Thursday October 4, 2007

You know what, fuck House of India. I’ve been there a few times with friends (who insist on going regularly despite consistently bad treatment) and while the food is fine, the service is uncomfortable and weird. But this takes the cake: they had a lady arrested because of a misunderstanding over $3 on her bill. And it pretty much sounds like their mistake. I’m sorry for you people in Coral Gables with restaurants that feel like they can abuse you because there’s no competition, but this place needs to be boycotted. Update: Also, fuck the asshole Coral Gables police officer who thought it would be a good idea to arrest this woman, and the asshole police chief who agreed. (via whl)

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The bastards changed the time of the Museum Park meeting tonight from 6 to 4:30pm! WTF — they’re claiming conflict with a later event, but isn’t this a transparent effort to make it impossible for many people to come? Why isn’t anyone making noise about this?!

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Proposed new Metrorail and other transit lines

BRT, Metrorail, DMU

Left to right: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), Metrorail, Disel Multiple Unit (DMU).

Below are proposed new transit lines from the executive summary of a Kendal Link study (download pdf of summary). While it focuses on South Miami, it has implications for the whole county. Still, the political situation in Kendall around some of these proposals is pretty controversial. This is mainly NIMB surrounding transit trains along existing, but minimally-used, tracks. As such, I’d be interested in hearing what South Miami/Kendall residents thing of these proposals.

It’s useful to know that this study considers anything under 5 years short-term planning, 5-15 years is mid-range, and over 15 years is long-range. You can click any of these maps to see a larger version.
 

Proposed Metrorail/BRT line along Kendall Drive.
 

Proposed North/South Metrorail line along Turnpike.
 

Proposed new Metrorail (orange) line and DMU (green) line.
 

Proposed North/South BRT line, alternative to above Metrorail option. I gather this is more useful to more people, but also more disruptive.
 

Putting it all together: this is the short/midrange transportation strategy.
 

And finally, the biggie: the long-range “preferred” transit strategy. It ain’t pretty, but this is what you get when you combine low-density sprawl with a mandate to reduce worldwide carbon emissions. Also: I still want my Metrorail beach-line.

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Wednesday October 3, 2007

Classical music comes back to Miami radio: I don’t know how I missed it, but WMCU 89.7 FM has been purchased by a company that intends to turn it into a classical station. May begin broadcasting later in this month. Yay! (via 26th Parallel)

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HUD takeover approved

I’m looking for something interesting, and it’s really just slim pickins. Yesterday the Dade Commission approved HUD’s takeover of the County’s housing agency. We knew this was coming, and the commission voted 11-1 for it because this way they get a little oversight and a little veto juice over some of the fed’s decisions. They’re unhappy, and so are housing advocates, on the grounds that the fed’s just a bigger bureaucracy (and so how can we expect it to do a better job).

But come on, people — the Miami-Dade Housing Agency was a clusterfuck for a very long time, lots of people knew about it, and they let it slide. And don’t give me “the problems are being addressed,” either. The response has been a completely limp, “we’re addressing the issues” type of shit, not the “we’re going to lock up everyone involved, and everyone who knew what was happening.” Also: you think that was the only Agency in the county that was corrupt? Where are the crackdowns on the other departments, Mr. Carlos Alvarez, Strong Mayor? Where are the results?

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Also: the Herald’s webmasters had nothing better to do, so they decided to overhaul the site’s misguided mandatory registration system. It went live yesterday and dumped anyone who registered after May of this year. If you’re going to re-register, please use names to let them know how you feel about the system (e.g. “Mr. Fuckyou Assholes”) and MyTrashMail.

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Tuesday October 2, 2007

What's up with mandatory PIP car insurance?

The state’s law requiring personal injury protection (PIP) insurance expired Sunday, though the fight is not quite over yet. What does this mean?

First, a primer on the exact changes (and please correct me if I’m wrong leaving out something important). The PIP law required every driver to carry $10,000 worth of protection for anyone injured by or in their car. It made Florida a “no-fault” state: if you’re in a crash with another driver, each drivers’ insurance covers his medical expenses, regardless of who caused the accident. Hence “no fault.” The logic behind this is that it allows everyone to get medical treatment without bureaucratic worries, and theoretically keeps costs low by minimizing lawsuits.

