Whew. Pants-splitting tract stuffage. Black Friday madness. The new Star Wars trailer. The insane TSA lines at Midway. It's been one hell of a four-day weekend. Now that your relatives have gotten back home (or at least left your premises), let's see what else happened...
THURSDAY, NOV. 27
Tampa Bay's Metropolitan Ministries prepared 6,000 Thanksgiving meals for people in need this holiday. Fifty-five people volunteered on Thanksgiving Day at MM's Florida Avenue location alone. A big, big thank you to each and every person who gave their time and talents to help those less fortunate this year.
A Tampa Bay Times piece looked at the "technology gap" faced by Bay area schools who can't provide the resources for savvy kids who need more up-to-date digital tools. "Duh," said every kid who's attended public school since Ferris Bueller changed his grades online — in1986.
FRIDAY, NOV. 28
America successfully exported rampant Black Friday jackassery to the U.K., where, we are told, "hooligans" got up to a bit of the ol' "what's all this then," and several "dustbins" were overturned in the "unpleasantness."
Yelp ranked St. Pete third on its list of Small Business Saturday-friendly cities, and included places like Haslam's Book Store and ARTpool in its list of worthy shops. This may give those businesses the boost they need to grow into evil, heartless Big Businesses and move up to the Black Friday big leagues, because THAT'S THE DREAM.
SATURDAY, NOV. 29
Florida Democrats were reported to be strategizing an end run around low midterm turnouts by starting a legislative initiative to have the governor elected in the same year as the president. Perhaps they should've started working on that before this year's low midterm turnouts, when there were still some of them in office.
SUNDAY, NOV. 30
The 2014 hurricane season ended, marking the ninth consecutive year Florida has avoided landfall. Meteorologists are saying things about it, but who cares because meteorologists are useless, bet-hedging guessmongers who should all be tossed bloody into shark-infested waters and told not to worry because there's only a 30 percent chance they'll be eaten.