Hello, hungry people.

At the encouragement of my wife and sons, who have taken up an increasingly popular act of physical punishment known as “rucking,” I recently started strapping on a weighted vest (20 lbs.!) in order to add further agony to my morning walks.

“It’s a double workout,” said one of my sons, as if this should be an enticement.

“You feel it all over,” said my wife, swallowing the Ibuprofen that typically follows her ruck outings.

Said a friend who has joined the Cult of Ruck: “It’ll add years to your life!”

Despite such warnings, I bought one.

***

And so it was that I set out the other day on my normal route, which takes me across the grounds of Rollins College.

It’s a gorgeous, idyllic campus, a place cloaked in the serenity of academia, a respite from the rest of the world. I never get tired of walking there.

I was striding powerfully in my life-changing ruck along the walkway near the Rollins Chapel when I spotted a man and woman heading my way. They were wearing uniforms, Rollins groundskeepers. I could hear them talking and recognized it as Haitian Creole.

They saw me and froze. The woman grabbed the man’s arm and stepped behind him, as if for protection.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“We have papers,” the man said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“We are legal,” the man said.

Only then did it dawn on me that, yeah, despite being 76 years old, and with the get-up I was wearing and my sunglasses, and looking my gnarly self (refer again to the photo above) I might at a glance resemble an ICE agent.

“No,” I said. “No ICE.”

But they weren’t convinced. They still look scared.

The woman kept holding onto the man and standing behind him. They were looking in all directions to see if there were others like me swarming in. But there were only a few students, faces buried in phones, oblivious to everything.

“It’s OK. Really. I’m not ICE,” I repeated. “I promise.”

The man seemed to believe me. The woman not so much. She looked like she was about to cry.

“Tell her it’s OK,” I said.

The man said something in Creole. The woman relaxed. A little. She smiled.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” said the man.

“Thank you,” I said, not fully understanding why we were thanking each but not knowing what else to say.

***

I gave them a friendly wave and went on my way.

After a few yards, I looked back. They hadn’t moved and were still watching me. I waved again. They waved back.

I walk across the Rollins campus most every morning but haven’t seen them since.

***
As you might imagine, the folks at ICE aren’t altogether forthcoming about the agency’s recent arrest statistics.

While media coverage of ICE has subsided since its invasion of Minneapolis earlier this year and the departure of Barbie action-figure Kristi Noem, the arrest numbers have continued to increase. Rather than a shock-and-awe demonstration of dominance, the agency has become more and more stealth about it.

And it seems to have evolved into a competitive sport, with Texas and Florida vying for the No. 1 and No. 2 spots from month to month. The two states combined for more than 20,000 arrests in July alone.

A lot of these, especially here in Florida, followed the June expiration of the Temporary Protection Status for Haitian nationals, which the Trump administration chose not to renew.

And despite the official stance that these arrests are getting dangerous felons off the streets, fewer than 10 percent of those arrested have records of criminal violence.

Many of them are decent, diligent people who have been here for years. Perhaps working as groundskeepers at a local college.

***
Which brings us, as it so often does, to . . . Today’s Poll!

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Hello, hungry people.

Between 2004 and 2011, I published five mystery novels with St. Martin’s Press. They were set in Florida and the Caribbean and featured a main character named Zack Chasteen.

The books did well enough. They won some awards, went into multiple printings, got published internationally (a Russian version inexplicably featured the gangsta rapper 50 Cent on the cover) and continue to bring in a (very) little money every now and then.

But I headed in another direction after the last novel, launched my own publishing company (Story Farm) and am content in knowing the Zack books enjoyed their place in time. They were a lot of fun to write, and I’m proud of them. Who knows? Maybe I’ll write some more.

Do I wish my books had spent months on the New York Times bestseller list and brought in tons o’ dough? Of course, I do.

Every writer thinks they deserve a wider audience and more money for their work. And for every writer who thinks that, there are plenty of charlatans assholes ready to exploit their dreams.

***
Which sets the stage for an email I received a coupla weeks ago.

Lots of writers have received emails like this recently. It’s AI slop, obviously, and it goes on and on with unrelenting praise for my storytelling skills and winds up with a pitch to market and promote my books so that gazillions of readers will buy them.

As much as I like to think that most writers will see through the scam, I know that many will gobble the bait and lose hundreds and thousands of dollars in the process.

So it was for them — and for my own entertainment — that I decided to screw with James Whoever-He-Really-Is.

I should mention here that “In Search of Lost Time,” is also known as “A Remembrance of Things Past” and is generally regarded as the world’s longest novel. Many people praise it and have read it in its entirety.

Good for them.

Anyway, I slip back and forth between those titles here, as well as font sizes.

James then goes on to tell me how much all this will cost, with a three-tiered option that offers increasingly valuable “levels of marketing and outreach.”

Basic: $297

Standard: $497

Premium: $797

He replied almost immediately with this very generous offer:

And from then on, well, I just couldn’t help myself.

And:

***
As much fun as I was having with this, I didn’t reply for a fews days. And got this:

***
Which brings us to, you guessed it: Today’s Poll!

***
That’s it for today, folks. I’ll be back soon (but don’t tell James that.)

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Hello, hungry people.

Today I’m sharing a few observations and comments from you, the astute readers of Bob’s Diner, many of whom actually pay to read this and for which I am grateful. 1

***
”You call your Substack “Bob’s Diner” and yet there’s seldom anything in it about food. This is false advertising.” — Alice P., Columbia SC

I should point out that this is a metaphorical diner, a convivial place where anyone, even those of you who don’t pay (ahem, Alice) can drop by, hang out, take your chances regarding what’s on the menu and even insult your server should you like.

But you are absolutely right! There hasn’t been nearly enough talk here lately of food, which is not as it should be. Because food is always on my mind.

So what you’re looking at in the photo above is The Best Thing I’ve Eaten Lately.

Which brings us to Today’s Poll. Two polls, actually,

And:

It’s the last one: Red Snapper Ribs and Throats, which too seldom appears on restaurant menus but which I snatched up when I found it at Outriggers Tiki Bar & Grille in New Smyrna Beach last week.

Yes, it looks like it might fly off the platter and strafe your table. And yes, it demands eating your way around lots of bones. But it’s served with Thai chile sauce and two kinds of seaweed (to give the dead fish a sense of place) and for $20 you get 2-plus pounds of red snapper (including carcass) which translates to more than a pound of delicious red snapper flesh and which is more than most humans can eat.

I should point out that those pectoral fins are particularly crunchy and delicious and can also be used as toothpicks.

***

And as long as we’re on the subject, here’s what else I’ve been eating.

Field peas!

Which are one of the few things that will grow in Florida vegetable gardens during these, the most hellish days of summer.

These particular peas came from my son Dash’s garden. For whatever reason, he did not see fit to pre-shell them.

But that’s as it should be. Because here’s the importance of field peas: Not only are they delicious when cooked with bacon and salt and anointed with butter, but shelling them takes time. And if you are lucky, then you have someone to sit and shell them with.

So, Debbie and I sat at the kitchen counter for the better part of an hour liberating the peas from their pods. And talking. Just talking. And shelling peas. It was wonderful.

***
And okra!

The Noble Pod thrives in Florida’s summers. It can also grow a couple of inches overnight. Meaning you have to pick your okra daily or it gets tough and stringy. Fortunately, there is a delicacy known as Pickled Okra. Again, from Dash’s garden:

Quite good on its own. Spectacular in a Bloody Mary.

