This mammoth-sized 7up is actually a water tower, cleverly designed to mimic a soda can. It was originally a Canada Dry Ginger Ale can but got rebranded, as they say. You can find it in Jacksonville, alongside I-95 between University Blvd. and Bowden Road.
Everyone's talking about the city of Jacksonville's latest scheme, a system of "smart street lights" that will be openly used to gather data on citizens and monitor their activity. The system comes from General Electric, a corporation whose commitment to Big Brother tactics (and a long history of really crappy home appliances and poor customer service) is well documented.
So enraptured are these fascists with their new toy, they can't seem to keep their stories straight, however. David DeCamp, city spokesman, said that your personal data will be "hosted on GE Lighting's network, city and JEA may request data and use it internally." He then goes on to say "Data may be shared with third parties only with written consent of GE Lighting." Why does this not make me feel any better about the whole thing? And yet Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown is openly admitting he plans to use this data to fight the war on "distracted driving":
“I am fully supportive of preventing distracted driving,” Mayor Brown said, emphasizing that he recently signed a pledge to combat it throughout the city. “I want this data to impact performance. It's cost-effective and it will empower citizens and employees with data to use.”
But you might be surprised to learn that this is nothing new. In a little-noticed news report from 2011, we find that Jacksonville Police have already had twenty hidden cameras mounted in various places, like traffic lights and building rooftops. ""The cameras are not there to spy on people," the article quotes some dirtbag official, "They're actually there to make sure everyone is secure." Riiiiiight. And when they asked him if recordings are being kept, he wouldn't say.
Jacksonville has never been in my top 10 list of favorite Florida cities, and my desire to ever set foot there again is waning even further now. (Jacksonville Beach, on the other hand, I miss dearly. Despite the similar name, it's a totally separate city.)
Owls aren't normally known to attack human beings, but at least one or several of them in Jacksonville haven't gotten that memo and are going on the rampage.
In something that sounds straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, various news reports state that at least six people have been directly physically attacked by owls and numerous more terrorized in close calls over the last two weeks.
According to the First Coast News:
"It flew down and hit my inside my eye and inside my hair and on my forehead," She said, as she described what she says happened to her.
Her father told us he wound up in the emergency room, but she is OK now. So far neighbors told First Coast News the bird has hurt 5 kids plus Weyer. The bird of prey has people on their toes and it has them freaked out.
"They're nervous," Frank Forte said. He told FCN his daughter was attacked. "They're going outside...the kids are going out with helmets on. Umbrellas. Even when I go take the garbage out at night. I got a cardboard box over my head."
Eight- year-old, Sophia Forte, said she had an owl ordeal of her own 2 weeks ago.
Animals exhibiting atypical behavior seem to be on the rise. Bears are rarely aggressive enough to break into someone's home, but it happened in Florida recently and also in Canada, where a bear forced its way in through a window. And in Bieszczady, Poland, a bear killed a human for the first time in 50 years.
In North Carolina, a family dog abruptly changed personality, forced its way through a screen door, and mauled a toddler. In Montana, a police dog also inexplicably changed personality and attacked its master. Another police dog snapped in Humble, Texas recently.
In Norwich, England, two cows went insane and ran amok to such an extent they had to be shot. A third cow nearby was found dead of unexplained causes.
In Michigan, a group of schoolchildren were attacked out of nowhere by an unprecedented huge swarm of angry bees. A similar incident occurred in Texas, and at a funeral in Pakistan. Out-of-the-blue clouds of angry wasps killed a Mayor in Montreal and almost killed a policeman in Brookhaven.
A formerly calm pet cat went rogue and attacked its owner, resulting in a bizarre police standoff.
And in Cumbria, England, thousands of people are reporting pets going haywire and attacking them, leaving people whose job it is to explain such things without an explanation.
Is something, or an amalgamation of somethings, affecting animal behavior? Or are they all just simultaneously deciding it's high time to overthrow their hairless-ape overlords once and for all?
Little Talbot Island can be found 17 miles northeast of Jacksonville, on the A1A. It's 2,500 acres of state park property, with Big Talbot Island and Long Island nearby. Despite the nomenclature, Little Talbot Island is actually larger than Big Talbot Island due to erosion and nature's shifting whims of sand deposition.