The downside of this is that if you already have medical insurance, you’re paying for double coverage. Many people who are in accidents that are not their fault also unsurprisingly report their insurance rates going up afterwards. So, the new law allows drivers to carry insurance for property damage only, should they so desire. Under the new system, if you’re in an accident, your regular health insurance will pay your medical bills, presumably recovering their costs from the person who caused the accident, in court if necessary.

This would be great if 1) everyone had health insurance and 2) everyone was smart enough to get insurance to cover injury they cause to others. To the extent that those two things are not true (only 80% of Florida residents currently have medical coverage; and don’t even get me started on #2), the new law is going to wreak havoc. The upside is savings for those that are properly insured, yet drive carefully enough not to actually cause accidents. More importantly, it will tend to hasten a state of affairs where we are forced to confront the larger medical/insurance disaster facing the country, as a much larger proportion of car accident victims arriving in hospitals will have no insurance covering them.

This highlights the real clusterfuck aspect of this change, which is that medical/insurance lobbies are essentially behind both sides of the issue. On the anti-PIP side are companies who are concerned about insurance fraud under the old system, which could easily pump money out of the system, $10,000 at a time, with simple staged accidents and shady doctors. On the other side are the doctors and hospitals worrying about the uninsured trauma cases they’ll be forced (god forbid) to treat and not be able to collect payment for.

That these are the two sides battling over something this important (rather then what’s best for people who’s just been in a serious car accident) is a sure sign of a broken system. I’m almost tempted to let them do away with it, let the situation come to a head, and then fix it from the bottom up.

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“Yet, despite this, there are those that recall the past failure of the much hyped Omni Mall when considering Midtown’s prospects for success. However natural this historic allusion may seem, the Omni, which never had the residential component Midtown has, is currently owned by a New York-based firm with billion dollar plans that span 10-15 years. Suffice to say times have changed.” Fine, but I still say that Midtown is no fun. The parking, even with validation, is a hassle. There’s no air conditioned part to the mall where you can just hang out. And they really, really need a big bookstore to make it the destination they so clearly want it to be.

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Monday October 1, 2007

“[Carlos] Suarez de Jesus may admire Kilimnik’s show, but that admiration seems intimately entwined with an attitude which diminishes and belittles women.”

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A list of still-live Miami-related Geocities websites, including Early aviation photographs, the Coconut Grove juggling exchange, ‘Nicholas Dunn’’’s Story’, and the charming South Beach crew. You may also enjoy the Firefox extension Timemachine 1.0, which will make ANY website look like 1996.

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The Florida Springs blog.

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The Little Havana roosters

william burroughswilliam burroughs

One of the more colorful bits to come out of the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust situation is the case of these fiberglass roosters. Eight of these were ordered by the trust five years ago (total cost: $26,000) to give some pizazz to Little Havana. They quickly became the subject ridicule, then of vandalism.

Most of them have been mercifully removed, one still stands, hopefully to remind our esteemed leaders to relax and keep their notions of “art” to themselves. For crying out loud — Bacardi logos? What on earth were they thinking?! I photographed these in 2003; Veronica mentioned one in her piece on Little Havana in 2005.

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You’ve got to love the Miami Herald. A great expose on misuse of funds at the non-profit Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust (part one of three!) runs alongside a director’s commentary style article about the reporters reporting the story. Maybe part 2 of the story will include a sidebar on the graphic designer who laid out the page.

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Much of the fault for the less-than-ideal experience of going to the Carnival Center falls on the architect, Caesar Pelli. I lamented the selection of Pelli’s firm for the Center over two years ago, and it’s nice to see the dots connected this way.

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Saturday September 29, 2007

William Burroughs is underrated Saturday

william burroughs

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Friday September 28, 2007

Kraftworks weekend

craft

Tonight

Saturday

Sunday

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Thursday September 27, 2007

“They certainly can’t be trying to attract us with confusion, can they? Or with the implication of a vowel movement, which gives a more-than-regrettable connotation to ‘going Downtown.’” Michael Lewis has some fun with DWNTWN MIAMI.