***
But enough about food. Back to your comments.

***
”How is Marcus? Is he still alive?” — Pete D., Ventura, CA

What a question to ask, Pete. Yes, Marcus is still alive. Do you think that, if he had died, I would not have already exploited his passing by writing something sappy about him for Bob’s Diner? Dogs are God’s gift to writers. Especially when they die (the dogs, not the writers.)

As proof of life, here’s a photo of Marcus taken this very morning as he stands guard against the imaginery FedEx delivery guy and imaginary squirrels he sees outside. He’s mostly blind, but he still has gumption and works fulltime at his job.

Marcus recently observed his 17th birthday. And he celebrated by:

Breaking Debbie’s kneecap!

OK, he didn’t do it on purpose. But he was sleeping in his spot on the tile floor you see above, as he so often does, and Debbie was vacuuming, as she so often does, and she tripped over him. The rest is orthopedic history.

Fortunately, it was a clean break. Debbie didn’t need surgery. For the past month, she has been wearing a knee brace. She can’t bend her knee. She can’t drive. And we had to cancel a planned trip to Mexico City. Because what’s the sense of going there if you can’t spend hours walking and getting lost and eating and then walking and getting lost and eating some more?

But that’s not the unfortunate part. The unfortunate part — and this is a big unfortunate part — is that Debbie had to miss pilates class. I will not say she is a pilates fanatic. But she is exceedlingly devoted and typically goes to five classes a week.

It’s bad enough that she has been forced to miss class. What makes it worse is that she was closing in on her 2,000th class in six-seven years — just 18 classes short — when Marcus she broke her kneecap.

I had no idea that pilates was a competitive sport. But there is only one other person at the pilates studio who has attended more than 2,000 classes and Debbie has been in dedicated pursuit. The payoff? Nothing. Except the instructor takes a photo and everyone applauds.

I’ll catch hell for this, but here’s Debbie when she hit the 750th-class milemarker a few years ago. For the record, she’s just as beautiful with a broken kneecap.

And furthermore:

Q: Who in their right mind, upon learning they had a broken kneecap, would immediately buy one of these weighted exercise rucks and actually go out and use it?

A: My lovely wife.

Says she: “I might not be able to go to pilates and I might have to limp along in a knee brace, but I’m gonna stay in shape.”

Bless her heart.

***
And also from our Dept. of Women’s Wear:

Bob’s Diner received a lot of response to this recent post: Boob’s, Etc.

By “response,” I mean that 22 readers canceled their subscriptions (a new record!). But that’s OK, because it netted 26 new subscribers. And two of them paid bona-fide gringo dollars for the privilege. So . . . a win!

And it provided me an excuse to again share the photo that ran with the post, which was about a store in Winter Park — klassy — that sells fitted, padded clothing so women can go comfortably braless.

It prompted this from a reader:

“I love this post and I had to tell you a funny story.

”I probably have 10 of their tops. I love them all. This morning we left for Canada. I had laid out my clothes the night before since our pick up time was 4 AM.

“It included a boatneck tank top, with the klassy built-in bra, including the cup inserts. My 4 AM brain put the thing on backwards. It wasn’t until about 3 PM that day that I realized I’d been walking around all day with protruding bulges in my back.

“My ever observant husband, of course, never noticed.

“I’m not quite sure what I need, a new wardrobe, a new enlightenment at 4 AM or a more observant husband. Can AI teach him that?” — LSG, Winter Park, FL; currently in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Dear LSG: I know your husband. Like me, he is untrainable. Be glad you are in Canada where, even if you put on your clothing backwards again, the people are far too polite to point it out.

***
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Hello, hungry people.

I was out for a morning walk the other day — it was 7:30-ish — and Winter Park’s main drag was largely deserted except for us early a.m. pavement pounders

Then from the block ahead came a loud commotion, lots of cheering and shouting.

And I saw a dozen or so women dressed in red and waving signs that said: “Go Braless!” and “I ❤️Boobs!”

I picked up the pace.

***

From a distance, it had all the signs of a 1960s-era women’s lib demonstration, but for the fact that the participants were better dressed. And not angry. They were smiling.

So, being a creepy old guy, I stopped and gawked and asked what was going on.

Turns out, it was a photo shoot for a Labor Day sale at the store where they work.

“We specialize in clothing that women can wear without needing a bra,” said one of the women in front of the store.

This gave me pause. I had reached a point where I could not hold up my end of the conversation.

And yet, I persisted.

“Can’t women go braless in any type of clothing?” I asked.

This got laughs and indulgent smiles from the women in red.

“Sometimes that’s too revealing,” said one of them. “And jiggly.”

“And sometimes it’s too scratchy,” said another.

“Plus, bras aren’t comfortable,” said yet another.

Again, not my field of expertise. But I wasn’t finished being a creepy old guy.

“OK if I take a photo?” I asked.

They were, as you can see, all for it.

“We love encouraging women to go braless,” said one. “In the right kind of clothes.”

Said another: “We love spreading the word on social media.”

And so, friends, here we are.

***

The name of the store is — klassy. — and that period, apparently, is necessary.

Yes, it looks like a comma in the photo below. But that’s a shadow. It’s really a period, And it has a purpose.

Other brands — JOANN. and Marc Jacobs., for instance — employ periods, too. It’s a design thing. The period, I am told, “sends a psychological cue of confidence, completeness, and finality — communicating that the brand is the ‘definitive’ word on what they do.”

And the lowercase presentation, I am further told, “mimics modern texting habits, making a retail storefront feel more human, direct, and casual rather than corporate.”

Who knew?

Now for the klassy. origin story. (Actually, that period is confounding and we will henceforth dispense with it.)

The klassy co-founder, Natalie Rogers Soto, grew up right here in the Orlando area. She got tired of uncomfortable bras that weren’t flattering to her outerwear, and she couldn’t find built-in bras that felt right. So she started designing her own.

In 2018, she and her husband, Jacob, launched klassy online. It was slow going at first. But they posted twice daily on TikTok. And in 2022, klassy went viral with its summer “brami” (a hybrid bra and camisole) and hit $1 million in sales in a single day.

They opened the first and, so far, only klassy retail store in Winter Park at the tail end of 2025. And in March 2026, Natlie was honored by her alma mater with induction into the University of Central Florida College of Business Hall of Fame.

How’s that for an “uplifting,” story?

***
”It’s all about body positivity and feeling good in your own skin,” one of the women outside the klassy store said.

It reminds me of the origin story of another clothing line, Lululemon, which has a store just down the street from klassy.

Back in 2002, when Lululemon launched its first shop in Vancouver, the owners advertised that they would give $200 worth of clothing to the first 30 people who showed up naked on a specified morning. Being Vancouver, it was rainy and very cold. Yet, way more than 30 people stood shivering outside in bathrobes that day and, after they stripped down, Lululemon let them all inside and gave them free stuff.

I have searched for photos of this historic event. Sadly, I’ve come up short.

Fast forward to present-day: Lululemon now has 811 stores and, in 2025, rang up sales of $11.1 billion.

Far be it from me to suggest that klassy is on the same trajectory. But to think that you could become a billionaire by helping women go braless? Surely it would boggle the minds of 1960s-era feminists.

***
I kinda wanted to take a peek inside the klassy store. Just so that, years from now, I can say I knew it when.

“Come back at 10 o’clock when we open,” said one of the women in red. “We have a little coffee shop inside. You can try our specialty, a ‘matcha k.’”

Maybe another day.

And so I carried on, just a guy on an early morning walk who set out with no expectations, learned a little something, met some lovely women, and came away with a bounce in his step.

Is this a great country or what?

***
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All you have to do is punch the button and become a paid subscriber to Bob’s Diner. It’s cheap. Less than $5 a month for a yearly subscription.

