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• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reference
• The news

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Any AI, no matter how well-trained, has no experience. It simply has representations of experience, derived from whatever literature, media, or data has been put into its training material.

The article is right about one thing: You need to check out Yalaha Bakery, which not just a bakery, but a deli and a biergarten with live music on the weekends!

And such good cheesy pretzel rolls, too!

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The ship will dock in Pattaya, but the photo not-too-clearly shows the Marina Bay Sands and Pan Pacific hotels, which are in Singapore.

Consider this one of my regular reminders to double-check your work before putting it out in the world.

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And yes, I’ll name the person and place: Joe Sacco, then-owner/manager of the pub Smokeless Joe on John Street.

Early August, 2002: I was sitting at the bar at Smokeless Joe, waiting to meet someone for a second date. She appeared to be running late. Fifteen minutes stretched into thirty, which stretched in forty-five. Finally, just shy of an hour after it was supposed to begin, I got a phone call. Not on my cell phone, but on the bar’s landline.

Remember, this was 2002, five years before the iPhone was even announced. Texting wasn’t easy then, and even mobile phones were still a little unusual.

Think about how I’d have to pass the time back then, before the era of the smartphone. I probably chatted with the barkeep, read the menu a couple of times, and perused the local free alt-weekly papers, Eye and Now. Smokeless Joe didn’t have a TV, which is highly unusual for a bar, even back then.

The barkeep passed me the phone, and my date told me it wasn’t going to work out.

Joe must’ve been observing, because shortly after I dejectedly returned the handset, he walked over to the barkeep and whispered something in his ear. Only a moment passed before the barkeep placed a pint of stout before me, saying “Sorry she’s not coming. Joe told me to give you a couple of these, on the house.”

I cryptically wrote about it here on August 21, 2002, which was twenty-four years ago. Just thinking about what happened that day, even though almost a quarter century has passed, brings back a flood of memories, and more importantly, the feelings that went along with them. But what I’ll remember most is that act of kindness to this day. Thank you so very much, Joe!

As I wrote at the start of this post, I have no proof that the “Gary” in the review pictured above exists or that the event took place. But I know for certain that things like this have happened and can still happen.

If the opportunity ever presents itself, be someone’s “Gary”.

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They may look like extras from the live-action One Piece, but that’s really me onstage on the patio at Bahama Breeze at Rocky Point (which won’t be open for much longer) with the evening’s guitarist, after playing Florida’s unofficial state anthem, Margaritaville.

The food there is just okay; I was there for a post-all-day-meeting dinner with some IBM partners. We all changed out of the “corporate drag” I’d been wearing all day, had some dinner and drinks, and had a conversation that led to my being commissioned to make this video:

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“Not all Americans, but always an American…”

Video chapters:

• 0:00 The Superpower Engineered to Fail
• 3:15 What is Critical Thinking (And Why Does It Matter?)
• 6:30 A Nation Founded on Anti-Intellectualism
• 11:00 The School System: From Prussia to No Child Left Behind
• 22:30 Adulthood: Compelled Loyalty & The Media Machine
• 34:00 The Cost: Healthcare, Debt, & Epistemic Tribalism
• 40:15 Why the World Is Done Being Nice
• 48:30 A Final Note to Our American Viewers

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I guessed correctly. For the answer, read the article!

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If you live in the Tampa Bay area, which has been my home for the past dozen years, you already know we’re a weird, beautiful, heat-soaked paradise of chicken-walking Ybor streets, Cuban sandwiches, unapologetic swagger, and no small amount of Florida weirdness. Also, it’s the long-time home of the reason I’m here: Anitra!

But if you want to understand why this town exists at all, grab yourself the largest cafe con leche you can get your mitts on and watch (or listen to) Paul McAllister’s excellent 40-minute deep-dive video, The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: Tampa, Florida.

It is a glorious love letter to the absolute absurdity of Tampa history.

Here’s the TL;DW summary of how a mosquito-infested swamp went from a ghost town to the center of the universe.

1869: The ultimate civic rage-quit

In 1869, after surviving Seminole Wars, yellow fever outbreaks, hurricanes, and the Civil War blockade, the 180-ish residents of Tampa looked around at their bankrupt village and did something almost unheard of in American history: they voted to un-incorporate and dissolve their own government.

By 1880, the U.S. Census counted a whopping 720 people living here. No railroad, no major industry, and yellow fever so bad that ships refused to dock. Tampa was a dying backwater on a bay nobody wanted.

