Welcome to your midweek cavalcade of disbelief and head-shakery. Enjoy!
Duke Energy apologized for blowing its self-imposed deadlines for getting Tampa Bay's power back on and promised to be more ready for the next big storm; meanwhile, Pinellas-based gubernatorial candidate Jack Latvala called for Big Energy to put its resources into infrastructure rather than political contributions and influence, while vowing not to accept any more campaign money from utilities. I believe all of these things equally.
A Dunedin middle school teacher returned to her classroom Monday after the school was used as an Irma shelter to find her personal collection of 80 books that she read to kids who score poorly in English had been stolen and are you fucking kidding me with this? This isn't 80 people idly picking up a book for comfort or distraction during a storm, then all deciding they just couldn't go the rest of their lives without finding out how it ended. This is literally stealing joy from children.
A three-hour standoff with Tampa police ended peacefully after somebody gave the man barricaded in his home a cigarette. You didn't know cigarettes save lives? They save my coworkers' lives on a weekly basis.
And finally, some good news for people who think the safest place to hide from all that's wrong with the world is between the years 1984 and 1991: there's going to be a sixth Terminator movie, one that brings back original franchise stars Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Because apparently now James Cameron thinks he can actually travel through time back to when this was a good idea, and make the three crappy movies not exist.
