A little bit ago there was a huge lobster bust, where some local people were harvesting thousands of lobsters illegally from illegal lobster houses which they built, some of which were in sanctuaries where lobstering is not allowed. Theoretically building lobster houses to harvest them, might be more ecologically friendly then deploying thousands of traps but as of now it’s illegal.
Lots of time poachers are small timers who come down from Miami etc and usually the general consensus is throw the book at them etc. But this time it was local guys some of whom are well known and looked up to charter captains. They are also white, which I know is opening another can of worms, but let’s be honest it’s the South.
So reading online there is various talk about what great guys they are, and how they just made a mistake (apparently repeatedly for years at a nice profit). The same people who would want to castrate some guy from Miami taking a few short snapper want to you to now give these other guys a chance.
The whole thing is kind of amusing, two of the guys at least on the surface seem to be involved in successful fishing charter businesses. How dumb is that. You are making good money legally taking people fishing and on the side you are risking everything to poach lobsters. Greed knows no bounds.
When I created this blog I thought I would want to write more Key West stuff , but I can’t seem to keep up.
Funny things that have been happening lately: people getting in all kinds of trouble for shady stuff. I’m sure there is stuff like this happening everywhere but it gets magnified down here because it is a small town, plus there is very distinct line between the financially well off locals and everyone else.
First we have the school superintendent’s wife, Monique Acevedo allegedly buying whatever she wants on the school credit card and not paying it back. The superintendent hired her and she went from a 9 dollar an hour job to one that pays over 100k a year. That not being enough to satisfy her greed, she went on to go nuts with the credit cards and now there are allegations that she held fundraisers for the school and then just kept the money.
It would seem like there would be some checks and balances for this sort of thing, but apparently not. If you are a local and well connected it appears that laws don’t apply to you. If you were drunk and shoplifted a pack of gum you would go to the county jail down here, but stealing possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars has not warranted any charges as of yet.
They ran an article in today’s paper about how the Mayor and some other elected officials’ homes are in foreclosure.
Pretty funny really, they are leaders of the community
The situation is so bad it’s even ensnared some elected officials and political leaders who Monroe County residents look to for fiscal responsibility and budgetary soundness. Among them are Monroe County Tax Collector Danise Henriquez and Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson, according to The Citizen’s court records search of all Keys officials. Schools Superintendent Randy Acevedo apparently has cleared up his foreclosure case, as has Key West City Commissioner Clayton Lopez, who blamed his on Hurricane Wilma.
Links to e-themes.info will no longer be approved, as a result your themes are being suspended from the Theme Directory.
I often have themes denied for various reasons, which sometimes I disagree with, but in all those cases there was usually a reason given.
My themes are still on the site but apparently suspended. At first I thought I had ran foul of some new rule. The people from wordpress seem to like a lot of rules. After checking the site it appears that I might not be the only one. The number of themes on the site is down to 512, over 50 themes have disappeared of the site since this morning. Mabye hundreds disappeared since yesterday.
Since the email gave no indictation of what the new rules might be, I checked on this page http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/about/, and noticed this line
Themes for sites that support “premium” themes will not be approved.
I don’t remember if that was there before, but it looks new. Although its not really clear I am taking that is that your author’s site cannot sell themes?
Well still waiting for an answer back on what the suspension is for.
There was an article in the Keysnews today essentially saying that they mayor called the feds to raid the head shops on Duval
Federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other state and local law enforcement raided the businesses — sometimes called head shops — on Oct. 17 in a surprise move, hitting all the stores at once. Agents were seen walking out of the stores with water bongs, wired rolling papers and other items deemed to be illegal drug paraphernalia under a broadly written federal law.
The raids came after Key West Mayor Morgan McPherson asked the Monroe County State’s Attorney Office to investigate the legality of such products, and they, in turn, went to the federal government as the items are not illegal under Florida law.
“The idea was to work on our image, and it’s something I believe we made progress on,” McPherson said. “Obviously the intent is to match what is in our windows … with the image of our community.”
I like that part about matching the “image of our community” what does that mean? Is he trying to say no one smokes pot in Key West? Maybe in a perfect world people would just stick to alcoholism, but the police blotter seems to show otherwise.
Personally I think that whole north end of Duval is repulsive really, its totally geared to sucking in the cruise ship people to buy essentially garbage. Crappy shops with obscene gag tee shirts in the windows, stupid knick knacks etc. Its funny they try to scrub down that area and make it as non-offensive as possible for the cruise ship people.
It still seems way over the top to call the feds for some water pipes, and the image of our community? I really wish I was here to see this city before the cruise ships and this past real estate boom. Always born too late. But perhaps I will be here to see a casino come in
Catherine and I went out snorkeling today, and it was freezing. There have been some cold fronts coming through and the air temperature has been down to 59 degrees which is cold for here.
We actually went looking for lobsters and found a bunch but they were mostly undersized, so we got a couple keepers and came back. The shallow water we were swimming in is much more senstive to cold snaps then the deeper water offshore, and the water today was freezing, but cat got a couple pictures and we got a couple lobster tails so it was worth it.
