One of Pres. Bill Clinton’s few endearing qualities is his ability to adopt as his own the emotions of those around him. So it was when he came to Miami last week. At a state Democratic Party fundraiser the president couldn’t help but feel the pain of Miami’s Cuban-American community…
n June 29 Ramon Saul Sanchez was working at his day job as an office manager for a community development corporation in Little Havana when he first learned that something terrible was taking place off the coast of Surfside. Tellingly, the first person to call him was a TV reporter…
Disco music is a disease. I call it Disco Dystrophy. The people victimized by this killer disease walk around like zombies. We must do everything possible to stop the spread of this plague. — Steve Dahl It was with those words that Dahl, a Chicago FM radio DJ, opened a…
Lead Stories *In the course of a June report decrying the Canadian economy’s discrimination against people who do unpaid work (mostly housework), the feminist group Mothers Are Women called on the government to pay wages to women for breast-feeding to bring that activity in line with the production of other…
The day after the Coast Guard fiasco involving six Cuban rafters off the beaches of Surfside, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart went to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and called on the Clinton administration to suspend its 1995 immigration accord with Cuba. “This administration’s policy toward Cuba can no…
Lolita: A Whale Who Spins a Web Lissette Corsa’s recent article on Lolita (“Livin’ la Vida Orca,” July 8) was great! I am working for Lolita’s freedom along with Howard Garrett, though I do it differently. You mentioned schoolchildren from Washington and their letters and petitions to Wometco CEO Arthur…
At this inaugural meeting of a new Miami Beach homeowners association, the information table held cookies and juice as well as sign-up sheets where neighbors could leave their names and complete a questionnaire about their interests and concerns. I was there because it was my neighborhood. One of the organizers…
Cheryl Wolosz tells me she feels sick. “I just threw up,” she says, her voice trembling over the phone. “They told me he’s coming back to work next week. I cannot believe this is happening. They are not going to do anything about him. He shouldn’t be a cop.” Wolosz…
Fidel! Quick turn on the TV news!” “What is it? Can’t you see I’m watching the autographed copy of Titanic that Leo gave me last year.” “Please, Fidel, it’s important.” “Okay, okay. What station?” “Try Channel 10 out of Miami.” “Are you kidding? You want me to turn off Kate…
Welcome to Everglades National Parking Lot Regarding Jake Bernstein’s article “Swamp and Circumstance” (July 1), man is the animal who walks upright (when he’s not driving), the creature whose survival depends not on fangs or claws but on his capacity to use hand and brain to manipulate the world around…
Lead Stories *An evangelical Christian organization in Hereford, England, announced in May that it had set up a 24-hour-a-day camera on Jerusalem’s eastern gate to capture Jesus’ millennial return (www.messiahcam.org). Also in May the firm Triumph International Japan announced it would market the Armageddon Bra, with a sensor in the…
Entertainment-industry maven Peggi McKinley, our very own martyr for free speech, recently experienced a kind of harmonic convergence that could only happen in Miami. Just as the town was preparing to welcome the third annual MIDEM international music conference, McKinley received some news that was like music to her ears:…
Last week something remarkable happened. Something I wasn’t certain was possible. Last week Alex Penelas became mayor. Oh, sure, I know he was elected mayor back in 1996, but all that did was confer on him a title. Until now Penelas has simply been playing mayor. He dresses up in…
Lead Stories *In April the Unique Recoveries collection agency in Bombay, India, hired six eunuchs to go to the homes or offices of obstinate debtors to embarrass them into paying up by dancing around and threatening to lift their saris to expose their “genitallessness.” Unique’s director said he expects his…
Miami May Be a Small Town, but It’s Home to One Very Big Ego Brett Sokol’s “arthouse” movie feature (“Missing the Big Picture,” June 17), while mostly excellent, also angered me. An anonymous local arts writer was quoted as saying, “Miami is the sticks. You don’t get art films in…
Lead Stories *Latest Diaper Research: Jill Furlough, age 31, of Lakenheath, England, told the London Daily Telegraph in April that she had been frightened by green sparks flying out of her one-year-old son Joshua’s disposable diaper. Scientists contacted by the newspaper said it was triboluminescence, a buildup of energy similar…
Alianza Nacional: Lost, Loony, and Illiterate It is with dismay, disgust, and horror that I read Alex Salinas’s article on Andres Orta (“A Mind in Exile”) in your June 10 issue. Poor bastard! Orta is waaaaay off course here. Obviously he is not very well informed on many issues. His…
That Mermaid Means War! Robert Andrew Powell’s article regarding Pow Wow (“Miami: See It Like a Pampered, Sheltered, Spoiled-Rotten Tour Operator from Munich,” June 10) was enough to make me explode. As a Miami Beach resident I know I have rights, and that I should not be shut off from…
Lead Stories *Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading (England) University told the Times of London in May that “several” firms had approached him about surgically implanting transponder microchips into their workers as a way of tracking their hours and whereabouts. Cybernetics expert Warwick last year put a chip into his own…
It came as no surprise that Phil Hamersmith’s memorial service this past Sunday was a standing-room-only affair. Hamersmith, who died last week after suffering a heart attack, had been a political force in South Florida for more than twenty years. The list of politicians who came to pay their final…
Lead Stories *Students enrolled in the pornography course at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, submitted final graded projects of fiction, photography, a video of a man’s eyes as he masturbates, and in one case, a bondage performance in which a female begs to be whipped with a rubber cat-o’-nine-tails, according…
The Doctor Is in a Snit As a fellow in the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner Department and as one of the subjects mentioned in Jose Luis Jimenez’s article “Quincy He Ain’t” (May 27), I feel it is important to correct certain facts and to provide additional information in considering the quality…