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What's so great about a housing crash?

platinum condominium Platinum Condominium has had some trouble selling units, so they decided to try selling 20 units off at a live auction. The results? Well, as Lucas put it at Miami Condo Investments, “the auction was a disappointing failure and Miami condo developers should soon be seeing brown stains appear in their underpants.”

Only 9 units were auctioned, and most came in hundreds of thousands less then what identical units have recently closed for. Luis has more analysis (plus videos of the event), and leaves open the question of whether this is the bottom. Well, folks, it’s not. Reports on the sub-prime mortgage meltdown have that fiasco continuing for about another year, so it’ll be feeding coal to this fire well into next year.

I still say this is great for Miami. The housing crash is nation-wide, and steps are being taken to fix the situation, but because it’s worst in Miami, those steps will do little more then soften the landing a tad. Consider the internet bubble of the 1990’s: one of the results was that insane amounts of fiber optic cable were laid down, much more then it made financial sense to do. The result is cheap broadband for everyone (and a hosing for greedy companies). The result here? Well, a hosing for greedy developers, but cheap condos for everybody! (With fancy lofts and primo stainless-steel appliances, natch.) Workforce housing? Give me a few more months, and I’ll have all the workforce housing you need on tap for ya.

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Wednesday September 26, 2007

Miami Project Hip Hop, 2007

hip hop project

Miami Light Project, one of my favorite organizations in the county, is opening their season with the Hip-hop project mini-festival, now in its 5th year. Performances, residencies, film screenings, and other events, most free, happen daily tomorrow through Sunday. This is ‘hip-hop’ in the broadest cultural sense, and filtered through an arts/cultural perspective, so nobody should feel unwelcome. Watch the video, and come out for an immersive mini-festival done up right.

Thursday, September 27, 2007 8:00pm
YOUTH EXPRESSIONS’ PERFORMANCE
The Light Box, 3000 Biscayne Blvd #100 Miami, Fl 33137- FREE-
Hip Hop Culture can be proud to have given birth to Youth Expressions (YE), a not-for-profit organization (501c3) committed to helping at-risk urban youth develop into self assured, focused, productive and skilled adults. Now in the 4th year of partnership with MLP, members will perform an original work developed during their MLP residency.

Friday, September 28, 2007 8:00pm LIGHT BOX STUDIO SHOWCASE
The Light Box, 3000 Biscayne Blvd #100 Miami, Fl 33137- RESERVATION REQUIRED-
This showcase features Rudi Goblen’s Insanity Isn’t and the Nicole Klaymoon’s Into the Fourth Dimension.

Saturday, September 29, 2007, 2:00pm
HIP-HOP: BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES FILM SCREENING AND DIRECTOR Q&A
The Light Box, 3000 Biscayne Blvd #100 Miami, Fl 33137- FREE-
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a riveting documentary that examines representations of gender roles in Hip Hop and rap music through the lens of filmmaker Byron Hurt, a former college quarterback turned activist. Conceived as a “loving critique” from a self-proclaimed “Hip Hophead,” Hurt examines issues of masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today’s Hip Hop culture.

Saturday, September 29, 2007, 8:00pm
UNIVERSES- LIVE FROM THE EDGE
Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, Fl 33139- $20.00-
Miami Light Project proudly presents the seminal NY-based theater company Universes’ in Live From the Edge, an evening that showcases the ensemble’s special brand of fusion theater in a “best of” evening that tracks the evolution of their poetic language from childhood rhymes and community rituals, to poetry and theater, Hip Hop and gospel. Redefining what theater is and who it speaks to, Live From the Edge is a unique performance event that turns the poem into a communal act.

NOTE: as of right now, you can get two-for-one tickets to this event (the only non-free event in the series) by entering the code ‘MPH10’ at this page. No idea how long this will work.

Sunday, September 30, 2007, 11:00am
Jeff Chang Book Signing and Discussion
Jeff Chang has written extensively on race, culture, politics, the arts, and music. His first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, garnered honors including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. He has also edited an anthology entitled Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, released in February 2007.

