What a blast! Holiday fun at the gun show

Viagra would be cheaper. But an extravagant Christmas shopper at the Fort Lauderdale Gun and Knife Show could spend $6,000 on a Dragunov Tiger and restore an old codger's manliness.

THE GRIMM TRUTH

No case for banning gay adoption

None of the ignominious arguments mounted by the Florida attorney general's office circumvents the cold reality of 3,535. At last count, 3,535 children languished in state custody in need of adoptive parents. Yet the attorney general's office defended a law prohibiting gay adoption as if Florida faced a stark choice between ''homosexual behaving'' parents and households of the Ozzie and Harriet kind.

Web suicide a new case for sociologists

FRED GRIMM fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com They were no better than the witnesses who turned away the night Kitty Genovese was murdered. Except, in the death of Abraham Biggs Jr., they didn't turn away. They watched with callous indifference as the young Pembroke Pines man orchestrated a webcam suicide. They let him die.

Education gets another kick in the teeth

S tudents spilling out of the FAU tower in downtown Fort Lauderdale didn't express much enthusiasm for the governor's tuition hike.

Creepy-crawly invasion looms -- via the Web

They're coming. Another horde of alien invaders. See them yet? No? Maybe you'll hear 'em first. Listen for an otherworldly hiss. They hiss when angry. They hiss (much like a certain ex-girlfriend) when amorous.

Fred Grimm: Teen's death just doesn't make sense

I fell in behind a slow-moving procession just inside the church vestibule, thinking we were lined up to collect funeral programs and sign the memorial book.

Palin and Co. abate election withdrawal

W hat's an addict to do? A dozen days since the election and I'm still in the grip of incessant compulsion. Can't read five minutes before the obsessive habit comes whispering in my ear. Causes me to lop off conversations mid-sentence, run to my computer. Watching TV, I feel the exigent craving rubbing up against me like a hungry cat demanding Kibble. More Kibble, dammit!

Stadium plan won't rev up the economy

I wouldn't call Brad Humphreys a loser exactly. He's just the latest in a distinguished cadre of economists proffering variations of the same losing argument. And they always lose.

A teen gets life while other killers get deal

All murders aren't the same. Michael Hernandez, 14 and delusional when he stabbed his classmate to death in 2004, was given a life sentence last week. No parole.

Truth about school funding is avoided

M aybe it was too unseemly to discuss in either polite company or a political campaign -- what we've done to Florida schools. Maybe it was just too embarrassing to remind voters how state legislators went after a financially desiccated education system, already ranked 50th in per student funding, and attacked it like piranhas in an eating frenzy.

FRED GRIMM | COLUMNIST

Beyond an old reporter's imagination

All those empty newspaper racks spoke to the history of the thing. The election of Barack Obama was too momentous to be remanded to something as ephemeral as the Internet. Frenzied collectors snatched up paper editions of The Miami Herald Wednesday for either posterity or eBay.

Election lines bring to mind notable waits

As you fritter away your life today in a long line outside some besieged precinct, don't fret the lost hours. Remember Prince. In the annals of inexplicable waits, I've discovered a 1985 account by a Miami Herald sports reporter (long gone) who described waiting in line in Miami for 72 hours -- to buy tickets to a concert by the-artist-still-known-as-Prince.

FRED GRIMM | COLUMNIST

Are voters smart enough to see hatred?

Think of Amendment 1 as an IQ test for the Florida electorate. The notion of voting against it lacks even a smidgen of intellectual support. Less than 60 percent voter approval will qualify us as a gaggle of dolts.

These thieves even shock South Florida

All robberies aren't equal. Walk into Curley's; the truth of it slaps you in the face. Walk into Curley's. You can't mistake it for anything but what it is. The burglars knew.

Disgraced Mahoney just won't go away

T he poor wife, you think, studying her steely expression as her private humiliation becomes the stuff of national television. The poor wretched political wife standing like a stage prop before a thicket of TV cameras, her face a mask pulled tight over repressed rage, while her mendacious slime of a philandering husband prattles about repairing his damaged family.

Hours spent in line to vote say something

Something about this election . . . Understand that I loathe overcooked analysis that chews on a morsel and discovers a feast of significance.

Corrupt cops were easy pickings for FBI `wise guy'

I t was not as if the cops moonlighting for Big Jack might have mistaken him for vice president of the Hollywood Kiwanis Club. Jack Garcia rolled into town driving a black Cadillac Escalade, wearing a silk guayabera, fine shoes, blinged out in a gold Rolex ``and the obligatory mobster diamond pinkie ring.''

Whiteflies may change South Florida's landscape

Not that I'm suggesting a conspiracy, mind you, but I couldn't help notice that South Florida's two looming catastrophes share the same timeline.

Kansas City's tenacity would serve us well

For a few dreadful days in 2002, South Florida wondered if Precious Doe was Rilya. It was a desperate theory. The decapitated body of a small child had been discovered the year before on a wooded lot 1,250 miles away. But the unidentified remains of the little girl in Kansas City seemed roughly the same age as Rilya Wilson, the undersized foster kid who had vanished in Miami.