The Great Trifecta (~1883–1886)

Within a two-year window, three completely unrelated forces crashed into our sandy shores and sparked a 670% population boom in a single decade:

• The railroad and the loss leader hotel: Rail tycoon Henry B. Plant brought his train lines to Tampa in 1884. To force wealthy northerners to ride his trains, he dropped $3 million ($75M in today’s money) out of his own pocket to build the Tampa Bay Hotel, a 511-room, 6-acre Moorish Revival palace topped with 13 silver minarets. It lost money every single day, but Plant didn’t care: the hotel was just a loss-leader to sell train tickets! Today, it’s Plant Hall at the University of Tampa.
• Phosphate: In 1881, engineers found massive phosphate deposits in the “Bone Valley” just east of us. Suddenly, Port Tampa was shipping prehistoric animal bones-turned-fertilizer all over the globe, giving Tampa the industrial cash flow it desperately needed.
• Vicente Martinez Ybor and Cigar City: Fleeing labor disputes in Key West and Spanish arrest warrants in Cuba, Ybor bought 40 acres of scrubland northeast of downtown in 1885 and built Ybor City. At its peak, 200 factories were pumping out 500 million hand-rolled cigars a year. They were producing more Cuban cigars than Havana itself.

The lectors: Factory floor intellectuals / proto-podcasters?

My favorite detail in the video is the story of the lectors. Ybor’s cigar rollers each chipped in 25 cents a week to hire a reader to stand on a raised platform in the middle of the factory floor.

While 400 workers rolled cigars in silence, the lector read aloud: newspaper headlines in the morning, and Victor Hugo (Les Misérables was a massive hit), Alexandre Dumas, and political philosophy in the afternoon. Because of this, Tampa’s immigrant cigar workers were among the most educated, politically engaged laborers in the entire country.

Think about it: If you listen to podcasts while working, you’re continuing a great Tampa tradition!

The video says that you needed stage presence and a great voice to be a lector. It sounds like the sort of job I would’ve taken had I lived here back then.

Flexing on History

The video runs through the sheer gauntlet of Tampa “firsts” and flexes:

• 1898: Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders camped out on the Tampa Bay Hotel grounds before invading Cuba, doubling Tampa’s population overnight while military generals planned the Spanish-American War under French chandeliers.
• 1914: The world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight took off from St. Pete and landed right here in downtown Tampa.  It was a 23-minute flight in a canvas biplane piloted by Tony Jannus, after whom the St. Pete music venue Jannus Live is named.
• 1924: Real estate wildman D.P. Davis bought two swampy mud flats in the Hillsborough River for $350k, dredged up sand, and built Davis Islands out of thin air.
• 1926: The Tampa Theatre opened as one of John Eberson’s crowning “atmospheric” movie palaces, complete with a ceiling painted like a night sky, twinkling stars, artificial drifting clouds, and the city’s first commercial air conditioning system.

Why it matters

Tampa didn’t grow because of some master corporate strategic plan. It grew because a Connecticut rail baron, a exiled Cuban cigar mogul, prehistoric fossil beds, and thousands of passionate immigrants all converged on this bay at the exact same time.

Today, while interstate highways and urban renewal tore down pieces of our history in the ’60s, the spirit is still here. You can still see the silver minarets catching the morning light over the Hillsborough River, and over on 16th Street, J.C. Newman still rolls cigars by hand—with the lector platform proudly restored.

Watch the video, get your local pride on, and remember: we’re living in a city built on pure, unadulterated Florida audacity.

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The front of Kaiju is taken up by the usual bar and bar seating, but the back is taken up by the snack bar, which has a giant sign that reads “The Egg Roll Machine.” It’s from a Japanese/Vietnamese restaurant that started in 1980, relocated in 2009, and operating until 2019. The owners of Kaiju saved the sign, and it now stands over the part of the bar that serves Asian snack foods.

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American viewers may know Al Waxman from his role as Lieutenant Albert Samuel from the TV series Cagney & Lacey, but we Canadians will always remember him as Larry King from the home-grown sitcom King of Kensington (the Kim’s Convenience of the 1970s).

So when I was last in Toronto and saw his statue in the Kensington Market park that often goes by his name (it’s really called Bellevue Square Park), there was only one thing to do.

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10. Coke zero was warm

9. Coke zero was warm

8. Coke zero was warm

7. Coke zero was warm

6. Coke zero was warm

5. Coke zero was warm

4. Coke zero was warm

3. Coke zero was warm

2. Coke zero was warm

1. Coke zero was warm

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