First, a gasoline tanker overturned on I-95 during morning rush, tumbling
over the rail and into a church parking lot with an explosion and
conflagration, y'know, typical Bruckheimer cinematic ka-blooey!-ness, and
then a fire of unknown origin took out Gatorland in Orlando. In fact, the
iconic "concrete alligator mouth that visitors walked through" was "spitting
fire like a storybook dragon," wrote the Associated Press. (Thanks to the
Internet, gators-on-the-barbie jokes were flying before the fire was out,
but the actual toll was one gator and two pythons.) [WPLG-TV (Miami)]
[Associated Press via Tampa Tribune] [Jerry Bruckheimer]

An Ohioan for Floridian of the Year If Florida is not the center of electoral attention in the next week, we can
once again thank Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, whose
proclivity for partisanship makes the Katherine Harris of 2000 look
entry-level and whose Ohio shenanigans in 2004 were welcome distractions
here. He's in trouble this week already for apparently not fixing since the
May primary a problem with Diebold machines that scan absentee ballots. (By
the way, in a decision announced yesterday, a Japanese appeals court,
reviewing a 1-vote margin in a local election in Naruto, ruled that the
"intention of the voter" and not the official format of the ballot,
prevails. This one had to do with whether supporters of Shigemitsu Bando,
who is apparently a very hairy man, would have their votes counted if they
marked them "Bando the Beard" instead of by his formal name. The formalness
caucus, chaired by Jameseki Bakeru, was said to be considering another
appeal.) [Cleveland Plain-Dealer] [Reuters]

The Scandal Is Not What's Illegal; It's What's Legal The relentless investigator Tony Pipitone of Orlando's WKMG-TV filmed
illegal dumping of "lightly treated" human waste from Osceola County and the
city of Orlando on land near Sawgrass Lake south of Clermont in Lake County.
Well, it turns out that, though those dumps were illegal, legal dumps on
the land are almost as scary. The illegality came from their being a little
too close to grazing cattle and to Harmony High School, but somehow
officials seem satisfied that if they separate the dumps a bit more, the
waste won't seep into the lake, won't get lapped up by cattle, and won't
draw flies strong enough to flap all the way over to the school cafeteria.
[WKMG-TV (Orlando)]

More Things To Worry About Today The ol' "I was shot, but this-here Bible in my pocket absorbed the bullet"
thing actually worked, for a Jacksonville man [Florida Times-Union] . . . .
. An 18-month-old boy was ejected in a crash, flew through the air, landed
underneath a house, and survived (but was hospitalized with
non-life-threatening injuries) [and his first words will probably be, I go
ride again!] [St. Petersburg Times] . . . . . $45m to renourish the 6-mile
Broward beach from Hallandale to Dania, and it didn't last a year, with the
coup de grace being last week's non-hurricane winds [WPLG-TV
(Miami)] . . . . . Game Show Network introduces a Foley's Follies online
game, with Foley's head Pac-Man'ing through a maze chasing Congressional
pages [New York Times]

This article appears in Nov 1-7, 2006.