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The sad result of speeding in Miami — a boy on a bicycle hit by a speeding driver, as witnessed and reported by Asawaa. This is old, but I’ve been staring at it in my browser for over a month and it’s oddly compelling. Asawaa’s photostream is worth investigating, too. He has images that are stitched together from hundreds of smaller photos.

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Swimmers in Sunday’s triathlon.

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Next Thursday (October 4), the City of Miami Planning Department is having a meeting to discuss plans for the design of Museum Park. No idea what they did to publicize this meeting, but I note that their web page doesn’t even mention the time (it’s 6 pm). Inexcusable. Michelle at Museum Park Forum caught this. It’s at the Orange Bowl Stadium Athletic Club.

Update: The bastards changed the time to 4:30pm! WTF, they’re claiming conflict with a later event, but isn’t this a transparent effort to make it impossible for many people to come?? Why isn’t anyone making noise about this?!

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Hey, would anyone be interested in creating a Wikipedia article about Awesome New Republic?

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Tuesday September 25, 2007

Get that resume together: the National Hurricane Center’s hiring. Position: director.

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Sushi Samba

Sushi Samba is obnoxious; if you can deal with that, you’ll probably love it. Exquisitely designed by Scott Kester, its shanty-space-pod interior, immaculate black-clad waitstaff, and perfect futuristic-Brazilian music give it a singular retro-modern atmosphere that would be right at home on TV.

Despite living no more than a few blocks of away since it opened years ago, I’d never been; this weekend a friend and I decided to give it a shot. It was Saturday afternoon and SS was fairly empty. We arrived, and . . . immediately had a problem with the hostess. You see, SS has two types of tables — 5 and 6-person booths, and outrageously uncomfortable tables for two. We didn’t like the first table we were offered, and even the second one was less then ideal. There were parties of two seated at booths, but it seems that we’d arrived after some sort of cut-off time after which this was no longer possible, in anticipation of the evening rush. A bit of tension ensued, and we ended up acquiescing to the cramped but not uncomfortable little table.

After that, though, the evening went rather remarkably well. Our waitress (the record will note that she was tall, beautiful, and really, really good at her job) eased our lingering irritation with an introduction the the restaurant’s aesthetic (“Japanese-Brazilian”), and got our waters. So I’ll cut to the chase: the food was great. We had beer, sake, several sushi rolls, edamame, and dessert, and every single thing was spectacular. The secret of their success is that all the portions are a little smaller, and a little more expensive, then you’d expect. Still, after tax and tip, we barely cracked $100 for two people.

The sushi rolls are a cut above. Try the Green Envy (wasabi pea crust, tuna, salmon, asparagus, and aji amarillo-key lime mayo) or the Neo Tokyo (yellowfin tuna, tempura flake, and aji panca), and you may wonder why you’re paying twice what you’d pay for the same amount of food in a regular sushi joint, but only until the first taste. There is substance to this here style.

When the kitchen was out of spoons for our dessert, they apologetically brought out two sets of huge soup-spoons and tiny spoons (then our waitress rushed out with the correct spoons, still warm from the dishwasher), which pretty well sums up how good the service was (but not everyone seems to have had quite this good an experience). I left feeling like quite the elegant slouch — Sushi Samba is style over substance, but only just barely.

Sushi Samba Dromo (menu)
600 Lincoln Rd. (Pennsylvania Ave)
Miami Beach

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Miami Herald Digital. Another in a long series of efforts by newspapers to try to make money by making the internet behave more like paper news. “The electronic editions follow similar launches by . . . The New York Times and Washington Post.” — I’m shocked that this passed the laugh test at chez Herald — the New York Times’ online edition launched in 2001. At this rate, the Herald will open its archives in 2013. (via Herald Watch)

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Monday September 24, 2007

It never ceases to amaze me how many frickin blogs there are. Behold Miami Drums, dedicated to . . . well, drums in Miami. You’d think it’s new, but you’d be wrong: been around for over a year. No cheesy blogspot address, either. Update: Also — a list of Miami food blogs.

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The Big Squeeze, North Miami.

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The Miami Herald comes out in favor of nuclear energy. I agree.

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