The Colonel

My previous attempts to dig up some dirt on my enigmatic obsessions with obscure Florida musicians of the past haven't panned out too well. Take Norbert, for example, or Mitzi Joyce, or Joe Peppy the Singing Bartender. But this one, I think I've got a lead.

The late-70s newspaper ads for the Aztec focus on, of course, the big local star - comedian Don Sebastian (who I should probably get around to blogging about one of the days). But in tiny letters, the ads also mention in passing the Aztec's "Mardi Gras Piano Bar" hosted by someone called simply... The Colonel. The imagination reels.

As with the other aforementioned lounge acts, search engines haven't provided much edification on the subject. But I did find, lo and behold, a post made to forums.miamibeach411.com by a user named "Canefan", who says:

Oooooooh, that's a BINGO! Now all we have to do is find this "Canefan" and let him spill all he knows about the good old days. Clicking on his username brings also his introductory post to the forum:

Any man calling himself "The Colonel" and running a piano-bar-lounge in a seedy Miami Beach motel in the 60s and 70s qualifies for canonization as far as we're concerned here. Got more info on him? Speak up!

Norbert at the Organ

For those who sympathize with my frustration and fascination with the mysterious Joe Peppy the Singing Bartender, here's another piece of puzzling evidence gleaned from an old Miami newspaper: Norbert at the Organ.

Norbert. Norbert. At the organ.

Googling him, and his outfit The Russ Ramsey Trio brings up next to nothing. It never fails to astound me and frighten me how many of these intrepid pioneers of the Mad Men era of glory led such swingin' lives only to find it undocumented, unrecorded, unremembered, lost, as Roy Batty said, like tears in rain.

The only other scrap of evidence I could find that the Russ Ramsey Trio ever existed was a short squib in the Miami News, December 14, 1967. In Herb Kelly's entertainment column he makes a very slight, very passing, reference: "The Russ Ramsay [sic] Trio is drawing in dancers and listeners at the Happy Hour Tavern." No mention of Norbert. And that's all we know at press time.

We know a little more about the Happy Hour Tavern itself - it was operated by one Frank Whale, and was at 3680 Coral Way, where Miami becomes Coral Gables. A google search shows the address listed as being a Blockbuster Video and/or a Direct TV sales place, but a look at Google Maps shows the spot now inhabited by a Chase Bank. It would appear that the original structure is gone, as is the building that had been next door to it. (We can see the original Happy Hour Tavern building on an old postcard.)

All of this, however, gets us no closer to our goal: who the hell was Norbert, and where is he now?

Star Island

One of the most exclusive and coveted places to live in Miami Beach is this lovely little island served by a single causeway, known as Star Island. I'm not sure if the name predates its current status as a refuge for celebrities, but it's well known for being home to such luminaries as Gloria Estefan, Rosie O'Donnell, Don Johnson, Sean Combs and Shaquille O'Neal. However, unscrupulous tour guides and realtors have exaggerated the island's celebrity stories, and have made false claims about Julio Iglesias, Madonna, Sylvester Stallone and Elizabeth Taylor also living here.

Some scenes from the Sylvester Stallone film The Specialist were filmed on Star Island, which may have inspired the myth that he lives there. (Though Stallone did attend the University of Miami, his home is in Beverly Hills, California.)

Christo

Since my own artwork is transcendentally primitive and lowbrow, I really have no room to judge any other artist. Then again, as a card-carrying Stuckist and Remodernist, I can't really get behind the postmodern trends of the wacky pretentious "Look, I nailed a condom to a gallery wall and called it art! Look, I dumped a pile of candy in a corner and called it art! Look, I dragged my bed from home into a gallery and called it art!" world.

This, then, is why I feel relatively comfortable in expressing disapproval at worst, boredom at best by the "exhibit" of Christo in which he placed a bunch of pink plastic around some islands off the coast of Miami, and, yes, that's right, you guessed it... called it art.

It was pretty. I guess. From an aerial view, anyway. Which few people had the chance to see. Boaters probably didn't love it, since it was just something else to have to manuever around.

Christo's own website corrects "common errors" in media reportage of his masterpiece, in rather persnickety terms. In particular, he takes umbrage at journalists who used the term "wrapped" to describe what he and his wife did to the islands with plastic:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude never wrapped any islands. They surrounded the islands. Most journalists do not understand the difference between "wrapping" and "surrounding" even though they should know that the United Kingdom is surrounded by water, it is not wrapped in water.