Despite its rustic swamp-beach island appearance, amenities include a full–facility campground, beachside picnic pavilions, bath houses, boat ramps, nature trails, a playground for children, and a rental facility for bicycles, canoes, and other gear.
Big Talbot and Little Talbot are two of only a handful of barrier islands that still remain undeveloped in Florida. The Native American Timucua tribe were, so ethnologists say, the first humans to inhabit these islands. When the French arrived here in 1562, these islands were claimed as colonial territory. However, England and Spain claimed the islands as well, and in 1735, General James Oglethorpe named the Talbot Islands in honor of Charles Talbot, Lord High Chancellor of England. (I'm still trying to find out what the Timucua called them, and suggest we think about renaming them back to that.)
In Jacksonville they gave a street sign to some Open MRI place for some reason. Now, especially with the sign bent, it feels like you're standing at the corner of Dante and Open MRI, which is a pretty fair metaphor for life in Florida.
In Jacksonville, a man named Calvin Beaver is excited after 12 years of cultivating rare and exotic plants, to finally see his "Corpse Flower" - Amorphophallus titanum - bloom at last.
The plant usually requires seven to ten years before blooming for the first time. And after the initial blooming, it may not bloom again for another decade, while others may bloom every couple years. There's no second-guessing these critters. It's called the Corpse Flower because it smells like decomposing flesh to attract pollinators.
The Corpse Flower grows in the wild only in the equatorial rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, where was discovered just prior to its classification in 1878, and it was not successfully cultivated to bloom in American until 1937. If you want to try your hand at growing your own, learn how here and buy seeds here.
As its title refers to a prominent Miami-based train, it's no surprise that "Orange Blossom Special", one of the most enduring pieces of instrumental music in Americana, comes to us by way of a Floridian.
Ervin T. Rouse (often errantly spelled "Erwin") was born in North Carolina but came to make Florida his home. He and his brother Gordon spent their entire life performing that peculiar ancient music generally referred to by the common man as "Bluegrass" but which actually encompasses an entire minature Universe of different sounds. And yet, next to no one today knows who Rouse was, and they hardly knew it back then in his own lifetime.
"Orange Blossom Special" was copyrighted in 1938 by Rouse, and it was based on an even earlier tune he'd been doing for years called "South Florida Blues". I don't really care about the convoluted controversies some try to keep kindled over the claims of Chubby Wise that he actually co-wrote the song in Jacksonville, but if you do, it makes for some absorbing reading here.
No, my interest in Mr. Rouse is in the reputation he carved for himself as one of Florida's great enigmatic eccentrics. In much the same way Hasil Adkins did for rural West Virginia, Rouse became rural Florida's penultimate mystery musician. The facts and the lies within the legends surrounding him are now impossible to parse; many of the tallest tales, it must be said, came from Rouse himself.
In 1993, Rouse appeared as a character in a novel written by one of his barfly buddies, Randy Wayne White. White's The Man Who Invented Florida is the third in a series featuring marine biologist Doc Ford, and follows in the footsteps of the previous generation's great ecologically-aware gumshoe, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee. In it, Rouse appears as himself, or a version of himself, as Ford's curmudgeonly neighbor who helps out with a bizarre scheme to disseminate a magickal Floridian water that is so powerful an aphrodisiac it causes testicles to regrow on a gelded racehorse. White maintains that most of Rouse's dialogue in the book, and outlandish anecdotes related, are as straight from Rouse's mouth as possible. "I may have paraphrased in places, but I tried to repeat his stories pretty much as they were told to me."
Rouse spent most of the 50s and 60s trying to convince people he had written "Orange Blossom Special", which by that time had faded into people's memories as being an "old standard" whose author was long since forgotten. Johnny Cash came to his rescue after Rouse met with him backstage at one of his concerts, and by the time John Travolta's classic Urban Cowboy used the song for its soundtrack, Rouse's royalties were properly restored, if not quite his reputation.
