The bottom line is, Pinky was just too good for this world.

The man who assaulted Pinky the Chilean flamingo at Busch Gardens on Tuesday, causing serious enough injury that the bird had to be euthanized, was charged with felony animal cruelty. Now, I'm not saying Joseph Anthony Corrao is some drunken asshole troglodyte, but the Times story certainly has me thinking it very loudly. I'm also not suggesting that you carry a golf club in your car just in case you see someone in public abusing an animal and feel the need to pummel that person, but there's really no need to keep the 4 iron in my bag, because I've never been able to hit anything smaller than, say, the shoulder blade of a drunken asshole troglodyte with it with any consistency.

The Hillsborough County Commission voted unanimously to back a trial period for a ferry service linking Tampa and St. Pete's downtowns. What a… wow, that's really… do they really think… nope, nothing negative or sarcastic to say about it. Use it when it opens, people, or look forward to dying not-so-historic on the fury road. (The fury road in this case being, probably, the Howard Frankland.)

Hey, did you hear the rumor about there being no pictures in the press of the first-ever U.S. law-enforcement officer arrested for aiding an Islamist terrorist organization because the dude's white, and that plays against the whole "we need to live in fear of people who look different than us" narrative? What a world. A broken, stupid world.

And finally, the 35,000 people expected to attend Tampa Comic Con each day (starting Friday) are also expected to seriously bone traffic around the downtown area. Who says nerds have no influence? (Well, nobody observant, actually, since nerd-ism has profoundly influenced pop culture over the last decade or so.) Also, good luck getting somebody out to reset your router this weekend.

This article appears in Aug 4-11, 2016.