Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Tommy wrote last year about how Forbes ranked Tampa-St. Pete #35 (of 40) on their list of “best cities to be single.”

The most important factor in this list is the number of singles, or percentage of people 15 or older and never married. Only Las Vegas has fewer than us.

Forbes’ 2007 ratings are here, and there’s great news: we’ve improved to #32 (of 40)! This is despite us moving to dead last in number of singles (only 27% of us are unmarried) and 35th in cost of living. The new report is on the tails of our recent ranking as worst on their list of best cities for young professionals.

The city ranks 32nd for young professional concentration, last for its never-married population, second-to-last for big and small businesses and, to top it all off, has a high cost of living for what a recent grad can expect to earn.

Well that’s not very nice. Clearly Forbes never took my mother’s advice about keeping quiet if you don’t have any constructive criticism. The only categories where Tampa-St. Pete scored above average on the “Best for singles” rankings were “coolness” and “job growth.”

We didn’t even break the top 20 in drunkenness!

Does anyone care? Or are the residents just happy to lose our fantastic museums and theatre groups and charities, the sorts of things that are backed by young, energetic people? Is Tampa-St. Pete the next Boca Raton?

We agree to meet at MacDinton’s, since that’s pretty much THE place to watch a big-time soccer match in Tampa — and for a Chelsea-bred Brit, her soccer-loving Yank husband, and me (who dabbled in high school footy a bit) the debut of David Beckham in the United States is as big-time as it gets in a non-World Cup year. I mean, this is Becks. They made a movie with his name in it that didn’t even have anything to do with him. He’s married to that lamp pole with basketballs strapped to it.

Mac’s is sparsely populated with skinny girls in bikini tops and skirts surrounded by guys wearing very expensive sunglasses. They regard me with… they don’t really regard me at all. We settle in at the outside bar with our pints only to find the televisions all switched to boxing at 8:00. This event is precluding me from watching soccer. We inquire with the manager; he informs us they’re not showing the soccer match, because they’re showing the boxing match. On all the TVs? Is that really necessary? “They all have to be the same,” he says. Everything has to be the same, he says, and it’s South Tampa, all over again, as we gulp our pints, leave, and walk past the Taqueria (which is always, always playing music from the early 90’s, every time; tonight it’s CeCe Peniston’s “Finally”) to the Dubliner, where they’re happy to put the soccer match on, and the Devil Rays’ slaughter by the Yankees right next to it for good measure.

Friends arrive. Beer flows. A band starts playing inside the bar, but it’s not a band, really; it’s a dude with a guitar who sings and his buddy who taps a 16-key synthesizer, emulating a drumset. It’s artificial, but expensive, and it’s South Tampa all over again. I talk to a blonde woman with a ponytail, waiting in line for the bathroom, a Kate Spade bag over her shoulder. Her responses are incongruous and scattered; it is as if her brain fluid has been replaced by tonic water (with quinine). Perhaps she drives a Jetta.

The match ends. The Brit, the Yank, the other Brit, and the other Yank agree to head out to the Hard Rock for a Basic Rock Outfit show, and on the way to my car a man stops me about my “OHIO” t-shirt. “Go Buckeyes!” he says. “No, go Bobcats,” I reply. This causes a point of contention, as he was kicked out of Ohio for grades and forced to graduate from the lesser, and younger, institution in Columbus. Furthermore, the man is a big fan of OSU-founded band O.A.R. whom once played (badly) in my backyard in Athens during Palmerfest. He pronounced their name like the boating tool, and I responded back “More like ‘Oarrible.” His friend had to restrain him from punching me in the face; on south Howard, your favorite band is as sacred as your momma. And then, a phone call: the Yank’s car was towed, and they need a ride downtown to get it. It’s South Tampa all over again.

(to be continued)

My earlier post about USF students Youssef Megahed and Ahmed Mohamed inspired quite a reaction. Winds of Jihad called me a “Islamofascist sympatyzer” and even Sticks readers suggested I was being too easy on the suspected “terrorists.”

Now, in what seems to be an unprecedented statement, the FBI says you should probably avoid linking these guys with terrorism. A former federal prosecutor called the statement “highly unusual,” though most of us have found ourselves in a work situation lending itself to the acronym “CYA.”

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko says they’re just fireworks:

There’s no (terrorism link) that we’ve identified at this point. They got pulled over and had just enough suspicious things to warrant investigation. We don’t think there’s that much to it. They had some materials to make some pretty good-sized homemade fireworks but not bomb stuff.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Buford T. Justice Sheriff’s captain Rick Ollic is confident he’s caught hisself some real turrists.

We made the proper charges against these people. We are continuing the investigation. These charges are appropriate.

The FBI’s not so sure, there, Rick. (”These people”?) Not that the FBI is the last bastion of investigative work, but when they release an “unprecedented” backtracking memo, you know they’re trying to get as far away from this case as possible.