Who knows? You might just find it uplifting.

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Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be back soon.

Hello, hungry people.

Let’s start today’s business with a poll.

OK, moving on . . .

***

Full disclosure: I’m a big Obama fan. I miss him in the White House. More every day. Plus, the two of us have a lot in common.

— We’re both left-handed (read into that what you will.)

— We both have a pair of great kids (adults now) who make us proud every day.

— We both married up . . . to smart, beautiful women who somehow manage to tolerate our many flaws.

So, yeah, for the trip Debbie and I have been planning to Chicago in October, the Obama Presidential Center, which opened in June, is at the top of our places to visit, along with a long list of restaurants and a whole lot of walking to work off the restaurants.

Thing is, tickets to the center are hard to come by. Within a week of the center’s opening, they were sold out through the end of September. Tickets for October went on sale yesterday (Wednesday) at 10 a.m.

Unlike some online sites where buyers camp out hours in advance to scoop up blocks of tickets and then re-sell them, the Obama center handles things a little differently. It doesn’t matter how far in advance you log on to its site, at 10 a.m. everyone who’s there is randomly assigned a place in the digital line.

Some folks will surely say this smells of communism. A random lottery determining who gets access to a limited resource, administered by the state.

But I think it's fair and equitable and, yes, democratic. It’s really a Vegas-kinda-thing. You’re gambling, you’re taking your chances. As American as it gets.

Either way, it's the first time in memory that a website has treated me exactly the same as everyone else who logged on — no fast lane for the guy with three monitors and a Ticketmaster bot, no VIP presale code. Still, somewhere a guy in a “Don’t Tread on Me” t-shirt is muttering: “This is how it starts. With tickets to a museum.”

***

The Obama center tells you in advance that if your wait time is more than one hour, then you’re probably outta luck.

So, I logged in at 9:55 a.m. Central Time and this is what I got.

Outta luck. And I didn’t stick around just to sink deeper into Loserville.

Which leads us to another poll.

For the record, we won’t be going to Chicago in October. And we weren’t about to take a shot at those January tickets. Because, well, it’s January. In Chicago. And neither the Cubs nor the Sox will be playing.

An extreme reaction? Maybe.

But I ask you: What if you were planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park and got a text saying the geyser was “taking a break between shows.” Would you hold off until the time was right?

I rest my case.

***

Since we’re poll-crazy today, here’s another one:

It’s low-hanging fruit, but we’ll take a beat here to allow your snickers about “Trump Presidential Library” being an oxymoron.

***
Plans are well underway for the Trump repository-of-who-knows-what. It will be erected (snort) in downtown Miami — a 1,067-foot (60-story) glass tower that will be just 2 feet short of the Federal Aviation Administration’s height limit for the city.

Here’s a recent rendering

By comparison, the Obama center is just 225-feet tall.

Far be it from me to suggest which one of these guys might be suffering from an edifice complex.

***
I am, of course, a renowned architect critic. So, I admire the design of the Obama center, which is meant to symbolize four hands coming together — unity, collaboration, collective action.

Whoops, did I just say “collective?” There’s that pesky communism sneaking in again.

By any measure, the designs of both buildings are deeply symbolic.

The Obama center has a certain whimsy about it that hints at something deeper inside.

The proposed Trump library? It’s a golden phallus that you can see right through.

***

The full details of the Trump Presidential Library have not been divulged. Although His Supremeness has hinted that it will likely include a hotel and corporate office space. Because why not?

Bob’s Diner has uncovered further details.

Here’s how things will stack up between the two places:

That’s it for today, folks.

I’ll be back soon.

Meanwhile, please punch some buttons.

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Hello, hungry people.

When I went in for my annual physical the other day, the nurse asked: “Mr. Morris, do you have a living will?”

“No,” I told her. “I do not.”

She gave me a look. And said: “You really should make one.”

To which I wanted to ask: “Do you know something I don’t know?”

Instead, I went home and jotted down a few things that I hope will settle the matter.

-- If I should remain in a persistent vegetative state and mutter only guttural, meaningless sounds, it’s obvious that I should be . . . elected to Congress.

-- If it appears that I am unable to interact with certain acquaintances or family members . . . this is normal.

-- If I am unable to clean or bathe myself, it’s OK to call me . . . Sponge Bob.

-- Do not resuscitate me unless . . . there is a double espresso at bedside.

-- If I do not respond to stimuli, such as Wet Willie’s in my ear, please tell my grandson Zeke to stop it already and go torment someone else.

-- Once I am allowed to die a painless and peaceful death, I would like my organs donated to any church that will agree to play them on alternate Sundays.

-- If my death is particularly dramatic, I expect an eight-part limited series on Netflix and, if Clooney turns down the part, it’s OK to get any reasonably handsome actor except Timothee Chalamet.

-- If there is any family dispute over my medical condition, it must be settled by playing rock, paper, scissors.

-- Even if I remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, that still doesn’t mean my lovely wife can wear a T-shirt that says “I’m with Stupid.”

-- If my doctor pronounces me brain-dead, I grant permission to change my voter registration to Republican.

-- I do not wish to be kept alive by any machine that has a “baked potato” setting.

-- I would like to die at home, surrounded by my Visa bills.

-- At my wake, I insist upon a martini bar (gin only), exceptional ganja and a strolling accordionist.

-- Despite having never served in the military and having gotten kicked out of ROTC in college, I demand a 21-gun salute at my memorial service. Make sure it’s performed with those Super-Soaker water guns that kids play with in swimming pools and fill them with champagne.

-- In the event of an open coffin, someone please trim those wiry little hairs that grow out of my ears.

-- I would like my entire estate to become the property of my dog, Marcus, so that he might travel widely and share his flatulence with the world.

-- Assume that, even in a coma, I can still hear any and all discussions pertaining to food and unless you can jam it in the tube then kindly shut the hell up.

***
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Hello, hungy people.

In what is now an annual tradition, Bob’s Diner is celebrating the birthday of John D. MacDonald, who would have turned 110 today.

We’ll have a bottle of Plymouth gin at hand for cocktail hour (the fave of Travis McGee, although he later switched to Boodles.) And some of us will be sporting our “Busted Flush” t-shirts (thanks again, Karen Turville, for sending them along.) 1

The only action item on our agenda, and one we’ll eventually get to: What would MacDonald think of the most recent adaptations of his 1957 novel “The Executioners,” more widely known these days as “Cape Fear” and source material for two feature films and a 10-part series now on Apple TV?

***
First, an interesting backstory.

“The Executioners” was written as the result of a bet between MacDonald and another Sarasota-based writer, MacKinlay Kantor, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of the much-admired Civil War novel “Andersonville,” among other books, screenplays and newspaper/magazine journalism.

Their longstanding friendship is mentioned in “The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family,” a 2016 book by my friend and one-time colleague Tom Shroder, Kantor’s grandson. The title refers not to MacDonald, but to Kantor, who called himself that to his family.

Kantor wrote dozens of crime stories and novels early in his career. Yet, he was a man of high-minded literary leanings and dismissive of the prolific output of MacDonald, who published 70 novels and more than 500 short stories, the latter mostly in the pulp and digest magazines of the 1940s-50s.

Says Tom: ”I have a letter he (MacDonald) wrote to my grandfather, who apparently had been condescendingly urging him to write ‘real novels.’ John was obviously deeply affected by it, and struggled with it . . .”

If you’d like to learn a bit more about this, please click on over to Tom’s Substack — “I Chat with Chat (So You Don’t Have To).“ It’s an ongoing and highly readable conversation between Tom and ChatGPT on an always-surprising range of topics. Even if you despise everything about Artificial Intelligence, it’s worth a visit. Because Tom is a deep thinker and a great writer.