Whatever. And:

Not plastic – fabric. Woven polypropylene is a man-made fiber, and is woven. Plastic usually refers to a film, not woven. For instance, women who wear nylon stockings are not wearing plastic stockings.

Well, no, sorry to disagree, Christo, but polypropylene - you know, the stuff they make Saran Wrap out of? - is, for all intents and purposes, PLASTIC. Nylon, also a synthetic polymer material, is considered a plastic by scientists and laymen alike.

And what was done with all this plastic (thirty-five tons of it!) after the "exhibit" was over? It went to the landfill in Florida's Dade County, to rot and dissolve. Thanks, Christo. We'll call you when we need another favor.

Freedom Tower

With construction completed in 1925, the Freedom Tower was originally built as the headquarters for the Miami News newspaper. But in 1957, the paper relocated to a new facility the U.S. government decided to use the building to process refugees from Cuba fleeing the Castro regime. The government sold the building to private buyers in 1974, after the numbers of incoming refugees began to dwindle.

Now it's a multi-purpose museum, cultural center, educational center, and much more. The MDC Museum of Art + Design is on the second floor and is free and open to the public, and works by Dali, Goya and DaVinci have been displayed here in conjunction with Miami Dade College.

Oh yeah, and it's lit up really cool at night.

The Barefoot Mailman

Located at 1210 Hillsboro Mile in Hillsboro Beach, a statue stands of a barefoot mailman. Why? Because in the late 19th century there were eleven barefoot mailmen who trudged along the beaches between Palm Beach and Miami to deliver the mail. Roads were very poor in those days, and taking the shortcut up the coast seemed like a preferable route at the time. However, it wasn't as easy as a seashell searching stroll: approximately 28 miles of the "barefoot route" required postal carriers to row more than one boat to get to their destination. All this just so some guy in Lemon City could send a "Wish you were here" Florida postcard to his cousin Sylvia in Weehawken.

There are actually three barefoot mailman statues; another is in Pompano Beach and the other can be found on the Coast Guard's Hillsboro Inlet Light Station to commemorate the mysterious disappearance of James "Ed" Hamilton, who had moved to Florida from his original home of Cadiz, Kentucky.

In 1887, Hamilton vanished while he was out attempting the swift completion of his appointed rounds and the mystery has never been explained. Hamilton's possessions, including all of his clothes, were found neatly laid out on the north bank of the Hillsboro Inlet. The rowboat that he had used to cross the inlet was missing.

It has been speculated that alligators got him, but his body was never recovered and why he had removed his clothes remains a mystery.

There are antiquated reports that a "stranger from the north", no name given, was charged with stealing Hamilton's boat and tried in Federal Court in Jacksonville. As per the custom of the time, the man's name was never publicly released or entered in the record because he was found innocent. What really happened out there? We may never know now.

In addition to the statues, there's a historical marker about the barefoot mailmen located in Boca Raton. Curiously, it lists Hamilton as having drowned, which is really only conjecture on someone's part.

St. Bernard de Clairvaux Monastery

Think fast - what's the oldest building in the Western Hemisphere? Hint: It's in Florida.

You're probably thinking about places in St. Augustine as you rack your brains, but don't sweat it, it's a trick question. The answer is the Monastery of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, located at 16711 West Dixie Highway, North Miami Beach.

How is that possible? Because the building, even though constructed in medieval Spain in the year 1133, was disassembled in the 1950s, shipped here, and put back up.

The Coppertone Sign

Since 1959, Miami has been the home of a three-story tall electrically lit sign of the iconic "Coppertone Girl". Its location has been shuffled around a lot over the years, but it currently can be found at 7300 Biscayne Blvd.

The original Coppertone logo was an Indian chief with the slogan "Don't Be A Paleface." Fortunately, at some point the company decided they could do better. The story has been told that they'd planned to use an adult woman in a bikini for the logo, but the owner's wife disapproved and suggested making it more innocent. If true, I would expect the dog would have to have been a Great Dane or a Mastiff or some such.

Angel Hair in Florida Keys

All too often when something really weird and unexplainable happens, the lone witness is some guy with a drinking problem or a gambling debt or a police record, and the skeptics inevitably try to impugn his character. And if the witness has no skeletons in his past to mock, then they simply shrug and say, "Well, you don't know what you're talking about because you are not a scientist."

