Summer A is upon us once again, and it’s a welcome relief. Campus is quiet — at least, until hordes of freshly minted UF first-years arrive for Preview — and we’re free to enjoy the last weeks of less-hellish weather before the brutal north Florida summer humidity sets in.
And it wouldn’t be the end of the first week of classes without your summertime-GLADness-because-the-lines-at-Starbucks-are-hella-short edition of
Darts & Laurels
Annoying neighbors: They have loud kids, they don’t pick up their dogs’ poop and sometimes they’re cannibalistic maniacs. How to deal with them? This week, a 62-year-old Florida woman took a neighbor problem into her own hands and forewent the usual passive-aggressive-notes-in-the-mailbox route for something a little more extreme: duping a contractor into bulldozing her neighbor’s mobile home. We’re tossing our first maybe-it’s-time-for-anger-management DART of the summer at St. Johns County resident Ana Maria Moreta Folch, whose mugshot looks not unlike Kathy Bates circa “Misery.”
This week, according to RTT News, the FDA approved a robotic prosthetic arm called DEKA inspired by “Star Wars.” The arm was designed by the same man responsible for the Segway, and it works by “sending impulse directly back and forth between the brain.” The prototype is named, appropriately, “Luke.” Though DEKA’s designer is, oh, about 30 years late on the uptake, it’s a pretty neat gadget. We’re awarding a this-is-way-cooler-than-Jaime-Lannister’s-metal-hand LAUREL to scientists who use pop culture as invention inspiration.
Another Florida man went viral this week, but it wasn’t a bath-salts-related incident: Florida Democrat Joe Garcia was caught on C-SPAN digging into his ear with one finger and — dry heave — eating his findings. The video has been viewed more than 1 million times. Instead of owning up to his gross on-screen blunder, Garcia claimed he was scratching his ear before noticing a hangnail, which he “bit off.”
Sure, in the grand scheme of thing, it’s not the grossest or weirdest thing a politician has been caught doing, and it’s certainly a far cry from LARPing as a sexually dangerous vampire. But for Pete’s sake, you’re a politician on C-SPAN, not a 15-year-old Taco Bell employee in the kitchen. Joe Garcia gets the quit-digging-for-gold-on-national-television DART of the week.
Despite two Florida persons inviting jokes about the Sunshine State this week, a group of fishermen in Venice Beach defended our rep by being total badasses and rescuing a 12-foot hammerhead shark, according to Fox News. And as if that wasn’t enough, the men discovered the injured shark was pregnant and proceeded to deliver 20 hammerhead shark pups and release them back into the ocean.
“We seen [sic] the tail, pushing out. They were trying to push their heads out, so I’m guessing the mom tried to give birth but she didn’t have the strength to push them out,” one of the fishermen told a local TV news station.
This week, we’re handing a good-Samaritan-of-the-week LAUREL off to these intrepid fishermen, who now have the best bar story of all time.
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 5/15/2014 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"]
