Good morning, and a very happy and inspiring International Women’s Day. But first, yesterday:
St. Pete residents and local business owners convinced the city’s Development Review Commission to deny a variance that would allow a developer to create a Dunkin’ Donuts with a drive-thru on 1st Avenue North just west of MLK in the city’s hip EDGE District. Despite passionate pleas about local flavor, corporations being awful and the like, the real reason the Commission was able to strike down the proposal is that it’s insane to consider putting a high-traffic drive-thru in that spot, or pretty much any spot on 1st Ave. N. east of, say, 34th Street. Activist kids, take heed: Passion is awesome, but citing real-world safety (or legal) issues is the way to get things done — particularly if the authorities in question might kinda agree with you in the first place, and might kinda be looking for a legit reason to give you what you want.
Oh my god guys there’s an otter, or possibly multiple otters, terrorizing kayakers on the Braden River. That’s riverly crazy! Oh, wait, no, I screwed that up. Hopefully at least one media outlet did the pun correctly.
This just in: Tampa Bay allergy sufferers are currently living in a body-horror hellscape of their genes’ own making. And to top it off, there’s been such demand for over-the-counter eyedrops that they’re now getting hard to find. Just do what I did: briefly consider removing your eyes with a nice sharp melon baller, then learn how to sleep with a pair of jeans fresh from the freezer wrapped around your face.
And finally, the Florida House passed that gun bill that’s full of common-sense stuff that should’ve been done a long time ago for restriction and attention to mental health dangers, and also has that one weird thing about turning some of our educators into Wyatt Earps, and doesn’t include the ban on military-style semi-automatic rifles that so, so many people think is the right thing to do. Progress? Yes, of a sort — at work yesterday, several of my colleagues expressed surprise that even this much got done. But consider this: There are something like 12 million registered voters in the state of Florida. There are reportedly around 4.5 million NRA members in the entire country. Think about those numbers, and decide who’s really got the power before November.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2018.