And so it was fortunate indeed that when a Fortean rain of weird gelatinously stringy "angel hair" substance fell from the sky on May 28, 1957, the main witness was... a scientist. Dr. P. Craig Phillips, who worked for the Miami Seaquarium (and eventually became Director of the National Aquarium), was on a boat around Biscayne Bay near the start of the Florida Keys when the strange skyfall occurred. He and his team immediately began saving as much of the stuff as possible in Mason jars, but when they arrived back to port in Miami, the substance had disappeared from every jar without a trace. Though the evidence had vanished, people nevertheless had to give Dr. Phillips and his team the benefit of the doubt, for they had no reason to conspire to lie about such a thing.

Project Blue Book, the US Govt bureau tasked with investigating UFO sightings, looked into the matter and, as was their modus operandi, assigned a plausible-sounding but unprovable explanation. The material, they insisted, was a "side effect" of military planes firing chaff during routine operations. Chaff is a term applied to a variety of materials designed to be expelled by planes to create a radar-confusing cloud in their wake. (Wait, isn't that, by definition, "chemtrails"?)

However, this concocted official story does not explain why the gooey gossamer filaments disappeared and left absolutely no residue in the jars. And the fact that the Government felt the need to put the matter to rest with such an obviously bogus story leads one to suspect that disinfo was definitely being seeded. The incident was never solved - at least, not in any way that makes sense - but similar incidents continue to happen in places as far away as Italy and China.

(Unfortunately, very few photos of alleged angel hair even exist. The one above is not from the Florida sightings - they apparently didn't have cameras - but of a different proposed fall of similar so-called star-stuff.)

WPLG Newswatch-10, 1979

This is one of those times that I love the Internet; some helpful soul has, for no valid reason, uploaded to YouTube some snippets of Miami's WPLG Newswatch-10 evening news show from 1979. The 1970s were a pretty ugly decade, and gazing upon this grey old footage instantly conjures up grey old memories of dreary family dinners, forced to watch local news with the parents. So why then do I find it so refreshing at the same time? Perhaps because of the simpler times it represents - a pre-Internet, pre-Reagan, pre-cellphone world.

And yes, Stanley Kubrick fans, that's the same Glenn Rinker who makes an appearance (as himself, on a television doing the show) in the movie The Shining.

Ervin T. Rouse

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?

Monitor Lizards in Florida

Yet another crazy critter to watch out for in the wilds of Interzone: not only do we have bears, panthers, pythons, monkeys, giant grasshoppers and giant snails, we have monitor lizards. Nile monitors, native to Africa, have somehow gained a foothold in our ecosystem and have been thriving in Florida since at least 1990.

On the eastern side of the state, the monitors seem to be concentrated in the area from Palm Beach through Miami, and then following down south into the keys, especially Key Largo. On the gulf side, their numbers are rapidly spreading outward from the Cape Coral area, including all nearby islands (Sanibel Island, Captiva Island, Pine Island, and Gasparilla Island) and as far north as Siesta Key and Sarasota.

Wild iguanas are also an increasing problem in Florida. Like the monitor lizards, they disrupt native species like birds, turtles and crocodiles by eating their eggs and competing for food. There are an estimated 10,000 feral iguanas on Boca Grande alone, and Lee County has spent over $100,000 trying to trap them. But you know how it is; once these invasive aliens start layin' their eggs in the primordial soup that is Florida, you might as well just throw up your hands and just watch and see how it all comes out.

Masked Screwball Parade

I don't know what this "Masked Screwball Parade" hyped in this ad (seen in the Miami Herald, I forget the date but it's the 1960s) is all about, but it sure sounds damned interesting, doesn't it? And I like how the clip-art woman's head seems to interject itself from above, like a Goddess looking down on her creations.

A quick glance at the Googles brings me no closer to solving the mystery. Absolutely nothing, zippo, goose egg, comes up in a search for the phrase (except now, of course, my blog will be the phrase's sole query response) and neither could I glean anything about Miami's mysterious Rainbow Inn. Nor its former incarnation, the Rainbow Club.

Some secrets, it seems, should remain secret.

I did determine that the former location of all this wackiness is now Bill Seidle's Suzuki Miami dealership. I wonder if there remains any evidence of the Rainbow Club or its doings, hidden in some crawlspace under the floorboards, waiting, like a larva in a cocoon, to see the light of day?

