Turns out we were lucky that it was just really, really cold last week. This time around, we got a hefty dose of bleak and rainy on top of the frigid air we’ve unfortunately had to get used to. But if Florida really is as weird as everybody else in the country seems to think — see Jon Stewart’s fierce description of us from Tuesday’s “The Daily Show” — it should be unbearably hot and humid soon. To celebrate getting one day closer to that time, here’s your damp-yet-bitterly-cold edition of...
Darts & Laurels
Craft beer, unlike wearing flip-flops out of season, is a not-awful trend that caught on in the past five years or so. Rather than mass-producing a product that tastes like liquified, fermented Wonderbread, craft breweries work hard to create small batches of delicious beer. A single craft brewery produces hardly a fraction of what giants like Anheuser-Busch do in a day, but together, the country’s 2,700 small breweries and their growing market share are starting to worry the giants.
Craft breweries everywhere rely on selling beer on-site to stay afloat, which is becoming a wing of Florida’s tourism industry. This is important, as other than gator farming and construction of private airports for Scientologists, tourism is our main industry. But the Florida Retail Federation is suing the state to repeal a law allowing craft breweries to sell beer. This would put scores of breweries out of business and all but guarantee no new ones would emerge. It’s clearly a power move by the big retailers and brewers to snuff out their smaller competitors, and they’re using the legal system for that. For that, we’re handing a sorry-your-beer-sucks-but-keep-your-hands-off-our-local-business DART to the beverage interests at work in our state.
Past the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo magazine shooting, the world’s political climate is beginning to readjust. The first sign of this came with the arrest of Dieudonne, a French public figure who walks the line between comedian and anti-semitic agitator. Responding to the march attended by 1.5 million in Paris, he posted a Facebook status calling it “a magical moment comparable to the Big Bang.” But he also said, “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” a mashup of Charlie Hebdo and the name of Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four Jewish hostages in a Kosher deli last week. Dieudonne was arrested a few days later.
France has existing laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial for which Dieudonne could have been charged. Instead, the French government chose to prosecute him for “defending terrorism,” which is troubling because, unlike hate speech, this doesn’t have a concrete definition. Potentially any speech could fall into this category because it’s so subjective. Dieudonne is a terrible person, but arresting him for this sets a dangerous precedent, especially when he could be arrested for breaking other laws. For its hypocrisy following a show of support for free speech, we’re giving the French government a DART.
Closer to home, UF astronomy professor Jian Ge just finished six years of research, finding scores of new celestial bodies. This includes 285 binary star systems, meaning he may have found the real-life Tatooine. For all his hard work, we’re giving Dr. Ge a thanks-for-keeping-our-Star-Wars-dreams-alive Laurel.
And that wraps up this Darts and Laurels. We hope you have a less rainy weekend.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 1/16/2015 under the headline “Darts & Laurels"]