Many a reporter tried to get Rouse's real life story out of him, but Rouse seemingly took delight in leading each newsman through a slightly different maze than the one before. That Rouse chose to live in a ramshackle dwelling deep in the Big Cypress Swamp made each visit seem rather like a pilgrimage to a remote guru, like those cartoon Swamis that only answer your questions about life after you climb up to the top of a treacherous mountain to meet them. Rouse said of his lifestyle: "Out here, you're in the wilds. When night falls, it's so dark. Oh, it's wild!"
An attempt by the U.S. Govt to evict homesteaders from the swamp in 1974 resulted in Rouse giving up the rights to the land, although provisions were made to allow people who'd built their homes before 1971 to remain there for the rest of their lives. Rouse kept the swamp house even after he finally was convinced in old age to move to a more civilized house - specifically 3729 Northwest 20th Court in a district of Miami called Alapattah.
In Randy Noles' great book Orange Blossom Boys, Vassar Clements talks about just how out-of-touch Rouse was with the modern world: "I don't want to say this the wrong way, because Ervin was a genius at playing, but he was a man who didn't know a lot, and didn't care about a lot. I remember seeing him at a festival down in Florida where I was playing. He was carrying a $10,000 royalty check from "Orange Blossom Special" in this old briefcase, and he walked up to a little booth and tried to buy a hot dog with that check. He didn't understand why you couldn't do that."
By the end of his life, Rouse's health had taken a downturn due to his hard-drinking ways. He'd always been an Olympic-class drinker even in his youth, but something about the silence and solitude of the swamp really seemed to put the zap on his head and drive the man further and further out there into deeper and darker conversations with the demon rum.
His decline was also hastened, some opine, by his insistence on shunning medical doctors (he only sporadically attended his necessary three-times-weekly dialysis treaments.) On the other hand, he lived to the ripe old age of 64 doing practically nothing but what he wanted.
How long you wanna live, anyway?
This time I gotta disagree strenuously with those super-snobs over at Beer Advocate and RateBeer. Their gang of self-styled brew experts dismiss Jacksonville's Landshark Lager with abysmally low ratings, mainly because it "lacks complexity".
This is rather like an overbearing cheese "expert" saying that no one should ever eat swiss cheese because it's blander than Gorgonzola.
Beers are tools, essentially, and one must apply the proper tool for the proper job. I certainly wouldn't order Landshark at a five-star restaurant to accompany my Lobster Newburg (not that they'd even be carrying it anyhow), but hey, I wouldn't order a Coke either, and that doesn't mean that Landshark or Coke sucks. Landshark's place on the beer scale is just where it's supposed to be: a simple, unpretentious gullet-washing bev'age with no aftertaste yet not as soulless as a "dry" beer. Perfect for outdoor activities, like hanging out on the beach, as the whole oceanic packaging makes obvious.
Though my primary go-to beers are IPAs and Belgians, I enjoy this stuff immensely, especially with a lime slice and accompanying spicy foods and cigars. I can drink a whole 6 of these and not feel like I'm about to turn into a loaf of bread rising in the sun, which is more than I can say for a lot of chewy brews that the beer intelligentsia assure us are superior.
I guess you might have to be part Floridian to get it. When in Kentucky, I enjoyed Landshark on many a dreary day wishing I was back in Florida, and a sip of the shark transported me here, to baby powder beaches and nautical nightlife.
Summer 1974.
A college student named Terry Betz, along with his mother Gerri and his father Antoine, were strolling around on their eighty-eight acre property on Fort George Island, east of Jacksonville. They were surveying damage recently caused by a brush fire when they discovered a smooth metal sphere slightly larger than a bowling ball. No markings except for a tiny triangle stamped into its surface.
Intrigued by the curious object, Terry took it home and placed it in his bedroom. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later he found something was strange about the orb; while playing guitar he realized it was "vibrating like a tuning fork" in response to the music and quietly making humming, pulsing sounds. And even when not responding to the musical notes, the sphere disturbed the family dog greatly. It covered its ears and whimpered as if hearing some sort of unpleasant sound out of the range of human hearing.
The Betz family then claimed to have observed that when you rolled the sphere across the floor, it would stop and then change direction by itself - sometimes multiple times - then return to the spot where it started. And when placed on a glass coffee table it would roam around on it as if seeking a way to get off of it. So convinced were the Betzes that the ball was moving on its own volition and could actually try to escape the house, they began keeping it trapped in a bag at night while they slept.
