If the weekday July Fourth holiday still has your internal clock all screwed up and it just doesn't feel like Thursday, don't worry too much about it — after all, life is just a meaningless trudge toward the empty black nothingness of the void. Now who wants coffee?
Gandy Beach and Ben T. Davis Beach, two of the Bay area's more notorious "beercan beaches," routinely get trashed far worse than what's usual even for them on July 4, necessitating costly taxpayer-funded and/or volunteer-fueled cleanup on the 5th. Having driven by Gandy Beach on numerous late nights to witness what looked from the street like Beyond Thunderdome being reenacted from the beds of Confederate flag-strewn dualie pickups by garbage-firelight, I find the idea that it's somehow worse on the Fourth… deeply troubling.
A crime-y moron busted into a Clearwater convenience store, spent a while unsuccessfully trying to bash open one of those games that pushes the quarters around, then left — without actually stealing anything. Obviously somebody was gonna take the clothes dryer he'd reserved if he didn't get back to the laundromat quickly with some change.
The state and the Seminole Tribe of Florida agreed to end their lawsuit over blackjack tables at Seminole-owned casinos. This is polite mainstream media codespeak for the state finally realizing it can't lawyer-bully an entity that has A) more money than the state and B) seen so much government-sanctioned horror visited upon it that a century of legal wrangling probably sounds like a nice break.
And finally, Hobby Lobby, the company that thinks it's OK to force female employees to stay off birth control in the name of doing the right thing in God's eyes, was busted for "accidentally" smuggling looted religious artifacts out of Iraq. To quote Chandler Bing, "Ah, the high road."
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.