Overlooking Florida

It's entirely fitting that one of my favorite movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, also involves Florida. If you have only a passing familiarity with the film, you may be unaware that in recent years it's been lauded as being a far deeper and complex movie than the 70's-slasher-flick it's generally thought of as. You can read some out-there analysis of it here and here, and you can find my own musings on the movie's puzzling evidence here, here, and also here.

In a nutshell, my take on the film is that the "haunted" Overlook Hotel in which the main characters reside is trapped in a sort of timespace warp in which everything is constantly shifting and rubbing up against parallel universes and alternate points on the time track. The multiple "mistakes" in the movie that some might ascribe to sloppy filmmaking are actually, I believe, deliberately placed as indicators that reality is constantly moving around in the hotel. Kubrick was infamous for his meticulous attention to detail, and that he could have had so many continuity errors in one of his works is inconceivable.

And, of course, this fits right in with the idea of Interzone, aka Florida, which I just happen to also posit as harboring a similar spacetime anomaly, but for real. So it's par for the course that the film's character Dick Halloran (played by the great Scatman Crothers, who I know as a great jazz-blues singer but you may know as the voice of Hong Kong Phooey) is from Florida. Halloran has psychic abilities (which he calls "shining", hence the title) and halfway through the picture we see him reclining in bed in his Miami home. He's watching Newswatch on Miami's WPLG-TV with anchorman Glenn Rinker, who was a real Miami newsman and not just something contrived for the film, which is a nice touch. Interestingly, Halloran's television set switches on by itself, yet Halloran is holding no remote. Among the imagery Halloran views on the TV is a lighthouse and a Pan-Am jet plane, which you may or may not find some meaningful symbolism in.

There are a lot of people running around Florida with psychic powers, extrasensory perceptics, remote-viewing savvy, and enhanced abilities, and I think the placement of Halloran here was a deliberate nod to this. Or maybe I've been sipping too many blue things. I dunno. Go watch the movie. Even if you've seen it before, look again.

Disappearance of the Witchcraft

Miami. December 22, 1967. Real estate and hotel magnate Dan Burack went on a short yacht trip in the evening along with his passenger, an Irish Catholic priest named Patrick Horgan, on board a 23-foot-long cabin cruiser called the Witchcraft.

They set out to Buoy #7, less than one mile away from the shore, intending only to view the dazzling spectacle of Miami's coastline lit up with Christmas lights, and then head back. But at 9pm, the Coast Guard received a message from Burack, stating that his craft had struck something unknown in the water. Although it was not an emergency, Burack said, his boat needed a tow back to shore. According to the Coast Guard, Burack was perfectly mellow and calm during the radio message. From this, it has been surmised, we can assume that whatever Burack hit in the water, it didn't damage the hull - otherwise his message would have been a mayday alert and not a mere request to be towed.

The Coast Guard knew exactly where Buoy #7 was, of course, but Burack indicated he was about to fire off his flare gun anyway for good measure. Though that flare never appeared, the team scrambled into action and arrived at Buoy #7 only nineteen minutes later, but there was no sign of the ship.

Even if there had been a huge gaping hole in the hull that Burack had been unaware of (not likely - Burack was a meticulously expert seafarer) it is inconceivable that the ship could have sunk so quickly. Doubly so, because the Witchcraft was extensively fitted with built-in floatation, rendering it essentially unsinkable. It, or portions of it, should have been bobbing up out of the ocean or just below its surface, even if the entirety of the craft had taken on water.

The ship was fully stocked with more life jackets and preservers than was necessary, and even the seat cushions on deck doubled as floatation devices. This means even if the ship had somehow been forced against all odds to the bottom of the sea, these items on deck should have been left floating behind, leaving evidence that the Witchcraft had been there.

But there was nothing when the Coast Guard arrived at 9:19pm. Nothing but the eerie clanging sound of the buoy.

Any conceivable disaster that could have befallen them still begs the question, why didn't they radio back a second time? And why didn't they send up the flare? How did every trace of the ship completely vanish when at least parts of it and on-deck materials should have been floating? Why were Burack and Horgan not still in the water in their life vests and preservers, even if the ship unexpectedly sank? And if it did, how did it sink in less than nineteen minutes? And even if sharks had gotten the pair, their life vests and preservers should have still been floating, and the water should have still had a sheen of blood easily seen by the Coast Guard searchlights scanning the water.

