The site for ranting and reporting by John Masters
Sometimes I just stumble across fun little facts and/or tidbits. When that happens, they will wind up duly noted in this category.
Well, this is another of the few 5-star ratings I’ve given. This small restaurant is only a few blocks from the house and has been there the entire time we lived here. We just never went, and frankly, we are both mad that it took so long. We kept saying we needed to try it, and a Groupon came up for it, so that was the incentive.
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So, this is my first post in a very long time. A lot has happened since that last post in October of 2020. That one was about local candidates and my recommendations. The intervening years was just too turbulent for me, and I know my posts would be mostly rants and filled with gloom and doom. We still face a lot of the problems coming out of the past couple of years, and I’m sure I’ll be ranting a lot, but it is time to get back into the game.
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Have you ever seen a sign or notice and wondered about the story behind the sign? Some of them could
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The only person I know who’d had Burger King’s new vegetable-based burger liked them a lot. I finally got around to trying one for lunch this past Thursday. I’m not vegan nor vegetarian, so I was viewing this very critically and didn’t care about the outcome (other than I didn’t want to eat a bad burger for lunch). I was pleasantly surprised.
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I almost never rave about a phone app, but in case you haven’t seen anything about this one, you really have to get the JFK Moonshot app (available for Android and iPhone). This is about the coolest thing I’ve seen and sets a pretty high bar for Augmented Reality.
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As is appropriate, a lot is being made of the 50th anniversary of the man’s first landing on the moon. I was just 10-year-old tyke at the time, but I have some pretty clear memories of that night and watching those grainy black and white photos of Neil Armstrong coming down that ladder and the hop down to the surface. It was an amazing time when we thought we could do anything.
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This past Saturday I went with some friends to the annual Tampa Bay Pride parade over in Ybor City. The parade was led off by a couple of Grand Masters of course, but then came all the candidates (Tampa is having municipal election runoffs) and local office holders. They kept coming and coming, and finally when the first actual float came by I looked at my watch, and it had taken nearly 25 minutes for all the pols to get by.
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The Deviled Pig opened within the past few months at 3307 S Dale Mabry Hwy, Tampa, FL 33629. I was getting good comments on a neighborhood message, and over 4.5 stars on Yelp. It does turn out it didn’t rate quite that high once Yelp realized that there were a sizeable number of recently created accounts that one review giving the location 5 stars (guess who that restaurant was). However, once that was cleaned out, it still had decent reviews, so we decided to try it last night (Friday) early.
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Well here’s some sad nostalgic news. Dorcas Reilly, the woman who invented one of my favorite dishes, the Green Bean Casserole, died on October 15.
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According to report in USAToday, “Employees at the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Center in Hawaii were receiving mysterious calls last week. Only it wasn’t a glitch with their phone system. It was caused by a gecko.” Claire Simeone, director of the Marine Mammal Center’s Ke Kai Ola Hawaiian Monk Seal Hospital in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, was just sitting down for lunch when a call came in to her cell from the hospital, but there was only silence.
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Florida headquartered Publix Super Markets, has contributed nearly $670k to Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam ($250K of the recently), now the Commissioner of Agriculture. The Tampa Bay Times has recently published an article calling this to the attention of everyone, and Publix’s has been in damage control ever since, issuing the typical PR-written, Lawyer-approved bullshit form letter. I’ve written my own letter in response to the form letter I’ve seen posted all over social media. Let’s see if Publix gets the message.
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