They went to the media with the sphere, and soon found themselves swamped in calls and visits from reporters and UFO obsessives, showing up in the yard and ringing the phone around the clock, even during all hours of the night. Even J. Allen Hynek himself examined the object, as did the U.S. Navy.
Supposedly, as the anecdotes relate, the Navy's X-ray analysis revealed that the mystery ball contained two round objects surrounded by a “halo” made of some sort of unknown magnetic material with an impossibly heavy density. The two internal spheres were seemingly made of elements heavier than anything ever known. The heaviest artificially-produced element has an atomic number of 105, and the heaviest naturally-occuring one on Earth is uranium, with an atomic number of 92. Allegedly it was determined - exactly by who I'm not certain - that the substance inside the Betz ball has an atomic number higher than 140.
Various theories about the ball have been proposed, however, that suggest it may have been of a more mundane nature.
Some say it was a deep-sea marker, while others say it was a ball valve for paper mill machinery - and there are an awful lot of paper mills in Florida. The ball's strange behavior, they insist, simply must have been everybody's minds playing tricks on them.
Whatever it was, it's probably impossible to know now because after the initial flurry of media coverage, the Betz family took their ball and dropped off the grid. I haven't made much effort to track them down, but many who fixate on the mystery say they have, and say they've been unable to locate them today. Perhaps the ball is, as we speak, sitting on a pillow in some flea market somewhere in Florida, just waiting for the right person to wrap it up and take it home.
Here's a small but friendly little park in Jacksonville, where I used to spend mornings fishing for croaker with a friend. I let him have all my catch each time, because just between you and me and the NSA agents, dear reader, I wouldn't eat anything that came out of this river.
Mostly though, I just sat and sipped my morning Starbucks and watched interesting stuff float by, like dead armadillos and styrofoam coolers and such. So much for celebrating the greenscape. But you can't beat its sculpture of an acorn that looks more like a breast wearing a knitted toboggan.
Look for Crying Child Island in the intracoastal waterway between Jacksonville and the Atlantic Ocean, and you may ask yourself, as I have, what the heck that's supposed to mean. Some internet chatter has ascribed the island's odd name to an old story, as given in a vague explanation by Atlantic Beach city manager Jim Hanson:
"The ominously creepy name comes from a sound, similar to the wailing of a child, that apparently was made by a cougar on the island in the past."
Hmmmmmm. Color me skeptical.
Legends behind place names everywhere, not just Florida, are usually a little too specious fpr my tastes. What usually happens is that a place gets its name in one century, and then the source for its meaning is lost a few generations later, leaving people to just make up their own folklore that sounds good. Still, I hold out hope that somewhere, in some forgotten resource in a neglected part of a dusty library archive, we may yet know the story behind its name.
When I looked at the Google Map for directions on how to get to Amelia Island from Jacksonville, it showed Highway A1A as a straight line extended across the water. I made the logical presumption that I was seeing the depiction of a bridge or causeway.
So you can imagine when I showed up to Mayport, FL, I was rather pissed off to find that A1A stops dead in its tracks at the water's edge and that you have to drive your car onto a gigantic ferry that takes you across to Fort George Island and beyond on the other side. Then I found out it costs money. And they want exact change. And they don't take plastic. And they only run at very specific times. Furthermore, the palpable Department of Homeland Security presence in the area (because of the adjacent naval base) made the whole place a total drag to be around.
So be warned, kids. Don't do like I done did. Go to Amelia Island the long way 'round.
So there I was, strolling around the San Marco district of Jacksonville enjoying a Tatuaje 10th Anniversary Miami Special cigar (and thanks to the awesome power of Twitter, I can look back and discern that the exact day was September 22, 2013, because the file clerk in my head tends to vividly recall things in terms of what cigars I enjoyed that day, thanks to the even awesomer power of para-mnemonic synapse-twinning whole-track flashbulb-memory.)
Anyway. I saw this crudely-crayonned sign taped to a telephone pole, but taped to the very bottom of the pole as if a child had put it there. But the sign was clearly made by an adult, though trying to ape that childlike style that adults so often attempt but almost always ends in a boatload of fail. But there it is, your honor.