One doesn't have to be a devotee of the paranormal to conclude that the facts just don't make sense. The Coast Guard must have felt the same way - "but - but - it just has to be here! It can't have just vanished!" - and so they continued widening the scope of the search to increasingly illogical distances. They finally admitted defeat and called off the mission on December 28, after fruitlessly searching 24,500 square miles.

I'm not one of those "I Want To Believe" types - I already have certainty that there is more under Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in your imagination - but I do feel it's worth mentioning that the disappearance of the Witchcraft took place within what is known as the Devil's Triangle and/or the Bermuda Triangle, that area which, some say, has been the site of more than its share of disasters, deaths and disappearances.

In 1918, for example, the USS Cyclops vanished in the Triangle, and the disappearance of the ship and its 306 crewmen and passengers without a trace remains, to this day, the single largest loss of life in U.S. Naval history not directly involving combat.

In 1945, a grouping of five planes known collectively as Flight 19 vanished in the Triangle during a Navy navigation training flight from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. No trace of the planes or an explanation of what happened to them has been conclusively found. (Steven Spielberg referenced the incident in his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind by including the Flight 19 pilots among the humans that the aliens returned after borrowing for study.)

And in 1996, University of Louisville basketball star Derek Smith dropped dead unexpectedly during a cruise to Bermuda on a ship called the Dreamward (since renamed the Norwegian Dream.) According to the New York Daily News:

Smith was seated upstairs in the lounge, chatting with several people. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed, opened and then closed. His head moved back. "C'mon Derek, quit messin' around," someone said. Smith's body slumped to the right. Another passenger ran over, found a very faint pulse and started administering CPR. Ship medical personnel rushed in and spent the better part of a half hour trying to resuscitate him.

"That's it", said one of the medics. It was 9:10. "There's nothing more we can do."

Despite their efforts to jump-start Smith's heart, it never produced more than five beats in succession.

Interestingly, another death cited as a possible Bermuda Triangle case is that of a man named Derrick Smith, who vanished off the coast of Savannah in 2001.

Miami Minister on UFOs in 1951

From the Palm Beach Daily News, March 20, 1951, we find a squib about Rev. Sidney Davis, a minister in Miami who gave a lecture at the Biltmore Hotel about flying saucers. The gist of it is, there are many UFOs that have crashed on Earth, and that alien technology and dead alien corpses have been recovered in secret by government scientists. Heck, sounds like my kinda preacher; sure beats the usual dry and abstract "on the charity of Dorcas" routines.

Sadly, my efforts to learn more about Rev. Davis haven't been successful. A Google search of his name/his church/Miami brings up that newspaper article and nothing else.

(Note to the poor unfortunate NSA agents who drew the short straw and got stuck with the job of monitoring me and reading everything I write: do a hillbilly a favor and pull up your files on Rev. Davis for me, okay? That would be most appreciated. Besides, you kinda owe me since you've downloaded all my books without paying.)

Bunny Yeager

Of all the pin-up queens that helped define the Mad Men era, none even come close to surpassing Miami's Bunny Yeager (pictured below). Not only was she one of the leading cheesecake photo models of the day, she also was one of its leading photographers in her own right. This was a considerable achievement in the completely male-dominated industry of the time.

In the early-mid 1950s, Bunny was, some say, the most photographed woman in Miami. After retiring from modeling, she soon met Bettie Page and became one of her principal photographers, capturing some of the most iconic Bettie images that made her famous. This would include her pictorial in Playboy magazine and a photo (with an alligator pasted in by somebody else) that still appears to this very day on a pirated postcard found in gift shops all over Florida.

After Bettie's retirement, Bunny went on to continued success in photography (her photos of Ursula Andress were used in the James Bond film Dr. No) and acting (she appeared in The Lady In Cement with Frank Sinatra and Raquel Welch.) Today she is still working at the age of 83, and still holds splashy well-attended exhibitions of her photographic works.

The Giant Apple Snail

A key part of the Floridial Floridianity of Florida is that sooner or later, everyone and everything makes its way down here, and once here, it thrives. It's a place where everything that can happen does, and must. Take for example the Giant Apple Snail, Pomacea maculata, which grows at least twice the size of a traditional apple snail - sometimes larger than a softball.