That doesn’t help Youssef and Ahmed, who are still stuck in solitary confinement.

It also doesn’t help hatemongers from renaming USF “Jihad U”.

Baseball and knitting haven’t had much in common since Charles O. Finley, but the world of sport and the world of crafts are due to collide this weekend at Tropicana Field, as the “Stitch N’ Pitch” world tour arrives in St. Petersburg for Saturday night’s game against the Cleveland Indians.

The Stitch N’ Pitch website explains the event thusly:

Stitch N’ Pitch brings together two American traditions — Baseball and the Needle Arts. Come to a ball game and knit, crochet, embroider, cross-stitch and needlepoint. Sit among friends, family and colleagues and cheer on your favorite Baseball Team. This event is for ANYONE who has an interest in the perfect double play — Needle Arts and Baseball; beginners, intermediate and experts are all welcome.

Nearly every Major League ballpark has hosted a Stitch N’ Pitch night so far this year, with the exception of the New York Yankees (who told the group to screw themselves). The August 9th New York Times explains the program has grown enormously in only two years:

The Stitch N’ Pitch program had its unofficial start in 2005, when retail needle arts stores in Seattle began a program at Mariners games, Paley said. The national association facilitated the
nationwide expansion of the program last year, with 15 major league teams involved.

Stitch N’ Pitch participants get a goodie bag with yarn, needle arts magazines, and light-up needles for night games. Better yet, if you attend Saturday’s Devil Rays game you’ll get a Rocco Baldelli figurine and a Rays poster — all for the ticket price of $8 (and free parking!)

The following local craft stores have Stitch N’ Pitch tickets available, or you can order them online at http://www.devilrays.com/stitchnpitch (password STITCH):

1. Knit & Knibble - 813-254-5648 - Tampa, FL
2. Needles and Knobs - 727-345-5662 - St. Petersburg, FL
3. Uncommon Threads - 727-784-6778 - Palm Harbor, FL

You might be wondering why I’m so interested in this. As it turns out, I’ve recently started dating a woman whose two main hobbies seem to be crafting (her house has its own craft room) and baseball (she even keeps score). She happens to be a Braves fan (like most people from the northern end of the state) but, well, we can’t all be perfect. We’ll be with the Stitch N’ Pitch crowd on Saturday, so come find us!

Fresh off having drinks with Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedians last month, I headed Saturday to the Howard Johnson on 50th street for the annual Tampa Fark Party.

I’ve written about Fark.com before. The Tribune recently took a look at Fark’s obsession with Florida, too, and Fark was name-dropped by the St. Pete Times back in June.

The Times even went out of its way to investigate the Fark Party phenomenon back in 2005:

Basically, it’s just a bunch of people standing around and drinking who live in the area and have something in common - which is, they like Fark. It’s like walking into a room with 25 people you’ve heard of before. I’d say about half the people are from some kind of a tech-related field, but we’ve had doctors, lawyers, the whole gamut. Baptist ministers show up at these things.

As a matter of personal disclosure, I’ve attended numerous Fark parties and even threw one at the Columbus Doubletree in 2003 that earned me a permanent ban from the hotel. Yet as I’ve grown busier my familiarity with Fark cliches and members has declined; there were roughly 20,000 registered accounts on Fark when I first found the site, and now there’s more than 10,000,000 page views A WEEK. (We’ll get there someday.) Add in that I wasn’t familiar with the 50th St. HoJo (and that the nerd-corps of Fark were sharing the HoJo lounge with a BBW meeting) and you’re talking about an odd amount of trepidation about something I ought to be pretty comfortable with.

As it turns out, the current crop of Florida Farkers is a good group; fairly nerdy, yes (one librarian’s shirt about grammar being free sticks in my head), but ready for a good time. A handful of people at the party had flown in from places like California, Michigan, or Virginia, and very few were actually from Tampa Bay, the majority having come from the East Coast or Gainesville or Naples/Venice/Ft. Myers. It says something about a web site that its fans are so dedicated they’ll travel extensively just to meet other netizens “IRL.”

My most eye-opening observation, though, was the age of the party’s attendees; while Fark claims its readers are 80% male 22-49, there were both Farkers “of a certain age” and women at the party. One woman, in particular, nearly kept me late (I had another party in Pasco to get to) talking about baseball and education; forced with the difficult decision of carrying on with my dream woman (who’d driven down from Gainesville for the party) or ditching my best friends, I scrawled her Fark name on my forearm and headed out.

It turns out I missed the better parts of the night, the parts with the police getting called, the BBW lapdances, the special brownies, and the skinny-dipping. It wouldn’t be a real Fark Party without them, for sure. And now I know that the lounge of the 50th Street HoJo has $2.00 domestic bottles and nice pool tables. Best of all, after swapping a few emails, I think I have a date with the girl from Gainesville…

I’ve held off on writing this for a long time as I’m not sure how to address it and remain within the ethics of both blogging and my teaching profession.