Oh yeah, and there's a playing card with a photo of a cat sleeping in a hammock.
What does it mean?
Hurricane Grill & Wings is a Florida-based chain, though it has locations in odd seemingly-chosen-at-random faraway locations as Elkton, MD; Hauppauge, NY; Surprise, AZ and Waterloo, IA. It was with a certain degree of desperation that I sat down at the San Marco (Jacksonville) location, because my luck with restaurants in Jax has traditionally been putrid. (Like the Tiki Bar that had no frozen drinks, or the Chili place that served me chili with practically no meat in it, or the Cuban place where I sat at the bar for an eternity waiting to be served and finally gave up and wandered back out into the night.)
Fortunately, there are exceptions to the Jax-area curse. The Chart House is one, North Beach Fish Camp is another, and, in a pinch, Hurricane Grill will do. Partially because they offer a superb Philly Cheesesteak sandwich, but mainly because their cocktails are quite potent.
There's a lot of things I miss about Kentucky, but most of all I miss the days of life in St. Matthews when I had a house with a wine cellar and a walk-in humidor for that most Floridian of fancies: cigars. Talk about your "man caves"; I camped out down there literally for days at a time, like a Franciscan in a monastery studying illuminated manuscripts. (Except my manuscripts were moldy old pulp fiction and the dusty old dregs of comicdom.)
After I moved from there to the JSH Plantation in Anchorage (Kentucky), I tried to set up a primitive cellar and humidor in the unfinished basement, but it just wasn't the same. And from there, I entered into a still-ongoing period where I constantly go out and forage for a few cigars at a time, rather than keep them hoarded at home. I don't do those little-bitty desk humidors; they're a pain in the ass to fiddle with and it's strangely far easier to keep a whole room properly humidified than a small cedar box on your desk.
In Louisville, hustlin' sticks was easy, for the most part. With Riverside Cigars just over the puddle in Jeffersonville, Indiana (Where I scored Nat Sherman, Drew Estate Undercrown and the Riverside Cigars Casa Especial), J. Shepherd's in the Highlands (where I got my Leccia Black, Jaime Garcia, Tatuaje, La Duena and Tarazona 305), Kremer's downtown (Kristoff, Ashton VSG, Quesada Tributo), Oxmoor Smoke Shop in Oxmoor Mall (Perdomo Lot 23, CAO Sopranos) and - if I was really desperate enough to pay inflated prices for poorly-kept sticks - several Cox's and Liquor Barn locations. I even came to know all the lesser-known little nooks and crannies where cigars could be found, like a place on Bardstown Road that sold glass pipes and crap like that, but also had a small walk-in stocked with goodies like the LFD Airbender. And Claudia Sanders Dinner House, of all places, had an innocuous little humidor of stogies quietly sitting off to the side in their little-used upstairs.
But now that I'm in constantly on the go in Florida, traveling for work (the great work), I continually have to re-suss the lay of the land wherever I go and try to let my nervous system's cigar-detecting antenna reach its invisible tentacles out, sniffing, feeling, searching for those elusive boxed beauties until, like a dowsing rod, something begins to twitch and quiver in recognition of its goal.
My tour of duty in Jacksonville started off with a bad omen - a great cigar store had long existed in San Marco Square, just moments walk from my house - but had recently closed down. Fortunately, I soon sought out Tobacco Cove, a great place with a bunch of great old guys loungin' around and talkin' trash. Here is where I got turned on to a lot of this year's faves, like my current all-time #1 stick, Alec Bradley Nica Puro. I got in such a groove on those, I actually had to stop tweeting my cigars for awhile because it was Nica Puro every day and got just plain redundant.
Espinosa is another brand that was new to me until Tobacco Cove, as was the Esteban Carerras Chupa Cabra.
Meanwhile, I discovered four other great places - Island Girl Cigar Bar (with three locations!), Art of Cigars, Aromas and Smoke City. I mostly played it safe at Island Girl and propped up the bar with old standbys like Alec Bradley Black Market (I still worship this cigar for some reason, even though they're often too tight and have a real vegetal quality at the very end) and Drew Estate Liga Privada No. 9. Smoke City, whose dinosaur we've already discussed, provided me with stuff like Revolution, Upper Cut, Gurkha Ninja, and Gurkha Evil. At Aromas I got a little more experimental with oddball stuff like Pura Sangre, a Ventura offering which initially smelled like a cage at the zoo but once lit, honestly was a delicious, powerful and tantalyzing spicy smoke. I miss it. Good times.