Today’s episode will dip into the MacDonald/Kantor friendship, and I can’t wait to see how Tom and his AI co-conspirator handle it.

***
Which leads to that bet.

During one of their many get-togethers, and prickled by Kantor’s disdain for genre fiction, MacDonald wagered that he could write a novel in just 30 days that would be serialized in a national magazine, bought by a major publisher, get picked up by a book club and become a film.

I have two words for you: Confident sumbitch.

MacDonald churned out 224 pages (about 65,000 words) in a month. “The Executioners” appeared in two installments in Ladies Home Journal in 1957. Simon & Schuster published it in hardback in 1958. It was a pick of the Literary Guild book club. And the first movie based on it came out in 1962.

MacDonald won $50 from his drinking buddy.

***

*** So why did the name get changed to “Cape Fear?”

Thank (or blame) Gregory Peck, who starred in the film, which was made by his production company. Peck was a big fan of films with geographic titles, like “Casablanca.” He looked at a map, spotted Cape Fear, North Carolina, and the rest is cinematic history.

For the record, there’s absolutely no mention of Cape Fear in “The Executioners.”

***

Next up — Martin Scorsese’s 1991 “Cape Fear.”

It featured a bad-ass, tattooed Robert DeNiro as the villain, Max Cady, and a wonderfully skanky Juliette Lewis, who didn’t even get a poster credit but won an Academy Award nomination.

But we’re gonna skip right past that so we can (finally) get to:

***
Just wanna say right off: I’m a big fan of this series.

Javier Bardem eats every shred of the scenery in “Cape Fear.V3.” Which, by happy coincidence drops its ninth episode tonight (July 24).

As for being a faithful adaptation of “The Executioners” . . . ha-ha-ha.

Consider the many departures:

— The “hero” (Gregory Peck, Nick Nolte) attorney is now a woman, played by Amy Adams, who may or may not be the mother of a child by her former client, the killer Max Cady(Javier Bardem)

— There’s an AI subplot (go for it, Tom!)

— While Robert DeNiro’s tattoos were crude inkings of the prison variety in the previous “Cape Fear,” Javier Bardem’s speak to devil worship and the occult.

— Amy Adams’s husband (I forget his name) microdoses LSD and their whole family, thanks to Bardem, accidently takes some and trips out.

— Plus, a whole lot more weird and creepy stuff. Especially Bardem. He’s as creepy as creepy gets. Whatever awards they hand out, he oughta get one.

So.

Would John D. MacDonald, a guy who won a bet by writing fast and clean, be baffled that it now takes ten hours of screen time, LSD, weirder sex than he could have imagined, a demonic subplot and a skanky reappearance by Juliette Lewis to tell his story?

And would he object to the commercialization of “The Executioners?”

I asked Tom about this.

“As for John being tolerant of commercialization, my clearest memory of him personally was at a party Mack (Tom’s grandfather) was throwing. We kids had been banished to the back rooms under threat of severe admonishment so we didn’t interfere with what were undoubtedly very adult activities going on in the main part of the house.

“Suddenly John D. swept into the room where we were serving time, like a freak wave, to hand out all sorts of random Travis McGee-themed merch — and this was before people HAD promotional merch. I remember I snagged oversized pencils that had BUSTED FLUSH printed on the side. Wish I still had them! So yeah, the guy was a salesmen first and foremost.”

In other words, John D likely would have just chuckled and put the money in the bank.

Happy birthday, bud.

***
Which brings us to Today’s Poll:

Thanks for dropping by. See you back here soonish.

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I stepped outside the other morning for an early walk and there was smoke in the air. Not a lot of it, just a bit of haze and a slight campfire aroma, making me think of marshmallows.

Those forest fires in Canada. They’ve made their presence known all the way down here in Florida.

Which, as I walked, got me thinking about fire. And what if my home were suddenly ablaze?

Yeah, that’s jumping to the extreme. But what would I scoop up and take with me?

Not a hard decision. Assuming that my lovely wife and our dog, Marcus, were already safely out the door, I’d grab:

Those are the sculpted heads of our sons, Dash (left) and Bo, which sit by our front door. They were created by our friend, the late Elizabeth Barr, who had a studio at her home in New Smyrna Beach.

Over the course of a couple-three weekends, Bo and Dash sat for hours while Elizabeth carved and shaped and captured their likenesses in clay. Do you know how hard it is to get a nine and ten year old to sit still for something like that? They squirmed and complained and, being brothers, tormented each other endlessly.

When the sculpting was finally done, Elizabeth put the heads into a kiln.

And they exploded!

Meaning, the whole process had to be repeated. More squirming. More tormenting.

But it was worth it. Bo and Dash are in their 40s now. These sculptures froze them in time, just before the onset of hormones and puberty and them not being little boys any more. When our grandchildren drop by, they say hello to their dads’ heads.

And if the house was on fire, these would be the first things I grabbed.

***

This photo hangs on our living room wall. We call it “Lost in the Everglades,” although it was really shot in Yalaha, Florida. That’s where my great grandparents, John and Ellen James (that’s them sitting in the midde) moved to in 1886 from Dover, England.

The rest of the James gang (from top left, clockwise): Great-aunt Daisy; great-uncle Ray; my grandmother, May; and great-uncles Roland and Stanley.

They left England on a steamship, landed in Jacksonville, took a steamboat up the St. Johns River to Oklawaha, hung out there for a bit, then took another boat up the Oklawaha River, across Lake Griffin, up the Dead River, across Lake Harris, up Helena Run to Lake Denham and to the end of the steamboat line in Okahumpka, where they lived for a short time before moving a few miles east to Yalaha. That’s where I grew up and where my brother Danny still lives.

Most folks don’t know where Yalaha is, even those who live around here. I tell them it’s halfway between Okahumpka and Astatula. Doesn’t help much. I’m kinda proud of being from someplace in Florida that few people have ever heard of.

None of my forebears look very happy in that photo. I’m guessing it was hot and buggy. But I thank them for all the effort it took to get here, and I’d grab them on my way out the door.

What you’re looking at there is the work of my lovely wife. It’s a bulletin board that occupies a wall in our guest bedroom which doubles as Debbie’s office. And it’s an ever-growing collage that’s filled with more memories that I can count.

Friends and family, some no longer with us, some growing up faster than I can keep track of, kids’ drawings, stickers and mementos from favorite places, an old newspaper story by outdoor writer Byron Stout about Debbie catching a big tarpon in Boca Grande Pass.

You can’t just tuck this kinda stuff away on the cloud or in a scrapbook. You want it where you can see it every day.

And if the flames were threatening to burn down our place, I’d snatch it on the way out.

***
Sadly, what I’d have to leave behind.

My rum bar.

Most of the bottles I’ve collected from travels. Others have been gifted me by friends. Caribbean rum mostly, but also from Vietnam, Thailand, Tahiti, the Seychelles, Australia and a particularly vile version from Nova Scotia that I bought because it had a Kraken on the label.

Those first three things — the heads that didn’t explode, “Lost in the Everglades,” Debbie’s wonderfully curated collage — are irreplaceable. It would gut me to lose them.

I can always buy more rum.

While I’m not particularly worried about our place going up in blazes, I was a good scout. I like to be prepared. And I am working diligently to drain those bottles so that nothing gets wasted. Except, on rare occasion, me.

****

Thanks for dropping by. See you back here soon.

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Hello, hungry people.

“Don’t write about this on Substack.”

