Welcome to Wednesday, your gateway to the day before the three-day weekend. Optimism is elastic, you see.
A three-person panel ruled that the Florida Department of Corrections abused its power and violated its own policy in its retaliation against a whistleblower who came forward with allegations of corruptions and inmate abuse — but that it didn't engage in any criminal activity. Oh, OK. Well, as long as everybody knows they were wrong and promises not to do it again, let's move on. I heard some human traffickers need a stern talking to.
Yesterday's best headline was a also a bit of a tension breaker against the backdrop of the terror in Turkey: "Bomb squad determines suspicious suitcase left at Largo Mall just a suitcase." It's laugh-or-cry a lot of the time these days, kids.
In other fear-related news (and really, what isn't?), a new study calls Florida a "hot spot" for Islamophobia. What? The state that draws America's craziest, most violent and least educated down to its frustrating heat and racist-infuriating mix of cultures the way gravity draws poop down a water buffalo's hindquarters is nurturing widespread prejudice against a misunderstood subsection of mostly non-caucasians? That's ridiculous. Better go back and make sure you carried the 1, Poindexter.
And finally, yesterday's Times police blotter contained an interesting little story about a dude who returned to the Clearwater trailer park from which he'd been evicted, and "contaminated" its community pool with a 5-gallon bucket of an "unknown dark-colored substance." The blurb's exasperating lack of specificity regarding the substance is, I think, every bit as cruel as dumping five gallons of …whatever into a semi-public pool.
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.