Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

The Weekly Rays Update

Overall: 21-16
Last Week: @ Toronto (2-1), LA Angels (3-0)
This Week: NY Yankees, @ St Louis

Roughly a month into the season, and the Rays appear to be legit. They have the fifth best runs difference (runs scored minus runs against) in the American League. Like any stat, runs difference does not tell the whole story, but it does a good job of eliminating the wheat from the chaff.

Oakland: +42
Boston: +31
Cleveland: +23
Chicago Sox: +20
Tampa Bay: +16
NY Yankees: +3

I would not place the Rays in the top tier of the AL with Boston and Oakland just yet, but they are firmly in the second tier with Cleveland and Chicago. Which means they should be competing for a playoff spot well past the All Star break.

Boston………….24—16 __ .600
Tampa Bay…..21—16 __ .568
New York……..19—19 __ .500
Baltimore…….19—19 __ .500
Toronto……….17—21 __ .447

RAYS POST OF THE WEEK
This week’s honor goes to DRays Bay for their post documenting Jamie Shields dominance in a one hitter against the Angels. Amazingly, Shields threw 92 pitches through 9 innings, which included 61 strikes and no walks. With Kazmir back in the rotation, the Rays have one of the more dangerous 1-2 punches in baseball.

RAYS PLAYER OF THE WEEK
Jamie Shields - 1 Win, 0.00 ERA for the week

We hope all you moms, stepmoms, and grandmas had a great day yesterday!

Wayne Garcia recently implored us to stay out of the water. In addition to his complaints of sharks, gators, red tide, and jellyfish, a new waterfront threat has emerged: Pelican Slams Into The Face Of Swimmer.

A couple of local bloggers are heading over to the Rock ‘n’ Sports cafe in Centro Ybor around 4pm, if anyone wants to chit chat about, well, anything at all…

On Read Write Web, Sarah Perez (aka SarahinTampa) told us How To Find the Top Twitterers in Your City. Of course we had to look at Tampa.

The current top tweeters in Tampa are WMNF with 276 - It looks as if they tweet their entire songlist, and TBO.com has 49, which tweets their breaking news. The most twitterriffic real person (albeit with a fake name) is FictionalSaint who tweeted 30 times.

CyndeeHaydon is the top tweeterer in Clearwater, and it looks like St. Peterburgers don’t tweet much.

You can keep up with my twittering at http://twitter.com/tommyduncn

This is OUR weekend, moms, and we should do whatever we want!

It felt really good to write that!

Of all the holidays in the calendar, I love Mother’s Day weekend the best (possible exception - my birthday)!

Now, if I get my way this weekend, I will be on the boat Saturday, listening to JGLB Saturday night and sleeping half the day away on Sunday! I’m pretty sure I will get my way because my little one will be at her mom’s this weekend and the older one is scheduled to work Saturday and a double shift on Sunday.

Don’t feel bad for me, I already received my card and gift from the little one with a BIG kiss and hug, and she should always spend mother’s day with her mommy! And I know my older one will HAVE to serve me that day, because I will go to the restaurant to make sure of it!  HA!

So what do you have planned?  Here are some ideas:

Saturday May 10 - Vinyl Records and CD Show from 8am until 3pm at the Holiday Inn Express, 4732 Dale Mabry, Tampa. I found this interesting for fans of the record player! This show is going to feature 45’s and LP’s covering the oldies, pop, rock, classical and everything in between. They will also have record supplies and even some CD’s. FMI call 727-251-9458. If anyone sees a beige plastic record player with a hinged top, it’s mine from my teen years and I miss it very much!

Saturday May 10 - Free Kids Movie at 10am at the Beach Theatre, 315 Corey Avenue, St. Pete Beach. This is the second time the Beach Theatre has made my list.  “Why” you ask?  Because it offers FREE movies!  This Saturday you can take your kids there to see Grease starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. This is my daughter’s favorite movie of all time, and I really feel it is timeless. Also, 5/17 The Black Stallion and 5/24 Nancy Drew: Troubleshooter will be shown to kids for free. FMI call: 727-360-6697 or go to beach-theatre.com.

Saturday May 10 - The Princess and the Pea, 11am, Largo Cultral Center, 105 Central Park Drive, Largo. This performance will cost you from $5-$7. a valuable lesson will be taught to the entire royal court about first impressions, personal decisions and true love in this toe tapping musical. I have only read this book a million times as a child, I think this live play would be fun for a family outing.