So said my lovely wife the other day after the thing happened that she doesn’t want me to write about.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want people to know we have this problem,” Debbie said.

“Lots of people have this problem.”

“But it’s embarrassing.”

“It’s perfectly natural,” I said. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I don’t care. It’s just not something that you need to be telling everyone about.”

“Yeah, but it’s a good story.”

“I hate being married to a writer,” she said.

***
We’ll pause here for a Quickie Poll:

***
Yeah, it’s rats. We have them in our attic. Our neighbors have them in their attics, too.

So let’s have another Quickie Poll:

***
For the record, according to the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), more than 22 million American homes have rodent issues. By comparison, only 10 million homes have swimming pools.

I’m not exactly sure what this comparison means except that, when it comes to real estate, that thing you hear crawling behind the walls is twice as common as that thing on your Zillow wish list.

***
And now contestants, it’s time for . . . Jeopardy!

Answer: State with lowest percentage of rat infestations in homes.

Question: What is Florida?

Correct!

Only about 4.4 percent of Florida homes have problems with rats, according to the aforementioned NPMA. The proud leader in this category is Vermont at 28 percent.

Why is this exactly? (Choose one):

1. Florida exterminators are allowed to use rat-seeking missiles.

2. Vermont is a rat sanctuary state.

3. Before the rats can make it to Florida, they get eaten by people in Georgia and Alabama.

4. None of the above. 1

***
Word for the Day

Murophobia: The fear or disgust of rats or mice, often resulting in anxiety or panic attacks.

There’s a lot of murophobia going around these days. All because of stories about hantavirus. Until recently, most folks, me included, had never heard of hantavirus. But in the last few months, “hantavirus” has climbed into the Top 25 Google searches with more than 72 million searches globally.

Some reasons why.

Reason #1: The sad and unfortunate death of Betsy Arakawa, wife of actor Gene Hackman. She died in February of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. It’s carried by rats, and humans can be infected by breathing in the virus from rat droppings. Fatal in 40 percent of cases.

Reason #2: The sad and unfortunate deaths from hantavirus of three passengers aboard the Dutch ship MV Hontius in May.

Also, according to the Center for Disease Control, the number of deaths annually in the U.S. from hantavirus has almost tripled since 2022, from 13 to 38.

***
So …

Based on the reports of our neighbors and having suspicions that furtive, disease-carrying rodents might be lurking in our attic, and not wanting to catch hantavirus, I went to the hardware store to buy some rat traps.

There were none to be found.

“Been a big demand lately,” said the guy at the hardware store.

Like I said, a whole lot of murophobia going around.

I finally got my hands on some traps. Here’s what those bad boys look like:

And exhaustive research led me to the very best bait to put in those traps: Slim Jims!

I was delighted to learn this. Slim Jims are delicious. Suffering under the delusion that they are not good for you, I had not eaten one in years. But knowing that they were primo rat bait, instead of just going out and buying a single Slim Jim, I was inspired to get a 12-pack. Because, you know, we might have a major infestation.

I baited one of the traps with a small chunk from a Slim Jim, climbed our stepladder, opened the attic hatch, gently placed the trap a coupla feet inside the opening and closed the hatch.

Then we left town for three days.

Note to self: Big mistake.

***
Upon returning home and pulling into our garage, I knew that the rat-killing mission had been successful. I will spare you the odiferous details. Except to say that if dead-rat stink could be weaponized, it would negate the need for nuclear bombs.

I climbed the stepladder and steeled myself for what I might find in the attic. I stuck my hand inside a plastic bag — like when I have to pick up dog poop — the plan being to quickly grab the dead rat and the trap and dispose of them both as quickly as possible.

Friends, it did not work out like that.

All I know is that the rat must have possessed a mighty will to live. In its death throes, it managed to drag itself and the trap from the spot where I had placed the trap, so that when I opened the hatch …

Yeah, right in my face.

The good news: I did not fall off the ladder.

However, I have developed a severe case of murophobia.

I am treating it with martinis. They pair nicely with Slim Jims.

***
And what the hell, let’s have one last poll.

Hello, hungry people. And … here’s to a glorious Fourth of July!

The signature above belongs to my alleged seventh-great-grandfather, Robert Morris.

He was one of only two Founding Fathers (Roger Sherman, of Connecticut, being the other) who signed all three of our country’s core documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Articles of Confederation.

I say “alleged” because our family tree has some missing branches, as family trees so often do. The case might even be made that we have grafted a branch onto our family tree in order to claim the bragging rights that come from having a semi-famous ancestor, albeit one who spent some time in prison.

In any event, we Morrises of the Central Florida variety, deluded though we might be, have long clung to the belief that we’re descendants of the patriot from Pennsylvania known as the “Financier of the Revolution.”

And today, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of our nation’s laborious birth and its perpetual postpartum blues, we’ll climb that tree, shake some limbs and see what falls out.

***

When I was in second grade, my parents took me to Washington, D.C., where one of our stops was the National Archives. We stood in a very long line to get a very brief glimpse of the Declaration of Independence displayed under several layers of very thick glass and surrounded by several very grim security guards.

“That’s our namesake,” said my father, another Robert Morris, pointing to the signature just to the right of John Hancock’s and above Benjamin Franklin’s.

What a thrilling moment it was for me, a seven-year-old boy who, instead of looking at a piece of yellowed parchment and the scribblings of dead guys whose attempts at cursive writing were even more illegible than mine, was in a hurry to get to the Smithsonian to look at dinosaurs.

So when one of security guards growled “Move along,” I happily did so.

***

That (alleged) Founding Father connection has long been a point of pride in our family.

Despite Robert Morris looking like this:

Actually, that’s not Robert Morris. That’s John Witherspoon, delegate of New Jersey, a Presbyterian minister and president of Princeton University.’

Here’s Robert Morris.

Just kidding. That’s Philip Livingston, delegate of New York, who made his fortune in the slave trade.

Here’s the real deal. Promise.

My point being that all the Founding Fathers looked pretty much alike — overweight, overdressed white guys who probably had bad cases of gout and suffered from chronic bad-hair days.

My heart swells knowing that our current chief executive is honoring this tradition.

Which leads us to a mid-post poll:

***

Some interesting things about Robert Morris:

— He owned a fleet of merchant vessels and sent the first American ship to trade with China.

— He spent more than a million dollars of his own money buying food and supplies for American troops during the Revolutionary War. And never got repaid.

— In his later years, he speculated in real estate and at one time owned most of western New York and what is now Adirondack State Park. Then things went bust, he declared bankruptcy and spent three years in debtor’s prison. Despite having been the Financier of the Revolution.

— He founded the Bank of North America, the first commercial bank in the U.S.

— When George Washington became president in 1789, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. Morris moved out of his Philadelphia estate so Washington could move in and run the government from there.

— When Washington asked Morris to become the first Secretary of the Treasury, Morris declined and said the job should go to Alexander Hamilton.

Which brings us to another poll.

My people are talking to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s people. I’ll keep you posted.

***

Back in the 1980s, our sweet cousin Martha spent several years sifting through courthouse records and birth certificates and put together a semi-official family tree that legitimized our claim of kinship to Robert Morris. Yes, there were some blanks and dead ends, but Martha determined that our ancestors eventually moved from Pennsylvania to Glen Falls, NY, and then some of those folks made their way to Florida in the 1890s.

“I’m confident that we are related to the Robert Morris who signed the Declaration of Independence,” wrote Martha in a note that accompanied copies of the family tree that she gave to all of us.

And if Martha said it, then I believed it.

***
So, it was with that assurance in hand that I traveled to Philadelphia in 1987 to join in the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

It was a pretty big-deal event. A massive parade. Lots of fireworks and speechifying and parties.