In the Florida Everglades, there's an endangered bird called the Snail Kite which feeds exclusively on snails and is suddenly experiencing a swift resurgence in their population. "That's good," you might say, and "No, that's bad," I might reply, and "Well, how come?" you might rejoin. Because this giant invasive species of mollusk is rapidly spreading like wildfire (a metaphor not usually applied to snails) in the Sunshine State, and though it gives the Kites a virtual all-you-can-eat buffet, it's throwing the ecosystem way out of whack. As noted on Al Jazeera America today:

Several species of the South American snails were first observed in the late 1980s, but in the last two decades the mega-mollusk maculata outproduced all the others and spread rapidly. It’s suspected that these baseball-sized creatures were unwanted aquarium pets released near the Miami and West Palm Beach canals. Now these meatier snails, which are about twice the size of the native apple snail, are ensconced in lakes and canals from northern Florida to as far south as Everglades National Park. At the same time as this new species is spreading, the native apple snail population is shrinking. The nomadic snail kites have recognized the heftier replacement and followed the food source.

There are scary clues about what these big mollusks can do in small marsh areas. The exotic snails decimated plant life near lakes and ponds near Tallahassee.

According to Snailbusters, the giant apple snail is edible and can be used in Gumbo, but they must be very thoroughly cooked because, being freshwater creatures, they can harbor parasites and bacteria harmful to humans - like another thriving new icky thing, that brain-eating amoeba, perhaps?

Some are recommending that if you see clusters of their giant bubblegum pink eggs, you should destroy them, but that ain't my style. Who am I to impinge on their survival and success? I leave it to fate and nature how it's all gonna come out in the wash.

The Biltmore Hotel

The Biltmore Hotel is a Jazz-age luxury hotel in Coral Gables, built in 1925 with a gala opening in January 1926. In its glory days, it hosted such luminaries as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, and Al Capone (when he wasn't staying at the Don CeSar). President Franklin D. Roosevelt even had a temporary White House office set up there for his vacation trips. Johnny Weissmuller, the actor best known for portraying Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, gave swimming lessons to tourists in the hotel's jaw-droppingly huge swimming pool.

Unfortunately, during World War II, the War Department turned the hotel into the Army Air Forces Regional Hospital, and in so doing sealed most of the windows with concrete, and covered the lavish marble floors with crappy government-issue linoleum. After the war, the military kept its clammy grip on the place, and it remained a veteran's hospital until 1968. From there it languished as an abandoned building, but saw much use as a spooky shooting location for movies and television.

In 1987, the Biltmore was restored to its original splendor as a 5-star hotel, and remains so to the present day. But in the intervening years, numerous legends have accrued about the place being haunted. This is probably in part due to the creepy look the place took on during its stint as an abandoned hospital (much in the vein of the probably-not-really-all-that-haunted Waverly Hills in Louisville). It may also be that less-than-attentive wannabe-ghostbusters are confusing it with that other Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island - the one that was designed by Satanist Johan Leisse Weisskopf and partially inspired Stephen King's Overlook Hotel in The Shining. And then there's the allegedly haunted Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Be that as it may, there's a story now often told about a "Woman in White" ghost - supposedly of a woman who committed suicide jumping from a tower window - and the ghost of mobster Thomas "Fatty" Walsh, who was murdered on the hotel’s 13th floor in 1929.

Malarkey or not, the local "ghost tour" types are having a field day running with the legend, and to them and their legends I say, enjoy.

George Takei at Supercon 2013

George Takei, best known as Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek, will be a guest at this year's Florida Supercon in Miami, which runs from July 4th through the 7th.

Takei, currently a regular on Sirius XM satellite radio's Howard Stern Show, has been in recent years a crusader to raise awareness of America's internment camps that Japanese-Americans - including him - were imprisoned in during World War II. As Takei told the Miami New Times:

"The best way to reach people intellectually but also in their hearts is a musical," Takei says. And if you know the exact number of minutes in a year (525,600 — thanks, Rent!) or that Oklahoma is a real place, he might be right. To that end, Takei has both inspired and stars in Allegiance, a musical about life in the internment camps that he expects to premiere on Broadway next spring. An earlier version broke attendance records during its run in California, eventually winning the 2012 Outstanding New Musical award from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle.

In 2009, Takei appeared in an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, making him the only leading actor from Star Trek to also take part in a Star Wars production.