Sunday, Mothers Day, May 11 - A Mother’s Day Brunch at Don Vicente De Ybor Historical Inn 1915 Republica De Cuba Avenue, Ybor City, seatings at 11am and 1pm. This beautiful inn would be a nice change from Denny’s, McDonalds or the Golden Corral buffet! I say spend a little on Mother’s Day!  Of course, I am biased, but c’mon, get off your wallet, MOM is worth it!  The price is $32 for adults and $12 for kids. You will need to call and RSVP (make reservations) and you can get the menu choices as well, call 813-241-4545. For more info you can also go to DonVicenteInn.com.

Sunday, Mother’s Day, May 11^th, A Mother’s Day Celebration at the Red Rose Inn 2011 N. Wheeler Street, Plant City at 4pm. This famous hotel (famous in Plant City, at least) is having a grand celebration with live entertainment, a full buffet, desserts, and a flowing pink and lilac chocolate fountain. It will cost up to $29.95.  I have been to the Red Rose and it is very nice and I’m sure this will be a very special time for all the moms!

We told you about the south Florida governments clamoring to cut the state in two to form a 51st state, but we did not realize that this happens all the time, all over the country.

Oh, we know that in talks of adding states, Puerto Rico sometimes is mentioned, as is the District of Columbia.  But the talk of states splitting is apparently all the rage.

We were surprised to hear that just this year, an Athens columnist suggested splitting Georgia in two in order to solve the Atlanta-Alabama-Georgia-Florida water wars, which was seconded by a Valdosta newspaper.

We also hadn’t heard about an effort for northern California and southern Oregon to quit their respective states, creating the new State of Jefferson.  That effort has been going on since 1941.

Over the years, U.S. state secession proposals have come from more than 30 of the 50 states, including parts of tiny, tiny Rhode Island.

The only people who succeeded in seceding from a state to become their own state was Maine - they used be part of Massachusetts.

So I guess if you South Floridians wanna leave the rest of your state, you better get in line.

Smile!

You might be on a webcam!

There are more than a handful of public area webcams in the Tampa Bay area, and I figured I’d try to put a list of them all in one place. 

Most of the webcams are claimed by your local media companies, and they call them trafficcams or weathercams.  WFTS has a web cam on top of the GTE Federal Credit Union, while MyFoxTampaBay has a bunch of weathercams, including two on top of their huge SkyTower (one facing east and one west) on Kennedy Boulevard, as well as one at Clearwater Beach and at Grand Court in South Tampa.  They even have a weathercam inside the WTVT studios.  TampaBay’s 10 has four trafficcams. WFLA purports to have a camera atop the News Center near downtown, but we haven’t seen an image there in months. Bay News 9 brags of fifteen cameras online locally, and lists several more cameras all over the state of Florida.

511 Tampa Bay has a handful of trafficcams, while Weatherbug lists a few weathercams in the area, including this camera atop the Rampello Downtown Partnership School, one at Legends Field on Dale Mabry, Bright House Networks Field in Clearwater, and one at Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg.

In downtown Tampa, there are at least four construction cams.  In a Big Brother sort of way, contractors hire companies to keep a camera trained on the building and crew to make sure everything is being done right, and on time. Many of these are available to the public, and face the structure being built.  Take a look at the Element Construction Cam and the Tampa Bay History Center Construction Cam. The first ConstructoCam we noticed was the Skypoint construction cam (which is still taking two or three photos an hour - take a look at the photos around sunset).  Right next to that one is the Curtis Hixon/Tampa Museum of Art webcam (username: tampamuseum@webcam.com, password: downtown).

Your county government has a camera on top of the pink Hillsborough County building in downtown.  You can take control of that one, even zooming to look into the windows at Tampa City Hall.  The City of Clearwater Beach has three beachcams set up along their waterfront.

Speaking of the beach, the TradeWinds resort has a St. Pete Beach webcam, and the Don CeSar offers a great view of the beach with the appropriately named Don CeSar Resort Beach Cam.

TECO has two cameras at their Big Bend facility to watch the manatees, but are only operable from November to April.   Ybor Eye has three area webcams in various states of working order.  Some realtor has a Hillsborough River cam, and Mike’s Cat Cam shows a patio which may or may not really be in Tampa Bay.  

Those are all that I could find, but I’m certain there are others out there that I have missed.  If you have a webcam in the area, be sure to let us know about it in the comments.

Happy voyeurism!