One of those parties was thrown by a group of Robert Morris descendants at a fancy Philadelphia mansion. There were dozens and dozens of attendees sipping champagne and eating fussy food from small plates. I walked in thinking: “How cool to be among my people.”

I found the organizers and introduced myself as a representative of the Florida descendants of Robert Morris. They looked me up and down. And one of them said: “There are no Robert Morris descendants in Florida.”

I don’t remember my exact response. It was probably something along the lines of: “But my cousin Martha spent years researching it and putting together a family tree and …”

The organizers smiled indulgently and drifted away.

I helped myself to more champagne.

And I never spoke a word of this to sweet cousin Martha.

***
Still, I proudly wear the name of Robert Morris no matter where it came from.

My older son is Robert “Bo” Morris III. His son is Robert “Boz” Morris IV.

A few weeks ago, when his second-grade class was studying the Declaration of Independence, Boz gave a report on one of its signers — his ninth-great grandfather.

The legend continues.

***

If you prefer not to pay, then please spread Bob’s Diner around.

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Hello, hungry people.

I learned a lot from taking our grandkids to see Toy Story 5 last week. Such as:

— For four grandchildren (ages 4, 6, 8 and 8), two grandparents (much older than that) and all the necessary snackage, a 102-minute movie experience these days can cost in the neighborhood of $150.

— After consuming buttered popcorn, pizza, fried mozzarella sticks and way too many Skittles, there will be gastrointestinal consequences. Of the most urgent kind. For young and old.

— My brain can’t move fast enough to keep up with modern-day cartoons.

But then, modern-day cartoons aren’t really cartoons, are they?

Their creators prefer to call them 3-D computer-animated films. Whatever you call ‘em, my slow-processing cerebellum can’t absorb all their showing and telling as quickly as they are showing and telling it.

Clearly, I am not evolving fast enough.

***

In my defense: This ain’t Steamboat Willie we’re talking about here.

Back in 1928, Walt Disney and his legendary partner, Ub Irweks, made their cartoon masterpiece in a tiny garage. Irweks created some 14,000 hand-inked drawings for the seven-and-half minute film. Disney handled all the voices and sound effects.

Fast forward to 1953 and the release of Disney’s Peter Pan. It required an assembly line of 300 studio artists and more than 250,000 hand-painted images.

And now we have Toy Story 5. It employed nearly 500 computer programmers and digital modelers rendering billions of pixels on server farms. No hand-drawn images required.

***

What does this mean to you, a human being sitting in a movie theater and watching everything on the big screen?

— In 3 minutes of Steamboat Willie, your eyes process roughly 18 different camera angles, about 10 seconds per shot.

— In 3 minutes of Peter Pan, your eyes process roughly 24 different camera angles, at about 8 seconds per shot.

— In 3 minutes of Toy Story 5, your eyes are forced to process 90 different camera angles, at about 2 seconds per shot.

All of which explains why, roughly five minutes into Toy Story 5, I wanted to shout: “Hit pause!” so my dinosaur brain could sort out everything. There was a whole lot of stuff going on.

***
Yes, watching Toy Story 5 was, for me, pretty exhausting. But it was also highly entertaining. The kids were enthralled. Except for 4-year-old Zeke who fell asleep in my wife’s lap about halfway through.

Here’s the very basic setup: An 8-year-old girl casts aside her toys when she gets an iPad-like tablet named Lilypad. Isolation and loneliness ensue. And the toys, led by Jessica the Yodeling Cowgirl, unite to help their lonely human make a friend.

Lots of film critics have written lots of words about the message of Toy Story 5.

Some early reviews called it an anti-tech film. And one said it “gamefies the act of friendship, illustrating how modern tech subtly forces children into a reality where maintaining a human connection requires constant screen time and digital validation to survive, fundamentally altering how children learn to socialize.”

Whew.

***

My takeaway: Toy Story 5 isn’t an anti-tech film. It’s a “we-surrender-because-tech-is-here-to-stay” film. In the end — spoiler alert — Lilypad the tablet joins forces with the toys to find a friend for their girl. The film takes the position that tech — and more specifically, AI — isn’t a villain but a force which we must learn to control. Or it will control us.

It’s about not being a toy that gets stuck in a box in the garage.

I asked our grandson Boz what he thought the film’s message was. Leave it to a kid to cut to the chase.

“Don’t be useless,” he said.

There you have it.

Don’t get consumed by the screen. Don’t stop thinking for yourself. Don’t become obsolete.

It’s a mantra for these often overwhelming times, especially for those of us with brains still trying to keep pace with all that’s coming at us from every direction.

Don’t be useless.

***

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon.

***
And, if you’d like to make yourself useful, please consider punching some buttons:

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Random old guy lurking at Smyrna Dunes Park (Photo by Carlos Amoedo)

Hello, hungry people —

Winter Park Magazine asked me to write a piece for the summer issue about Winter Park East, aka New Smyrna Beach, which might as well be my second home. I’m sharing it with y’all today. If you’d like to see the entire issue, just click here.

***

A New Smyrna State of Mind

It’s just after daybreak and I’m passing the quarter-mile marker on the loop boardwalk at Smyrna Dunes Park. I’m walking counterclockwise, the best way to go. Because that’s where you hit the incline, a pretty steep incline, for Florida anyway, just past the stretch where you might spot painted buntings in the wax myrtles when it’s spring and where you can almost always see gopher tortoises nosing out of their holes.

And when you reach the top . . .

To the east there’s the aforementioned daybreak over the Atlantic, quite often spectacular, and on middling mornings merely awesome. There’s a decent swell today, surfers dotting the water south of the jetty, reading waves. Some days it’s blown out, all seafoam and treachery, other days flat as a flounder.

But standing here, looking out, it’s always uplifting.

The entrances haven’t opened to cars yet, so the beach is empty, except for the early walkers, the sandpipers and seagulls.

To the north — Ponce Inlet. Some historians say it was here, not St. Augustine, where Ponce de Leon first sighted La Florida and touched land. It’s a narrow cut, unpredictable.

Once, years ago, coming back from an offshore regatta on a friend’s sailboat, a sudden squall swept in, 40 m.p.h. gusts out of nowhere, an accidental jibe, and we lost our mast. I went overboard, instantly terrified by the specter of the infamous Ponce sharks. This is, after all, the Shark Bite Capital of the World. Then came the calm of knowing: “It’s not my boat, and I probably won’t die.”

Beyond the inlet, the armored shoreline of Daytona Beach, somewhat tempered by the red-brick sentry that is Ponce Lighthouse. At 175 feet, it’s the tallest lighthouse in Florida, the third tallest in the United States, its light first lit in 1886.

I can never look at it without thinking about what was once, for some daring and libidinous young souls, a Central Florida rite of passage and I hope still is: Getting a friend to watch the stairway while you scurried to the top with your paramour du jour to, you know, enjoy the view in extremely amorous fashion. You’ve heard of the Mile-High Club? This was the Lighthouse Club, quite exclusive in its day.

To the west, the Intracoastal Waterway, broad sandbars and mangroves and Disappearing Island. In a couple of hours, it and other nearby spoil islands will host a flotilla of boats _— picnics and families and dogs. Our younger son and his family have a place at New Smyrna. If their pontoon boat cranks, always iffy, we plan to be out there, too.

I’m among the legions of Winter Parkers who has one foot in our city and the other in New Smyrna. We’re everywhere over here. Go shopping at the beachside Publix and it’s practically guaranteed you’ll bump into someone you know. Same thing at restaurants and bars.

