If you worked as an extra in a major motion picture that shot locally, we'd like to hear your story! Oh, wait, we've already heard your story, because you've been telling anyone who would listen since freakin' Cop and a Half came out.
Stars Bryan Cranston and Benjamin Bratt walked the red carpet and posed for photos with fans at the Tampa Theatre premiere of locally shot thriller Infiltrator. Moviegoers welcomed them like royalty, then ruined the premiere itself by loudly and incorrectly identifying the bank onscreen as the one right down the street from their house every 14 seconds or so.
A Lakeland woman is calling for drastic procedural changes at a local Mercedes dealership after she found a semiautomatic handgun in the cubby of a loaner car. I know, right? A Mercedes dealership in Lakeland? The world is a strange and frightening place.
Cops in Sarasota County continue to look for a man who allegedly set somebody's pet rabbit on fire in mid-June. Here's a tip: If you see someone setting any living thing on fire, you might consider beating them unconscious with a shovel right then and there, which ensures they'll still be around when the authorities arrive, and provides the added benefit of stopping them from continuing to burn a living thing alive. (Disclaimer: We can't guarantee this will be deemed strictly legal.)
And finally, speaking of fire, they're finally recalling all those two-wheeled "hoverboards" that aren't really hoverboards due to many, many, many cases of combustion. So if you didn't already burn your feet and begin the process of suing an obscure Indonesian toy-part manufacturer or, much more likely, get tired of your Christmas present and throw it away in February, it's Get Paid Because Someone Else Was Stupid/Greedy/Evil (Check One) Time.
This article appears in Jul 7-14, 2016.