E-mail Fred at fgrimm@herald.com
Mother's Day approached, and I found myself suffering something like phantom leg syndrome. The eternal conundrum still haunted me. Like the itching foot of an amputee. As if she were still up there in West Virginia.
IN MY OPINION
I'll concede right off. When it comes to my worth as a valued employee, I ain't no Larry Feldman. If I retired and offered to come back for $1 a year, my bosses would figure that was just a negotiating point.
The rightful location for the Barry Kutun Boat Ramp would be in the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway with the sex offenders. But Miami Beach has kept its tribute to Kutun not far from the kiddie playground at Maurice Gibb Park -- despite his 2007 conviction for cavorting with a 16-year-old.
IN MY OPINION
The house on Northeast 18th Street was well landscaped with lush tropical plants beyond the arched brick entranceway. Very nice. Of course, accomplished landscaping would be the least you'd expect of a grow house: palms, birds of paradise and purple orchids out front; 79 hydroponic marijuana plants inside.
They can keep the name. And I suppose -- if they let us go our own way without a fuss -- they can keep the billions stolen from folks down this way since Henry Flagler built his railroad.
Fearless in the face of irony, the ethically suspect Michelle Spence-Jones wants to name a park in Little Haiti after the ethically suspect Art Teele.
IN MY OPINION
If Case Number SP07-10-085 was a barnyard animal, the conversation would go like this: You: ``I don't know, Farmer Mike. Looks like a pig to me.''
Frederick Lewis Allen penned vivid descriptions of the mass insanity that afflicted South Florida. ''There was nothing languorous about the atmosphere of tropical Miami,'' he wrote. ``The whole city had become one frenzied real-estate exchange.
Once, a gathering like this would have been a sparse collection of quixotic losers. They always lost. Developers nearly always won these fights, pushing into the citrus groves and vegetable fields, bulldozing over their opposition, turning South Florida into an ill-planned mishmash of suburban sprawl.
IN MY OPINION
She might as well have been clinging to a tree stump in the middle of a crocodileinfested river. She was trapped, maybe forever, in the emergency lane.
Five years ago, the Florida Legislature was duped into putting up $310 million to lure the Scripps Research Institute to Palm Beach County.
The Royal Palm opened in 2002 adorned with the lofty language of a great social experiment. Terms like black dreams, black pride, black hope, black determination echoed off the hotel's soaring Art Deco walls.
IN MY OPINION
Stephen Sticht has been portrayed as the half-crazed bigot of Fort Lauderdale, bent on terrorizing the homeless. His five purported victims called him ''Chain Saw Man'' at a news conference organized by homeless advocates. Their lawyers intimated Sticht must be of the same mold as the thrill-kill teenagers who beat a homeless man to death in Fort Lauderdale two years ago.
Junior needs a proviso. Junior sits in an underfunded classroom in an underfunded schoolhouse in a state ranked so near the bottom in education funding that Florida has to jump up to kiss Mississippi's posterior.
Crime Boy blew every chance. Might as well add that charge to last week's arrest sheet with the drug and weapons violations. Percy Campbell frittered away one chance after another to turn his sorry life around.
O nce a year, reporters rolled into Davie and validated the meaningless lives of meatheads. The South Florida media dutifully camped out in a pasture located in what we described, in the late 1970s, as ''in the damn middle of nowhere'' and listened to pathetic men rant.
Nothing against medical screening for expectant mothers, mind you. And we'd all like to help out with preemies. Fatten up low-birthweight babies. Sure, we regret cutting services for foster children.
Coral reefs are dying. Sea grass meadows are receding. Fisheries are depleted. Health officials periodically close our beaches, citing unacceptable levels of fecal bacteria.
Certain words tend to pop up in stories about arms dealers. Invariably, they're ''shadowy.'' As if international arms merchants come out of the box with the factory default set to ``shadowy.''
The house at the foot of the curving tower looks like an insignificant speck of Miami history that the demolition crew forgot to cart away.
A mother and child reunion for TV actors in mom's day salute
