Surprise!

Some things here in S. Florida are just a little different than what I’m used to. Like, when people here refer to the Bay area, they mean Tampa. And when they say “West coast”, they also mean Tampa. Or Sarasota…

Leading even insane traffic on my list of irritants is the vicious breed of ants they have here. You don’t have to provoke them, they come to you. Then they walk around on any exposed skin, pausing now and then to inject a venom that itches like a mother— for several days. The mosquito problem is nothing compared to this, I assure you.

You’ll almost never hear a Southern accent here. The few Caucasians with any accent are all New Yorkers, while half the Blacks are speaking Creole or French or an English so heavily accented with one of those that it’s impenetrably foreign.

Black women still conk [straighten] their hair here!! (Black men, like white men, generally keep theirs cropped quite close.) One young skateboarder — dependable reservoirs of rebellion, they — was sporting a Soul Train ’fro.

SE Fla. seems lacking in some of the civilized amenities. (I’m referring now to the real city, where the locals live — the tourist fantasyland hard by the ocean is undoubtedly up to world standards.) For one thing, they don’t seem to believe in hot running water, not even at coin laundries. For another, at pay phones there is usually either no directory, or one for the wrong city, or one so old it’s practically useless. It’s also a challenge to find a good submarine sandwich [Hint: LaSpada’s] or a good pizza [no clue]. (J-Box is mercifully missing from the local food scene, but its niche is claimed by the even nastier Checkers.)

Supermarkets put big Toledo freight scales right by the entrance for customers to step up on. You’d think reminding people how much weight they’re carrying would be poison for business, but with all the people here who look frankly malnourished, it’s probably a good idea. What I’d like someone to ’splain to me, Lucee, is why I’ve been gaining two pounds [nearly a kilo] a week here. I mean, it’s not like I don’t walk much ... Also, the typical man here being so scrawny, why is it still near-impossible to find novelty T-shirts smaller than a 43-in [109 cm] chest size ?

The two dominant Florida supermarket chains are Publix (which feels a bit Yankee) and Winn-Dixie (which feels very Deep South). While Publix is pushing healthy produce, Winn-Dixie fills a whole mirrored wall with red meat. Of course W-D is the one to sponsor an auto racing team, and it’s the one to look the other way while its refuse bins serve as de facto soup kitchens. At Publix, they’re playing a taped instrumental version of Blind Faith’s Can’t Find My Way Home; at W-D, they’re grabbing country music off the radio. (Without apparent irony, W-D offers a snack item styled “Georgia Crackers”.) At both chains, you can choose from five brands of prepared horseradish and five of tinned anchovies (Huh??).

You also can buy the red label Nabisco graham crackers (sweetened with molasses, not honey) — a variety utterly unknown on the U.S. West Coast. The fresh pineapple, from Costa Rica, are excellent; the cantaloupe (Honduras) and the strawberries (local) are abysmal. And plain unflavored milk in paper cartons smaller than a quart is unheard of. (Why I care:  the small cartons make bitchin cereal bowls for breakfast on the run.) What you get instead is the Chug from McArthur Dairy, a wide-mouth plastic bottle that looks, well, like a milk bottle. Sure doesn’t cut it as a cereal bowl.

The region’s multi-ethnic (as distinguished from merely regional) influences are further revealed by popular flavors of soda: grape (Centroamérica), ginger ale (Caribbean islands), seltzer water (Jew York). For some reason, the 12-packs of cans here have rounded corners [back in California, they’re squared]. And there’s no cash bounty on beverage containers, so the place is a pig sty: empty cans and bottles everywhere.

Taxi cabs look more like police cars than real cop cars do. Real cops park empty cars along busy roads to give the impression of increased coverage.

Ft Lauderdale has cops on horseback … ’cos with all the canals, beaches, etc. sometimes ya need a good all-terrain vehicle.

School buses carry a flashing strobe light on top [good idea]. When the bus is in motion, you’re fooled into thinking it’s a string of lamps flashing in sequence.

Some county transit buses add a chemical to the exhaust that makes them smell like cheap cologne. Most of the benches placed by busy streets are not bus stops. You can sit on them, you can read the ads on the seatbacks, you just can’t get a bus to pick you up there.

You’ll see two or three different garbage companies competing on a single block. One of them archly promises “FREE SNOW REMOVAL”, which we very nearly ended up needing this winter.

There are dozens of places where you can pawn your car. (Given the local attitude toward cars, that’s akin to pawning your left nut, but … desperation happens.)

And in a place where people even tear those miles off Marlboro packs, I keep finding paper money (large bills, folks) and $25 fone cards lying around outside stores. What’s up with that ?

Most-frequent themes of graffiti around Ft Lauderdale: Oral-sex offers, racist slogans, and the text of Romans 10:13.

Nearly all of the Tommy and Calvin logo clothing is seen on Blacks.  Whites wear Nautica. (I don’t make these stupid rules, I just report what I see.)

Newspapers are sold largely by guys who hawk them at busy intersections (they buy a BIG stack at wholesale, and it’s up to them to hustle back their investment plus enough to get by on). This seems like a good idea [it pre-empts potential begging space, for one thing] but it turns out most of these guys are low-life addicts, so there’s no real win here (except maybe for the publisher). Oh, and guess what color the Sun-Sentinel vendors’ uniform T-shirts are ?

Those wide grassy strips along roadsides are there to buffer runoff water from the trademark Florida downpours. While the rich imported sod holds up deceptively well, the sandy native soil below erodes from repeated flooding … so when you walk across the grass, you and the sod sink several inches at each step — into a dry place if you’re lucky.

You can get 1Mbps (!) wireless Internet access here for about what ISDN (~0.15Mbps) costs in California. But, whose time is that valuable ?