Certainly you’ve heard the story by now of Yousef Megahed and Ahmed Mohamed, USF students picked up in South Carolina on charges of terrorism.

The students claim the “explosive devices” in their trunk were simply fireworks, while Berkeley County Sheriff Wayne DeWitt says they definitely had bombs in the trunk.

Meanwhile, Megahed’s family, on vacation themselves at the time of the arrest, consented to an FBI search of their house — only to find the feds took all their computers away.

I’m actually familiar with Mr. Megahed, having had him as a student and seeing him around campus. He’s a nice kid, an excellent student, and given the bully pulpit of a speech class, never used his time to spout any kind of extremist rhetoric. That hasn’t stopped sites like this from labeling them “Islamic terrorists” or this woman from identifying them as Al Qaeda members.

The problem, of course, is that we’ll probably never know the details about what was in the students’ trunk; what I call fireworks may be dangerous bombs to Sheriff Buford T. Justice. The boys aren’t getting out of jail any time soon; a $300k and $500k bail will tend to keep you from posting. The nearly-graduated students are “flight risks,” after all.

What’s the statute of limitations on claiming you’re “new in town”? This past weekend marked a year since I moved to Pinellas from New Tampa, and yet I’m still using the “new in town” trick to explain why I don’t really know anyone on this side of the bay. I made my core group of friends in New Tampa less than a week after moving to Florida; why, then, have I had such a struggle with building a similar social life here in Pinellas?

We ethnographers often use studies in contrasts to better understand the culture we’re observing. By looking at oxymorons or anachronisms we can get to what’s really happening. With that in mind, I headed Friday to Dunedin’s Martini Club to watch my favorite local band, Basic Rock Outfit. Having been juiced by their great performance at the LA Hangout on Thursday night (covered on my own blog) I was excited to see them again, and at a place practically down the street compared to all the way over in Lutz.

The fact I like BRO is itself a contradiction; I’m usually not into the heavier rock styles, but these guys really melt your face off and have some beautiful songs. They’re going to hit it big, and they play shows five nights a week all over the Bay area, so I encourage you to check them out. Dunedin’s Martini Club is across the street from Knology Park, on the currently-under-construction Douglas Ave. Douglas Avenue has been a wreck for months, and I’m told they won’t be able to pave it until a full day comes along without rain, which in August is unlikely, and it was probably not the best idea to execute a street repaving in the summer, but that’s Pinellas County for you.

You might think, given its name, that Martini Club would be a high-class, ritzy place, like Blue Martini or Martini Bar. It is not. I don’t mean that in any negative manner, seriously. Martini Club is more of a “roadhouse” feel, dirty and smoky and filled with trucker-capped mulleted locals, drinking $1.50 PBRs. BRO was up to their usual rockingness, and during their first break I struck up a few conversations, as I usually do in places where I don’t know anyone.

A balding man in a grey tank top and missing a few teeth asked me what I did.

“I teach,” I answered.

“What do you teach?”

“Persuasion.”

“Well how can I persuade you to get outta my f*ckin’ face?”

I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of comedic trap. Yet this is the kind of response I’ve gotten everywhere in Pinellas, be it the bookstore, supermarket, or St. Pete Beach cabana bar. I’m not sure what the hangup is, but it’s some insight into the barriers I’ve found on this side of the bay. (I should note that the Martini Club bartenders were fantastic and the friendliest people in the bar.)

It was nice, though, to see how well people took to the band; most of the bar’s patrons had never heard of Basic Rock Outfit, and I saw several purchasing CDs as the bar was closing (at the odd time of 1:30) which made me happy, though three hours of mingling hadn’t resulted in a single conversation of more than a minute or so. I’ve often compared Hillsborough to Pinellas with a drug reference: “Tampa is to St. Pete as coke is to weed.” After a year of living on this side, I’m not sure the analogy works anymore.

Maybe I’ll figure it out eventually. After all, I’m new in town.

Danger! Danger!

Florida’s economy is on the brink of recession:

“Florida is the epicenter for all the problems that exist in the housing industry,” said Lewis Goodkin, president of Goodkin Consulting Corp. and a property adviser in Miami for the past 30 years, who also foresees a recession. “”The problems we have now are unprecedented and a lot of people will get burnt.”

If the housing glut isn’t going to kill us, the new municipal taxes will:

The fee increases threaten to erase some or all of the initial savings in property taxes, which lawmakers put at $174 for the average homeowner this year.

