Ready to Take On The Day(tm)? Great! But first, you’ve gotta retake the ground humanity lost yesterday, OK?
A bill that would allow Florida churches to refuse to perform same-sex marriages passed the House Civil Justice Committee with a 9-4 vote, even though churches in Florida are already legally protected from having to do so, and no one in the world can cite a case in which a Florida church was ever forced to perform a same-sex marriage. Small government in action, kids.
In an effort to bring more transparency to the process through which moneyed interests attempt to influence local lawmakers, the Hillsborough County Commission passed a motion to require paid lobbyists to pre-register for their visits to county officials, to create an online public record of their interactions. It’s the local-politics equivalent of that scene in every vampire movie where the hero shines sunlight on the creatures, and they hiss and writhe before backing away into the shadows once more. (Disclaimer: Not all paid lobbyists are vile, scheming sociopaths. But the ones who most loudly oppose this idea, or try to get around it — well, watch those fuckers.)
OK, don’t die, but Real Housewives star Bethenny Frankel will be appearing at the grand opening of the new Tampa Premium Outlets shopping center during the last weekend in October! All right, all right — if this news actually excites you, feel free to die.
And finally, a super-weird one: The Sarasota County School District has agreed to pay $600,000 to the families of three students who died under strange circumstances shortly after being hypnotized by the former principal of North Port High School — who admitted to hypnotizing many students, for reasons ranging from increasing focus on guitar lessons to feeling less pain on the football field. This is why employers should always check the “Hobbies” section of a prospective new hire’s application for warning-sign stuff like “amateur healing mesmerism enthusiast.”
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2015.
