Pinetop Peterson apparently has a lot of time on his hands in between chili contests. He wrote in wondering why it is that manhole covers are always on the same line as his tire path? He says they could move them a foot or so in either direction to keep them from becoming speed bumps.  Unless he wrecks his car, Pinetop and his his team will again be among the teams in the 21st annual Steve Otto Chili Championship at Channelside. 

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Ellen Brown, who owns the Old Tampa Book Company on Tampa St. with her husband David, is more curious than concerned about what someone was looking for.
“They came in through the old abandoned building behind us, dug a small hole through that building’s old bathroom and into ours and somehow squeezed into the bookstore. I call them the Hole in the Wall Gang, but whoever they were they must have been awfullysmall. I could never squeeze through that opening.’’
The police showed up but nothing seemed to be missing, although the store has over 40,000 books. “It would have had to have been a short story to get through that hole,’’ Brown says. 

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Tampa City Council is meeting this morning with a workshop on the city charter. As usual the council got bogged down with something else, this time an hour-long discussion on hiring a budget analyst as a way of saving money. Several council members not only want to hire an analyst but set up another committee.
Charlie Miranda, as only he can, limited his remarks to saying. “The only way you save money is by not spending it.’’
The council ignored his advice and will kill another hour or so next week figuring out how to spend money to save it. 

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While the Gasparilla Fim Festival is going on downtown, The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department is continuing its own video festival featuring fifty ways to beat up the disabled.
The problem with the latest video of an innmate in a wheelchair being dumped on the floor of a holding cell, is that it may not tell the whole story. Videos seldom do. On the other hand that might be good news for the Sheriff’s Department, which is beginning to look like the East coast distributor for YouTube.
It may very well be that the guy was out of control. There is little doubt the officers in charge were either out of control or had no idea how to deal with the situation.

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The Tampa Sports Authority is currently negotiating with the University of South Florida over a 15-year extension at Raymond James Stadium for its football games. Included in the bargaining is preferential rights for games on Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights during the football season.
Wasn’t there a time when colleges passed over Friday nights, leaving them to the high schools? But then that was before USF decided it was just going to another football school and join the pack. 

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I wish I could remember the first time I heard William F. Buckley Jr., who died today. I think it was back in high school and Buckley was in town to preach about the conservative movement that would soon take over the Republican Party and help Barry Goldwater get the nomination.
I do recall I couldn’t decide if he was ultimately cool or just a snob but that he had a way with words, whether or not they made sense. I even went out and got a subscription to his magazine “National Review,’’ which I pretended to enjoy and even understand although if ever a magazine could have used playmates, it was this one. 

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Did you read that story in Mother Trib this week about the “Doomsday Vault’’ in the Arctic? Norway spent close to $10 million constructing a vault only 620 miles from the north pole where they plan on storing 4.5 million seed samples in case of a global emergency such as a nuclear war. I felt like I was watching Dr. Stranglove comes to life.
A bunch of seeds will be OK for generations that might follow but I would feel better if they had a giant refrigerator up there stocked with Cuban sandwiches, deviled crabs and black beans. Man does not live on seeds alone. 

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Sorry to hear about the death of Channel 10 weatherman Dick Fletcher this morning. He was one of us; not just in the media business but in our community.
I only knew Dick casually but he was among that handful of “celebrities’’ I could call on for one event or the other to support a charity. He cared about the community and its people and how we treated both. One of his passions was studying the Florida environment and what we are doing to it. I’ll miss him. 

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Anybody who lives around here and has had to get anywhere at anytime on any road was probably not surprised by this statement from a road construction spokesman yesterday. His remarks came after construction workers put up barricades on northbound I-275 around the Armenia\Howard entrance ramps, creating massive backups.
John McShaffrey, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation, said “Sometimes you do things in the planning room and get in the real world and have it not work out. If we’d known, we wouldn’t have designed it that way.’’
I’d say that’s a big maybe. 

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Just came home and turned on the television. At first it appeared there were more troubles down at the County jail. Fortunately it was just the Serbs trying to burn down the American embassy in Belgrade.

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From the mailbag a few Readergraphs:
Mariella Smith usually writes about the environment or more to the point, what we are doing to it in the southern reaches of Hillsborough County. This one was a little different.
“You hit the nail on the head in your column today (2/15/08). My husband and I know Brian Sterner personally. As awful as it was to watch the one deputy dump him on the ground, the really sickening part was the way all the other deputies just walked around nonchalantly, this is is S.O.P. Not a single double-take. No one went over to ask’What’s going on?’ And that one creep smiles. If this is just one rotten apple, where was the shock among the rest of the staff?’