Then came Clearwater. Not so good. Once again, I found there had recently been a cigar store - very close to where I was living - on Fort Harrison Avenue, but it had given up the ghost. I quickly determined there to be a number of cigar shops over the bridge in Clearwater Beach but they mostly specialized in hand-rolled stuff - and just between you and me and the microphone in the potted plant, dear reader, I'm a real snob about my hand-rolleds and hard to satisfy. Fusion Cigars carried a decent line of name brands but unfortunately they don't open until 3pm and I usually stepped out to fetch my fineries in the mornings. A little joint in a strip mall called Smoker's Paradise turned out to be my primary smoke source while in CW, and they got me obsessed with Nish Patel's XEN cigar, which is a creamy-tasting Connecticut-wrapper "breakfast cigar" that puts off a lot of billowy smoke with a real ass-kick to it.
Finally, my cigardian angel led me to a place way out Highway 19, called Smoker's Den who showed me the San Lotano love and the ways of Asylum 13 as well as stocking my XENs. But aside from a rack of My Uzi Weighs A Ton baitfish packs at Smoker's Paradise, there wasn't a serious Drew Estate to be had in the whole damn city. Mark my words, there's a real market void waiting for someone to fill it: there needs to be a serious cigar shop that sells the good high-end collector's stuff right in downtown Clearwater, preferably on Cleveland Street.
Now I'm on Siesta Key, that wacky party-island off the coast of Sarasota, learning the ropes all over again about where to find the rope-a-dope. For the third city in a row, I found a shut-down cigar store that had been right at the top of my street, practically. These are apparently tough times for the stick-store business; watch yourselves, boys, keep sharp.
As luck would have it, I soon found a hip liquor store called Siesta Spirits that has a goodly humidor full of can't-go-wrong crowd-pleasers like Arturo Fuente Hemingway and Drew Estate Natural Clean Robusto. Over on the mainland, I discovered Mardo's, a place run by a guy who was very knowledgeable in some ways (he could rattle off the entire history of many of the companies and knew the exact composition of every cigar he stocked, right down to the country of origin of the filler) but then said some baffling things too (like, regarding several new upstart companies I mentioned, he muttered dismissively, "Ehnh. All those places get their cigars from Oliva and put their own band on it, who needs it?")
Most recently, I was relieved to find Bennington's on St. Armand's Key (who also stocks my local snooty-grocery, Morton's, with their cigars) carries the XEN and a boatload of other good stuff including some new to me, such as Giacomo's and Flor de las Antillas. And then there's Norman's Liquors way out Clark Road - they have a way deep walk-in with an old favorite of mine from back in the Kentucky days, Perdomo Patriarch. But it's Sarasota's Maduro Cigar Bar that takes the prize for the place to go - crazy-complete selection of sticks and a dark cozy atmosphere, where a man can hibernate, drink craft beer, and ponder his sins. When I saw they had cans of Drew Estate's Papas Fritas I knew the hand of providence had placed me right where I belonged.
Papas Fritas are an exercise in audacity that not many other than Jonathan Drew might have attempted - selling an expensive product that is openly admitted to be a recycled short-filler amalgamation of leftover table sweepings from construction of Liga Privada cigars. But these Frankenstein french fries really are tasty.
Other cities I find myself often in include St. Petersburg, where I recently discovered the joys of Central Cigars, a really dark can't-see-my-cigar-till-I-light-it saloon with one whole wall of smokes going off practically into the vanishing point. In several visits to St. Augustine, I've learned where every cigar is to be had - but usually go to St. Augustine Tobacco, hidden deep in the labyrinth of the Colonial Quarter. Ybor City, of course, is such the cigar capital that you can't throw a rock without hitting a tobacconist.
And then there's Orlando. Well, the less said about Orlando, the better.
