Tag Archives: Florida

Current Affairs, Food & Drink, Games, Music, Pleasures, Travel

Retirement the Margaritaville Way | The New Yorker

At the active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, it’s five o’clock everywhere. Letter from Daytona Beach…

By Nick Paumgarten, March 21, 2022

“We like the idea of being happy,” the head of the Jimmy Buffett-branded communities said of the residents’ attitude.Illustration by Nada Hayek

The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand. He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”

I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.” His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The Bar & Chill was open to the evening. A gentle breeze fanned the lanai. On a flat-screen, the Providence Friars led the Vermont Catamounts by a few buckets. A bartender brought a Perfect Margarita in a plastic cup.

The bald man, drinking a vodka soda, said his name was Phil. Phil Murphy, from Arlington, Massachusetts, aged sixty-four. Formerly a research director at Forrester, retired since 2015. “I was in the air for twenty years,” he said. He looked and sounded less like my idea of a Parrothead, as Jimmy Buffett’s diehard fans are called, than like Mike Ehrmantraut, the melancholic fixer in “Breaking Bad.”

Standing off his left shoulder, his wife, Betty, red hair cut short, added a dash of urbanity, a spritz of Allison Janney. Phil and Betty had organized an emergency fund for the restaurant’s staff during its Covid shutdown. One of their friends declared them “the king and queen of the Bar & Chill.”

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/retirement-the-margaritaville-way/

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Times They Are A-Changing

Archive of Ernest Hemingway Writings, Photos Opens to the Public for the First Time | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

Privately owned for decades, the materials include a short story featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald, personal effects and rough drafts

By Molly Enking, Daily Correspondent, September 26, 2022 3:13 p.m.

Ernest Hemingway and his middle son, Patrick, pose with a record 119.5-pound Atlantic sailfish caught off Key West, Florida, in May 1934. Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Penn State University Libraries / Penn State. All Rights Reserved.

A veritable treasure trove of papers, artifacts and photos linked to Ernest Hemingway is now accessible to scholars and the public for the first time. As the New York Times’ Robert K. Elder reports, the archive—part of the new Toby and Betty Bruce Collection at Penn State University Libraries—represents “the most significant cache of Hemingway materials uncovered in 60 years.”

Objects featured in the trove include Hemingway’s earliest known short story (written at age 10), hundreds of photographs, four unpublished short stories, manuscript ideas, letters, clothing and personal effects. The writer was a notorious “pack rat,” saving “everything from bullfighting tickets and bar bills to a list of rejected story titles written on a piece of cardboard,” says Sandra Spanier, a literary scholar at Penn State, in a statement.

Hemingway left the materials in storage at one of his favorite bars, Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, Florida, in 1939. They remained there until his death by suicide in 1961.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/trove-of-ernest-hemingway-writings-photos-is-available-to-the-public-for-the-first-time-180980842/

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” | Salon.com

Republicans are channeling tax dollars to right-wing institutes at colleges across the nation. What’s the endgame?

By Kathryn Joyce, Published May 31, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

Statue of Socrates, the philosopher (Getty Images/vasiliki)

Last fall, when professors at Flagler College, a private liberal arts school in St. Augustine, Florida, gathered for a faculty senate meeting, they learned that the college administration had worked with their local legislator to propose a new academic center on campus, the Flagler College Institute for Classical Education.

To administrators, it was an exciting prospect: the chance to receive $5 million from the state to shore up their “first year seminar,” a universal core curriculum for incoming freshmen intended to help students, particularly first-generation students, prepare for the rigors of college.

But some faculty members felt concerned, reading between the lines in a state that has become ground zero for the nation’s education debates — where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-style Republican with his eyes on the White House, has imposed gag orders and mandates on K-12 schools and described universities as “hotbeds of stale ideology” and “indoctrination factories.”

Source: EXCLUSIVE: Now the far right is coming for college too — with taxpayer-funded “classical education” | Salon.com

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Libraries, Politics, Web & Technology

Book banning is one step away from book burning | Editorial – Sun Sentinel

By Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Apr 14, 2022 at 3:52 pm

On May 10 in Berlin’s Opera Square, students burned any books deemed “un-German” to align the arts and culture of Germany with Nazi ideals. Over 25,000 books were burned in bonfires throughout Germany, including author Helen Keller’s work on the rights of people with disabilities and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.”
(Keystone // Getty Images)

The book-burning began only 100 days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933.

Torchlight parades in 34 university towns led to bonfires where more than 25,000 volumes went up in flames for being “un-German.”

Among them were the works of Germans Thomas Mann, a Nobel-prize winner and anti-Nazi; Erich Maria Remarque, the anti-war author of All Quiet on the Western Front; and the 19th century Jewish-born poet Heinrich Heine, who had written prophetically, “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.”

American writers Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway and even Helen Keller were among the verboten.

Source: Book banning is one step away from book burning | Editorial – Sun Sentinel

Food & Drink, Games, Music

Retirement the Margaritaville Way | The New Yorker

By Nick Paumgarten, March 21, 2022

A swim class at Latitude Margaritaville.Photograph by Tobias Hutzler for The New Yorker

The first person I met at the Bar & Chill was a bald guy in a black T-shirt, black drawstring shorts, and flip-flops, with a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his right arm and a claddagh ring on his left hand.

He was drinking and laughing with a few friends. He gestured to the empty stool next to him and said, “We don’t bite.”I offered an expression of if-you-insist, and he said, “Bring it.”

His tone was cheerful, as you might expect at the Bar & Chill, the principal drinking-and-dining establishment that looks out on the town center of Latitude Margaritaville, an active-living community for Jimmy Buffett enthusiasts, aged “55 and better,” in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The Bar & Chill was open to the evening. A gentle breeze fanned the lanai. On a flat-screen, the Providence Friars led the Vermont Catamounts by a few buckets. A bartender brought a Perfect Margarita in a plastic cup.

Source: Retirement the Margaritaville Way | The New Yorker

Current Affairs, Libraries, Web & Technology

Florida: “New Web Portal Documents and Catalogues the Black Experience in Tampa Bay”

From the University of South Florida:

Source: USF

The USF Institute on Black Life (IBL) has created a new web portal to better document Tampa Bay’s historic and contemporary African American communities.

The African American Neighborhood Project portal offers a multitude of resources accessible to the community, including oral histories, heritage sites, archival photographs and research addressing anti-Black racism.

“There has never been a centralized database where people can find out about the rich history and contemporary culture of African American communities in Tampa Bay,” said Fenda Akiwumi, director of the IBL. “We are excited to launch this portal with the type of information that can help students with projects, while linking together those engaged in research and community work in these neighborhoods.”

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The new web portal grew out of the Institute’s ongoing African American Neighborhoods Project. The project was the theme of this year’s conference and explores diverse perspectives and current conditions of Tampa Bay’s African American communities.

Initiated in 2012, the project chronicles the lives of people who live in historically Black communities. It focuses on residents’ historical relationships to these neighborhoods and how people feel about the future of life in Black communities. Data collected from the decade-long project will now be easily accessible through the portal to local residents and to an interdisciplinary body of scholars interested in these issues locally and nationally.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

Direct to “Black Life in Tampa Bay” Portal