- On a completely different subject Bob Dwyer wrote in to comment on the column marking the 25th anniversary of the arrest of three county commissioners for bribery.
“I certainly remember the day (Jerry) Bowmer et al were taken down. I was a supervisor in the Tampa FBI office. My baliwick was directing violent crime investigations so I did not get involved in the comissioners’ case but I can tell you it was botched up in a very major way from the start. You can lay that at the feet of the egotistical US Attorney Bob Merkle.
“First of all, the case was a gift. A guy walked in, said he was being shook down by Jerry Bowmer and what should he do. He was wired up and in very short order we had Bowmer on tape in an extortionate conversation. Bowmer, of course, was a moron and rolled over immediately. Where to go from there?
What should have been done was to wire him up and let him roam around the county for the next six months or longer, recording hundreds of criminal conversations. Did that happen? No. Why? Because Merkle knew the legitimate venue for the case was the Organized Crime Strike Force and he wanted the glory for himself. So Bowmer was sent in the next day with the marked money, the busts went down and the cat was out of the bag. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that if Bowmer had been wired there would have been a wholesale cleaning out of county government.

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”Hi Steve...You may find this amusing , but my brother in law was very worried about it… My sister and family were in town from Brevard, North Carolina for the Outback Bowl last month and they stayed at the Hyatt downtown...They were on the 16th floor and had a great view of one of our bank buildings. My brother-in-law called me and said that he saw at least 200 buzzards swarming around on top of buildings. He thought there was something dead up there! He snapped some pictures and sure enough there were swarms up there. Is this true? I thought you would be a great source since you know Tampa so well. Thanks, Margaret Dixon.’’

- I do know about the buzzards. I also know about Brevard, where they pay homage to the white squirrels that meander around the town. My guess is our buzzards and their white squirrels wouldn’t be all that compatible.
My friend Bob Bishop, who used to work in one of those downtown buildings, did a study of the critters and discovered these are the same turkey vultures who show up in Hinckley, Ohio every Spring, where they have a Buzzard Day festival. He tried to get one going here a few Octobers ago -which is about when they arrive back in Tampa - holding a dinner and equiring everone to wear buzzard masks. For some reason it still hasn’t caught on.

-

é

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Just got back from the state fair where former GTE boss Bill Starkey was named Tampa’s Outstanding Citizen of the Year by the Tampa Metro Civitans.
Starkey is a good guy and has worked to imporve this town in areas from education to health care. I think his most impressive moment came in 2004 when he was asked to take over as interim director of the Port of Tampa. We were in a lurch and although Starkey admitted he knew little about running the port, he brought in new energy, helped make sweeping changes and did it all for free, figuring it was something he owed to the community.
The Civitans give out the award at what is called the Governor’s Luncheon, a huge deal with every muckey-much in town, inlcuding most of the elected officials and plenty of wannabes.
For the second year in the row Charlie Crist was late...I mean he was more than an hour late which isn’t all that acceptable even if you are the governor.
He finally rolled in, George Hamilton tan and all, took off his jacket, went to the podium and started right in telling us how swell everything is going in Florida, which could have fooled more than a few people in the hall. It was probably one corn dog short of a winner for the gov. who might have gotten a better reception if he showed up before everyone had to go back to work to pay their mortgage and fill up the gas tanks.

. 

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Haven’t been to the fair yet. I plan on hitting it Monday afternoon after the Governor’s luncheon which is a must event. I love the Governor’s luncheon. It reminds me of a similar event further down the midway at the poultry tent. There’s something about meandering about looking at the various breeds of chickens, all preening and strutting around, that reminds me of this other gathering of movers and shakers.

It’s also a good excuse to try whatever new deep-fried goodie that is the specialty of the year on the midway. The best thing is you can go up to the counter with absolutely no guilt and order a deep-fried chocolate bar or whatever, without asking the guy what he put into it.
I was sitting over at a Starbucks on Bay to Bay last week staring at the cup. They like to put inspirational messages on the cups. At the bottom it noted that the cup was made with “10 percent post-consumer recycled fiber.’’
You know, that’s more than I want to know and I doubt I’ll have to deal with any such information at the deep-fried food booth.

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Sixty-three years after his death, a photo taken minutes after the death of Ernie Pyle surfaced and was printed in newspapers and online this week. It was a striking picture of Pyle, stretched out on the ground shortly after he was killed by Japanese machine gun fire on the island of Ie Shima, April 18, 1945.
I was a fan of Pyle’s reporting and writing before I even got into this business.
After I read the story I went back and dug up one of his books, “Brave men’ I bring out once in awhile. Pyle made himself one of the guys during World War II, moving with and listening to the troops as they lumbered across Europe.
You can read his passages and understand more of what it was like in that war than anything I’ve seen or read about what is happening in Iraq or Afghanistan.
All of the technology - the emails, the video cameras - can’t replace someone who takes the time to listen and understand what is happening.
Listen to some of his words: “I sat in the darkness on the forward deck helping half a dozen sailors eat a can of stolen pineapple. Some of the men of the group were hardened and mature. Others were almost children. They all talked seriously and their gravity was touching. The older ones tried to raionalize how the law of averages made it unlikely that our ship out of all the hundreds involved would be hit...Younger ones spoke but little. They talked to me of their plans and hopes for going to college or getting married after the war, always winding up with the phrase, ‘ If I get out of this fracas alive.’
“As we sat there on the hard deck - squatting like Indians in a circle around our pineapple can - it all struck me as somehow pathetic. Even the dizziest among us knew...’’
And it goes on and you cannot stop reading. Pyle became one with an entire generation. That picture reminded me of what our profession is supposed to be about but all too often depends on technology instead of the human touch. 

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