Fred Grimm joined the Herald in 1976. Since 1991 he has written a column about crime, politics and life in Broward.
E-mail Fred at fgrimm@herald.com
Disparate thoughts and random opinions of longtime Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm
They slump on airport chairs in disconsolate repose, drained of optimism, bored, nothing to do but stare hopelessly at flight monitors like losers at a roulette wheel.
Steve Higgins' job is to create the illusion of permanence along an impermanent stretch of shoreline. Nature engineered beaches to shape shift with the wind and waves. Higgins, Broward County's beach erosion administrator, does what he can to keep an undulating strand from wiggling out from beneath the hotels, condo towers, parks and mansions.
T he notion's so damn bleak, it must have been imagined by Victor Hugo. Our novel's set in the recession of '09. One out of every 10 workers is unemployed. Tourists are scarce. The housing market has been savaged by foreclosures and unsold inventory.
Angry parents. Teary teachers. The stricken faces of school employees banished from the payroll. Bill Brumfield, 439 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, understood exactly what the Broward County School Board faced Tuesday night.
On a September afternoon in 2007, 85,000 spectators, some of them sober, watched teams from the University of Alabama and Florida State University play a football game.
FRED GRIMM fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com The surreal specter of people forced by the state to live under a bridge is only one of the unintended consequences of South Florida's overwrought sex-offender residency laws.
Donte' Stallworth does 30 days. And walks. In a sentencing process that grants peculiar deference to the victim's families, it's good to be a rich professional football player.
After five years in jail, Eduardo Galego took the plea offer. Time served. Seven years probation. Maybe five years was too light for sexual assault. Particularly with a knife and a 17-year-old victim. I don't know, though a Miami-Dade circuit judge and prosecutor signed off on the deal in 2006.
I t's as if we're living through a remake of The Blob. In our real-life version of the 1958 horror classic, the pink undulating clump has morphed into a fearsome mass of 25-years-and-out cop and firefighter pensions.
Rethink the disheveled, hollow-cheeked fellow working the I-95 off-ramp with his business plan scrawled on soiled cardboard. ``Homeless vet. Needs help.''
I t was a fine time to sabotage the state's growth-management policies. With 300,000 unsold homes languishing on the market, with another half-million in various stages of foreclosure, with God knows how many stalled projects moldering amid rusting rebar, bare cinder-block walls, concrete slabs and fading ''no trespassing'' signs, growth management lately seemed more about nostalgia than policy.
Picnic Island #4 is about as much a park as Marc Sarnoff is a statesman. Picnic #4 rises out of Biscayne Bay as an obscure clump of a spoil island, accessible only by boat. (Or perhaps by amphibious sex offenders willing to swim 1,200 feet across open water from the Julie Tuttle Causeway.)
In the Philippines, they're rubbed with spices, stuffed with leaves from the palongpong vine and served as cinafa'y feclat. Cinafa'y feclat not only packs more menu appeal than ''hot roasted python,'' it offers a culinary solution to the infestation of giant snakes threatening to overrun, or rather over-slither, South Florida.
O fficer Paul Kempinski was protected by an anachronism -- a bulletproof vest designed for an era before street thugs had easy access to such fearsome weaponry.
Thoughtfulness comes too late. The task force charged by the Broward County Commission with finding a way out of the conundrum created by sex offender residency restrictions has listened to experts, crunched numbers and discussed a dismaying array of unintended consequences.
fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com If only I had known that all those well-connected foreign conglomerates were gonna chicken out I'd have bid on Alligator Alley myself.
Lyglenson Lemorin committed an offense tantamount to a terror attack. He embarrassed Homeland Security. Which explains why he's still behind bars 520 days after being exonerated by a Miami jury.
We're all waiting to learn Charlie's intentions. And the tension's killing us. But I've gained access to postings on a certain anonymous Twitter account that just might reveal whether our governor intends to abscond to Washington.
T hey've become friends of the Internet kind. I've never seen them. We've never spoken. But our e-mail conversations have moved into something more personal than the usual exchanges between a newspaper columnist and his readers.
The immortal words of Florence Orbach remain a siren song for upstate defense lawyers who fear their locals lean toward the prosecution.
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