I recently clicked on Google Maps to see how New Smyrna shows up in the geographic scheme of things. And I was surprised by what I found. Zoom into the area around Smyrna Dunes Park and the U.S. Coast Guard Station and you’ll see that it’s labeled, not New Smyrna Beach, but . . . Orlando Beach. Not an official designation, but one reflecting the demographics of who hangs out here. Cocoa Beach might be a few miles closer, but New Smyrna is where we go.

Over the years, this has rankled some locals. Graffiti has occasionally appeared saying: “O-villes go home.” While it might be directed at our Orlando neighbors, it still stings by proximity.

“The O-ville-go-home thing got started with the surf culture, which can be pretty territorial,” says Steve McCarthy, a former Winter Parker who moved fulltime to New Smyrna with his wife Krystal several years ago. “It’s not as bad as it used to be, except maybe at the inlet when there’s a good swell. Despite how much it’s grown, New Smyrna is still just a little surf town.”

Make that two towns, which is a large part of the charm. There’s the beachside downtown along Flagler Avenue that, for better or worse, has developed a Key West/Duval Street vibe, especially during Bike Week. And there’s the mainland downtown along Canal Street, which is bit more staid and buttoned down.

But back to Winter Parkers and our prevalence here.

The Rev. Jim Spencer, formerly of All Saints Episcopal Church in Winter Park and chaplain at Trinity Prep, moved to New Smyrna in the late 1990s with his wife, Sally, to serve as rector at St. Peter the Fisherman Church. After his retirement, Spencer, better known as Father Jim, founded Barnabas Ministries of Central Florida. The non-profit connects people in need with resources to help them. It’s also been instrumental in its work with the Mary S. Harrell Black Heritage Museum and the local Boys and Girls Club.

“New Smyrna has always been a wonderful place to call home. And it’s fair to say that the generosity and support of folks from Winter Park have helped make it an even better place,” says Spencer. “People from Winter Park don’t just come over here to enjoy themselves. They get involved; they give back.”

***

Case in point: Hal George, a Winter Park builder (Parkland Homes) and founder/president of Habitat for Humanity of Winter Park/Maitland. George first visited New Smyrna back in 1972 when he came to Florida from his hometown of Virginia Beach to take part in a surfing competition. He had plans to attend Duke University on a lacrosse scholarship, but that visit changed his course.

“I decided to go to Rollins mostly because it was just an hour’s drive to Ponce Inlet and good surfing,” says George. With his wife, Teresa, George has had a second home in New Smyrna since the 1990s and been involved with various projects to better the community. “We escape to New Smyrna every chance we get. It’s our refuge.”

***

It’s the same for me and our family. I’ve been coming to New Smyrna since I was a kid. More memories than I have space here to mention.

My father taught me to fish on Mosquito Lagoon, dragging me out of bed at 4 a.m. so we could put in at Oak Hill, be on the water before sunrise and be done by mid-morning, before it got too hot. Memory tends to embellish when it comes to fishing, but we always loaded the boat with reds and trout.

Our sons learned to surf here. Probably learned some other things here, too, as Winter Park teens tend to do.

My wife and I have logged countless miles in beach walks and, in season, counted loggerhead nests by the score. One summer, when the boys and some of their friends were young, we got a whiffleball game going on the beach using clumps of seaweed for the bases. I was at bat when Bo, our older son, shouted: “Hey, Dad! There are turtles coming out of second base!” A procession of 50-60 hatchlings streamed out of the sand, and we escorted them to the water, watching them swim away.

Loggerheads can live 70 or 80 years. So, I like to think that some of our whiffleball turtles have survived and they and their progeny return to New Smyrna between May and October to lay their eggs.

There’s good news on that front. The 2025 nesting season on Volusia County beaches shattered all previous records, with 3,908 recorded nests, mostly loggerheads, but with a fair number of leatherbacks, greens and Ridleys. That’s nearly double the number in previous years.

***

This being Florida, thunderstorms can be a daily occurrence at New Smyrna. They are magnificent to behold as they build up in the sky, but they can sneak up on you.

One summer, we were sitting on the beach, not paying attention to the weather, when we heard a rumble to the west and turned to see the towering dark clouds rolling in.

We gathered the chairs and coolers and umbrellas and high-tailed it across the sand dunes to the house where we were staying. Lightning flashed all around. The raining came pounding down. Things were getting really hairy.

The screen windows in the living room were wide open and, as I grabbed the metal frame to close them, I watched, frozen, as lightning struck the transformer on the utility pole in the driveway, jumped to house and next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the floor with scorch marks on the palms of my hands.

My wide-eyed sons looked down at me.

“That was pretty cool,” said one of the little bastards.

***

I survived to write the better part of five novels holed up in that same house on Beacon Street. While those novels play out in various parts of the Caribbean, the main character, Zack Chasteen, lives in a place modeled after New Smyrna. I called it Minorca Beach, homage to the 1,200 indentured workers from the Spanish island of Minorca who arrived here in 1768 to found an agricultural community under the leadership Dr. Andrew Turnbull, a physician from Scotland.

They built a fort in what is now downtown New Smyrna atop shell middens left by previous residents, the indigenous Timucuans whose line died out in the early 1700s. Things didn’t work out much better for the Minorcans. Over the next nine years, more than 1,000 of them died. The rest said to heck with it and marched north to start over in St. Augustine.

While some descendants of those settlers have returned to New Smyrna in the years since, the most notable and ironic nod to the legacy is the Minorca Condominiums, more than 300 units near the north tip of New Smyrna. Original plans called for the development to stretch all the way to Ponce Inlet, continuing the march of condos down the coast from Daytona.

But local government leaders like New Smyrna attorney Clay Henderson, a former Volusia County Council member and president of the Florida Audubon Society, stepped up to halt those plans and set out to preserve swaths of green space around New Smyrna.

***

“If you want to see an example of what land conservation efforts could have done for the rest of Florida, you need look no further than what organizations like Florida Forever and Preservation 2000 did here,” says Dykes Everett. He’s a Winter Park attorney and founder of Dykes Everett Co, a land and natural resource advisory/investment firm. “I like to think of it as the ‘green donut’ that surrounds New Smyrna.”

Everett grew up in Mims, a few miles south on U.S. 1. He’s been coming to New Smyrna since he was a kid and, with his wife Lisa, has a second home here. He remembers camping with his family at Bethune Beach and, on the drive back to Mims, picking up smoked mullet wrapped in newspaper at Norwood’s Restaurant, which traces its roots back to 1929 when it was the only gas station on the beachside.

“The aroma of that smoked mullet was torture because our parents wouldn’t let us eat it until we got home,” says Everett, a dedicated angler who keeps a boat in the water near Ponce Inlet. “New Smyrna has changed drastically since I was a boy. But it has somehow managed to keep its soul. It’s where we come to escape the insanity that is too often the rest of Florida.”

***
On this particular morning, it’s hard to pull myself away from this crest on the boardwalk at Smyrna Dunes Park. It’s a view unequaled in all of Florida, the morning breeze and the good salt air getting me right for the day.

Maybe I’ll take a dip in the ocean, maybe not. Later, a nap might be in the offing. We’ll grill out, watch boats going on the waterway and fisherfolk cleaning their catch at the marina.

Then we’ll soak up the sunset. It’s most always spectacular, too.

And I tell myself: There are few places in this world I’d rather be.

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Hello, hungry people.

I’m delighted to share three things that have lifted me up lately.

***

Thing #1

Down here in Florida we call it “Running the Publix Gauntlet.”