I tend to worry — a lot — but I wasn’t thinking about any of these things as I slept at noon on Saturday, dreaming of waking up to see a foot of fluffy white snow outside my window. Instead, I woke to the sound of a fist on my door, a fist connected to the body connected to the scowling face of my landlord. Actually, he wasn’t scowling, but I sleep with my contacts in and things tend to look upside down in the moments after I awake.

My landlord, who also goes by the name of “my roommate’s dad,” invited me to renew my lease in the house where I live in Countryside. There were, of course, some consequences:

1. My rent is going up $100 a month.
2. My roommate’s boyfriend is also living with us now.

Only in Florida does adding a roommate increase your rent. To his credit, I understand why my rent has to increase. He was taking a huge loss on the mortgage with my only paying $500 a month on this very nice three-bedroom house in north Clearwater. Yet in the volatile housing market, there’s a big difference between $500 and $600 a month, especially when your annual income is only $10,000 before taxes (as mine is). Throw in the long commute I’m currently suffering and I have to seriously consider moving to Tampa. Can I find housing equal to where I’m living now for less than $600 a month in Hillsborough? Here in Countryside I have a garage, a nice kitchen with new appliances, a backyard, a giant palm tree, a quiet neighborhood, and a roommate whom I’m sure will never return my affections, especially considering that her boyfriend lives with us now.

This isn’t a “find Tim a new place to live” post, because I’m pretty sure I’m just going to absorb the rent increase by switching from Boddington’s to Michelob Light at my new favorite bar, Mike & Lisa’s Cricketers. It’s more intended to get a reaction from you about what real-world impacts property tax (etc) increases have on people. If we’re headed toward recession, and it’s getting obscenely expensive to live here, who’s going to move here but wealthy retirees? How will USF survive without graduate assistants (all of whom chose other universities where it was cheaper to live) to teach 60% of classes? How will Tampa survive when its artists and actors and musicians and comics leave town because the income isn’t meeting the expenses?

Danger. Danger.

This post was originally written on Tuesday, and is now updated with the most recent information.

A Tampa man is in jail for violating Florida’s flag-desecration law.

Police say 45-year-old Donnie White stomped on the flag, sat on it, and “rubbed it on himself.” He’s charged under Florida statute 876.52, under the category “Criminal Anarchy, Treason, and Other Crimes Against Public Order” (check it out, it’s almost entirely made up of laws aimed at the KKK):

Public mutilation of flag.–Whoever publicly mutilates, defaces, or tramples upon or burns with intent to insult any flag, standard, colors, or ensign of the United States or of Florida shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.

First degree misdemeanors are punishable by a $1,000 fine and a year in jail. It isn’t White’s first clash with the cops; Hillsborough County records show several open container and disorderly conduct violations. Yet Donnie may have more than a public defender on his side this time around; flag desecration laws were struck down by the 1989 Texas v. Johnson Supreme Court case (one my Public Speaking students know very well).

I love America. I cheer for us in the Olympics and World Cup. I vote. I blow sh*t up on Independence Day. I have a flag I fly from time to time. Yet I recognize the semiotic difference between signifier and signified. Donnie White wasn’t stomping on America; he was stomping on the symbol of an idea — an idea that, by way of the First Amendment, protects his right to stomp on it (though I doubt Donnie had any particular political expression in mind).

Flag desecration laws are fairly ludicrous on their face, however — regardless of their unconstitutionality. This is for several reasons:

1. The U.S. Flag Code is regularly violated. Here’s a few examples:

2. To ban desecration of an object, you have to define that object. How do you define the American Flag? If I draw it on a blackboard with chalk, am I not allowed to erase the blackboard? If I make an American Flag cake am I not allowed to eat it?

3. What, exactly, is desecration? How do you delineate between burning the flag in protest and burning it to dispose of a used or worn flag?

Certainly if this story makes any kind of national news, the ACLU will come to Donnie White’s aid — and they should, as Florida’s law is in clear violation of Texas v. Johnson. Interestingly enough, Donnie would be in the same situation if he’d stomped on the Confederate flag — that’s illegal in Florida too.

Thoughts?

– UPDATE –

Donnie’s out of jail.

The First Amendment gives people the freedom to desecrate the American flag.
That’s why the state attorney’s office decided to drop charges Thursday against a Tampa man police say stomped on the flag this week. The archaic Florida law holding him was unconstitutional, officials said.

Nice of them to realize that — but why did it take three days?

Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said the arresting officer was not aware of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Texas v. Johnson is one of the most well-known U.S. Supreme Court decisions — I learned about it in HIGH SCHOOL. You’re telling me that not one person, from the arresting officer, to the booking officer, to the prosecutor, to the JUDGE AT THE ARRAIGNMENT had never heard of it?

Donnie White spent three days in jail for no reason. Hillsborough County residents will foot the bill. Are there graver injustices in the world? Of course. But this case might be a microcosm of other problems in the Hillsborough County system…