Sooner or later my Steampunk Tiki-Bar concept, the Pulcova Club, will be up and running and then once again I will have a wine cellar and walk-in humidor to lord over, like an evil genius in his doomsday fallout shelter. You're welcome to join me... until then, I'm out there on the hunt, constantly vigilant, searching the seaside for the sweetest sticks, day by day, hour by hour, to help serve the cause to which we all are so devoted.
Stay tuned; developing.
I know, I know, the Chart House is a chain, but by golly, it's a darn good chain and it's not exactly something you find in every strip mall. Jacksonville is unfortunately so hard-up for decent local restaurants, whenever I'm there I take what I can get where I can find it. (Notable exceptions are Bistro AIX where Anthony Bourdain recently made an appearance, and the European Street Cafe in San Marco.)
Each Chart House is laid out differently, and the 50's-style Googie architecture of the Jacksonville location (overlooking the riverwalk) makes me wonder if this wasn't originally built as some sort of suave Tiki Bar back in the day. This is no flip-flops and t-shirt joint, these are serious people, chief. About as swanky a place I've dined at since the grand productive Louisville days of Vincenzo's, Morton's and Jeff Ruby's.
I had the New York Strip and a mojito. Both were fine examples of their genres. I had a date that night but I can't remember what she had. I don't think she was as impressed with the glamour and the splendor and the power and the glory as I. Me, I think I deserve nice things and I think you do too, dear reader. Deserve nice things, I mean.
Almost universally overlooked by locals and tourists alike, the obscure Bird Island is located in the intracoastal waterway between Clearwater and Clearwater Beach.
Just how obscure is it? A search on Google Maps for it brought up Bird Key instead, and Bing Maps brought up a sand bar off the coast of Jacksonville also called Bird Island. Trying to learn much about it is a bit like picking gnats out of pepper, as one of the few articles I found online notes:
You won’t find it on any chart, but most local seafarers know what you mean if you tell them you’re heading over to Bird Island.
Unfortunately, because it's a protected wildlife sanctuary, you can't actually land there and get out and walk around and drink a Hennepin or three. So, we drive by, we sail by, we circle and wonder. I took the above picture this morning standing on the causeway, sipping Starbucks, and pondering the Copenhagen interpretation.
Clever humans! Someone in Jacksonville decided to convert this mimetic Twistee Treat ice cream building (just like the one in St. Pete's Beach!) into a cupcake shop and take advantage of the fact that an ice cream cone does kinda resemble a cupcake if you put a candle on top and sufficiently flog your suspension of disbelief.
Then again, not everyone's adept at that. As this newspaper article notes:
Though customers still walk up and ask for a large vanilla cone, there is no soft-serve ice cream inside. Just cupcakes and cookies.
More importantly, the article gives us valuable new research insight into the background of our Twistee Treat fascination:
It looks like something from the 1950s, when buildings-as-kitschy-art lined American byways. There were giant oranges, hot dogs, milk bottles and motel rooms that looked like teepees.But the Twistee Treat cones actually only date to the early 1980s. It was a Florida company, founded in Cape Coral. There were 23 Twistee Treats in the state when the company filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s.
A new company was formed a few years later and it’s believed that about 90 of the buildings were built over the years and about half have torn down.
On the downtown side of the river in Jacksonville, you can find this statue of President Andrew Jackson astride his horse, just like on the manhole covers.
It's actually a replica of the original (said to be the first equestrian statue made in America) which stands in Washington DC's Lafayette Square. It was commissioned in May 1847, cast in 1852, and dedicated on January 8, 1853. The sculptor, Clark Mills, used his own horse, Olympus, as the model for Jackson's steed, rather than Jackson's actual horse, Duke.
This statue of a Naval Officer overlooking the St. Johns River on the San Marco side of Jacksonville is often referred to as "The Lone Sailor", but that's actually a misnomer of sorts. The original "Lone Sailor" statue (created by Stanley Bleifeld, the United States Navy Memorial's official sculptor) is in Washington, DC, and was chosen from four different models Bleifeld offered.
This model, depicting the sailor leaning pensively forward, was a close contender but was passed up in favor of the one standing straight up. It was dubbed the "Liberty Hound" and subsequently commissioned for the Jacksonville Navy Memorial in 1987.
