Good morning! Do you feel like America is a little closer to being great again this morning? If so, you're definitely white, wealthy, woefully misinformed on the subject of taxes or some combination of the three.
New video came out of the burglar who broke into Ella's Americana Folk Art Cafe and Martha's Place in Seminole Heights over the weekend. I guess it was naive to hope that, given all Seminole Heights businesses and residents have been through this fall, petty criminals might be courteous enough to move like one neighborhood over for a while.
Two men were arrested in Lakeland and charged with leaving three "The Works Bombs" in parks around the area. "The Works Bomb," BTW, is a "bottle bomb" experiment in chemical reactions that should only be conducted by high-school teachers in controlled environments, not left by giggling morons in parks to create an environmental hazard and maybe spray somebody's kid with toxins when it explodes. This is not "a prank." This is a class-three felony and maybe some ruined lives.
Speaking of bombs, a Clearwater man was arrested when an FHP officer discovered what appeared to be a homemade explosive device during a traffic stop. The man also reportedly had more devices and manufacturing equipment at home. Yeah, two unrelated local homemade-bomb stories in one day. Unless you're recently retired from the local bomb squad, you do not get to adopt "building incendiary devices" as a hobby. And even then we'd like to see a note from somebody saying it's OK.
Speaking of activities that aren't hobbies, Manatee County cops are looking for whoever flattened the tires of 20 vehicles in a Bradenton apartment complex parking lot overnight, apparently just for fun. Inconveniencing strangers and costing them money is hilarious! A theory that only one specific car was targeted and that the others' tires were flattened to confuse and distract law enforcement was dismissed as really, really dumb.
And finally, a 36-year-old man who commandeered a paddleboat and had to be rescued from a fountain in the middle of Orlando's Lake Eola at 4 in the morning said he'd taken too much Molly and just wanted to be among the swans. I'll take the guy who gets high and communes with the nonjudgmental swans as a hobby over the recreational tire-flatteners and amateur bomb-building enthusiasts any fucking day.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.