comes to order in a fifth-floor conference room in the 15-story Fifth Third Bank building. You wouldn’t know that, right here, history is being made. And…
IRISH GUY WALKS INTO A BAR …
In the aftermath, there’s whiskey and blood soaking into the varnished wood floors. The stains grow wider with each St. Patty’s Day past and gone. The shards of broken glass from another wild night fill in the cracks, where the barmen and their push brooms can’t get to them. Another year over, by the Irish…
BLESS YER HEARTS
Being Southern (if not by birth, then by choice) comes with its perks. We have our own dialect, our own cuisine and our own literary genre. Even as the rest of the country homogenizes (thanks to TV, chain restaurants and mall culture), Americans continue a love affair with all things Southern. Not convinced? It’s hard…
REINVENTING THE SPORTS BAR
If you think that any restaurant bearing the name of a sports legend has to be adorned with flat-screen TVs that only show ESPN and serve only heaping plates of chili cheese fries: think again. Dan Marino’s newly refurbished Tavern on the Lake is one classy joint with some killer comestibles. Whoever designed the two…
BLISTER
“You cannot smoke for two hours,” Jessica slaps my emotional crutch out from under me. “They’ll smell it on you and turn you away with their cruel glances of judgment.” I suppose I deserve this. Having endured two months of a big gay morbidity curse with all of its adjacent toxic trappings, Jessica is seeing…
SAVAGE LOVE
I’m in my final year of high school and I decided to come out as a lesbian – a foolish move as I live in a small town that’s not exactly brimming with tolerant people. But the response was worse than I expected. It’s nothing too terrible, no physical violence, and in the beginning I…
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
ARIES (March 21-April 19) He “cleans up well” is prison lingo. It refers to a convict who, upon leaving jail, is able to overhaul his appearance and demeanor so thoroughly that no one can tell he has served time. In the coming weeks you will have access to another version of this skill. You will…
THIS LITTLE UNDERGROUND
Somehow, of my own inexplicable doing, I got sucked into watching the CMT television series Gone Country (don’t ask, I have no good answer to offer). But after following it for nearly an entire season, I’ve managed to glean some truths from it. Besides the fact that Nashville is sooo far removed from the country…
CRITIC ON CRITICS
“A glamorous, witty period comedy” is how NPR’s Bob Mondello describes Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and he is almost right. It’s a period comedy, certainly, the period being late-1930s London. And I guess you could say it’s glamorous; there are high-style costumes and Art Deco sets, a chic (lingerie) fashion show and an…
FIRST SHOT
We recently heard that the Sharper Image retail chain has stopped accepting its own gift cards. The Sharpies aren’t denying the validity of the cards; they simply maintain it’s not in their best interest to honor them until the economy improves. So anybody who was planning on using company plastic to score a nuclear-powered neck…
LIVE ACTIVE CULTURES
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A geriatric vaudevillian and a performance artist walk into a fundraiser …. Like the unnatural lovechild of Jerry Lewis’ telethon and The Carol Burnett Show, March 3’s Fab Fringe Fundraiser was, well, fabulous. Thanks go in large part to the new Korman and Conway of Orlando hosting gigs:…
HAPPYTOWN
The Association of Comm-unity Organizations for Reform Now, better known as love-nugget ACORN, has come into some good news: Their housing counseling agency is the recipient of $7.8 million from the National Foreclosure Mitigation Fund ($180 million greenlighted by Congress two months ago to stem the foreclosure flood), making them fifth in the nation at…
POLICE BEAT
Feb. 20 (2008-77237) 7:40 a.m.: Hey kids: I know you like MySpace and Facebook and anything else that substitutes for actual human interaction. It’s fun to see which jock various cheerleaders are hooking up with this week, or to keep up to speed on what mood that weird goth kid from art class is in…
MAILSACK
Pissed-off vets, part I Sixty-three years ago, Feb. 23, 1945, five Marines and one Navy corpsman heroically raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima. Now you have used that sacred image to your perverted liking and made a total mockery of the most famous photograph to immerge from the second World War [“Victory!,” March 6].…
Somehow this DIDN’T happen in Florida
A woman in Kansas, which is apparently trying to outstupid Florida in ways other than teaching their children that the world is flat and 6,000 years old, spent two years on the toilet. Why? She didn’t want to come out. You can’t make this shit up. Details of this sordid potty affair on the flip…
See anything funny on the Sentinel’s front page today?
I did. See if you can spot it. [EDIT: The Sentinel is now showing today’s cover, no yesterday’s. Next time I have to create my own image rather than linking theirs. Sorry.] It wasn’t just that the Doggystyle Dyerâ?¢ story took precedent over the water wars and Gov. Spitzer’s mess. Look at the bottom-right corner.…
