Winter is coming. Well, not winter, really, but that slight drop in temperature and humidity that we in the Tampa Bay area associate with the end of the year — anyway, whatever, you know what I'm talking about. Check out yesterday's news and then get out that blanket that's not a blanket, really, but more of a thicker sheet — anyway, whatever, you know what I'm talking about.
Largo cops arrested a suspect late last night as he was leaving the convenience store he allegedly robbed. Apparently the dude has never seen a single one of those heist movies where the crew practices with a stopwatch and then yells shit like "40 seconds!" during the actual crime, because he reportedly browsed the store for an hour with one employee at knifepoint while another hid in the cooler and Facebooked the whole thing in between calling his brother and the police. Before you decide to commit a crime, it's important to take a good, long look at the choices you've made in your life that have led you to the point where you're considering committing a crime, and then not commit the crime, because obviously you make bad choices.
A St. Petersburg police officer who was fired for adjusting his work schedule without permission and then lying about his reason for doing so to superiors was reinstated after producing a recording he secretly made of a meeting with said superiors that proves he didn't lie. He has also filed a lawsuit. Now, the officer doesn't dispute that he screwed with his work schedule, and the difference between what he was doing and what his superiors said he claimed he was doing seems so innocuous as to be a negligible technicality. It's all very complicated; I guess the point is, work is gonna be really tense for some folks at the St. Petersburg Police Department for a while, and also hey, irony.
And finally, remember how the public got to vote on which design they wanted for the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway's Gandy extension? The design titled "Estuary" beat the design titled "Vivid" by a landslide, which basically just proves that if you're gonna build a thing in Florida, give it a Florida-sounding name rather than one that's also a porn company.
This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.