Meaning, you can’t go to the grocery store on the weekend without passing kids who set up by the doors and ask you to shell over a few bucks for Girl Scout cookies or sports teams or whatever else they’ve got going on.

I’m a sucker for all of them.

Most recently, it was these three young ladies, members of a junior cheerleading team raising money for summer camp.

I tossed $5 in their plastic bucket. And one of them asked: “Sir, would you like a cheer?”

Well, of course I’d like a cheer. Who wouldn’t?

So they gave me a rousing round of “Let’s go, Jaguars!”

When they were done, I told them: “But I’m a Dolphins fan. I want my money back.”

They got all big-eyed and, the one in the middle, I thought she was gonna cry.

“Just kidding,” I said.

Still, they didn’t find anything funny about it.

“We can change it to Dolphins for another five dollars,” said the one on the right.

“Nice try,” I said.

But that girl has a future.

Thing #2

That bird you’re looking at is a limpkin, spotted feeding on Lake Virginia, just a couple of blocks from where I live.

It’s the first limpkin I’ve seen around here in I can’t remember when.

They’re also known as the “crying bird” because their call will definitely get your attention. It sounds like someone hurting bad. So startling is the cry of the limpkin that when the Tarzan movies were filmed in Florida back in the 1930s and 40s, they recorded limpkins to make it sound like an African jungle.

Limpkins aren’t often found much north of Florida. They used to be common here and fed almost exclusively on our native apple snails.

But you know how that story goes. Development has eaten up our wetlands. Apple snails began to disappear. And so did limpkins. At one point, there were thought to be fewer than three or four thousand of them left in the state.

This is one of those bad news/good news scenarios.

In recent years, apple snails from South America, discarded by tropical fish collectors and the aquarium trade, have established themselves in Florida’s waters and crowded out what few native snails are left.

As for the limpkins? They love snacking on what is officially considered a pest. They’re still on Florida’s imperiled species list, but they now have an all-you-can-eat buffet. And thanks to those invasive snails, limpkins have made a big comeback.

Now, if we can only get them to develop a taste for love bugs.

Thing #3

So what you see here is just what it looks like: A guy walking down the street and reading a book.

But when was the last time you saw anyone walking down the street reading anything other than a phone?

For the record, the book was “A Tale for the Time Being,” by the American author Ruth Ozeki. According to the blurbs it’s a “metafictional novel narrated by two characters, a sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl living in Tokyo who keeps a diary, and a Japanese American writer living on an island off the coast of British who finds the diary of the young woman washed ashore some time after the 2011 tusnami that devastated Japan.”

So there you have it. Not exactly light reading.

But here’s hoping that, like the limpkin, reading while walking makes a comeback.

And give that guy a cheer!

***
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Not by Norman Rockwell

Hello, hungry people

Like you, I get several spam texts a day. Typically, these involve people who want to:

— Buy my home.

— Lend me money.

— Hire me for a position for which I am “uniquely qualified” and pay me $600/day for just 2-3 hours of work from home with “great opportunities for advancement” and a 401K.

And then there was this one, which popped up just the other day from a number in Los Angeles:

“Hello Mr. Jeff, this is Josephina. When are you free today? I’ll be waiting for you at home; please bring your traps.”

OK, let’s stop things right there for a quick poll:

And yes, of course, I did.

Because I was curious. Was this some kind of kinky-sex thing? If it was, I didn’t want poor Josephina to waste her afternoon waiting for Mr. Jeff to show up with his traps to do God knows what.

So it seemed only polite to let her know that her text went to the wrong person. I texted back:

“I’m not Mr. Jeff. But I gotta ask: Why do you need the traps?”

Josephina got right back to me.

“Huh? Good morning. Isn’t this Mr. Jeff’s number? Isn’t this the DACC?

Me: “What’s the DACC?

Josephina: “L.A. County Department of Animal Care and Control. Is Mr. Jeff there?”

Me: “No Mr. Jeff here. I’m in Florida. You have the wrong number. But what’s with the traps?”

Josephina: “I’m going crazy with the gophers in my yard. I need help.”

This was turning out to be a whole lot less kinky than I hoped feared. And I was all set to hit delete and move on. Before I could reply:

Josephina: “I’ve been to Florida many times, and there are gophers there, too. How do you deal with gophers? Are they currently invading your yard, too?”

Me: “Here in Florida we have tortoises that we call gophers. They aren’t the furry gophers that you have out there. Our gophers are protected and can’t be killed.”

Gopher tortoise (left) and pocket gopher (right) both highly photogenic.

Josephina: “Oh, I lived in Miami for a while. I didn’t know tortoises were called gophers there. Thank you for telling me. The gophers in LA go crazy this time of year. They are destroying my lawn.

And then she started sending me photos like this one:

And this one:

And a whole lot more photos after that.

Josephina: “Have you experienced anything like this?”

Me: “No, not in my yard, thank goodness. We do have pocket gophers here, but old-time Floridians call them ‘sandy mounders’ and sometimes ‘sallymanders.’

Josephina (after sending me at least another dozen photos of her backyard:) "How do you get rid of them?”

And at this point, friends, I just couldn’t help myself.

Me: “What we do here in Florida is we get a fishing rod and a lawn chair and, after it’s dark, we sit down by a gopher hole and bait the hook with a piece of broccoli. Then we sit and wait. It usually doesn’t take long until we get a bite and set the hook. Those gophers can put up a pretty good fight. But once you get a bunch of them, you’ve got dinner.”

Josephina: “Wow, that’s incredible! But aren’t you worried about catching a disease? Gophers are rodents and many rodents have been known to carry the viruses.”

Me: “Well, yes, it can be dangerous. And there are a few outbreaks of bubonic plague every now and then. But once you’ve acquired a taste for gopher, it’s worth the risk.”

Josephine: “What do they taste like?”

Me: “Kinda like manatee.”

I waited.

But that was the last I heard from Josephina.

Which disappointed me. Because I’d love to know if Mr. Jeff ever showed up.

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Photo by Mead Garden

Hello, hungry people —

For the record, standing around and watching flowers bloom on a tree is a lot more exciting than standing around and watching paint dry on a wall.

Maybe exciting is the wrong word here. Maybe transportive or enchanting or mesmerizing better describes it. Or maybe there just aren’t any words that do it justice.

I mean, just look at that photo. Have you ever seen anything quite like it?

***

What you’re looking at is a night-blooming cereus. Specifically, a night-blooming cereus at Mead Garden, just down the street from where I live.

For most of the year, it’s a scraggly-looking, totally unremarkable cactus that has climbed 60 or so feet up a dead cherry laurel tree. Then on one night and one night only, at the end of May or first of June, it explodes with blossoms that are gone by the next morning.

The folks at Mead Garden keep careful watch as the blossoms form and grow full. No one can predict very far in advance when the “Queen of the Night” might burst into bloom. There’s a loose countdown on the garden’s website, then comes an announcement — “It’s Tonight!” Word gets out around town and, beginning around dusk, hundreds of people gather to take in the spectacle.

It starts slowly, on plant time, which is timeless. As it gets darker and darker, more flowers appear.

And in the rush of today’s world, it does the soul good to take a breath, just stand and watch and let nature take over.

***

Unlike other large gatherings, this one was surprisingly quiet, almost reverent.

People spoke in low voices. Except for the young boy standing near me who called out: “Mom, are those aliens?”

No, not aliens. But otherworldly? Yes, and then some.

***

It should come as no surprise that the night-blooming cereus has provided inspiration for many a poet. Like Robert Hayden (1913-1980), who wrote:

“we ought
to celebrate the blossom,
paint ourselves, dance
in honor of
archaic mysteries
when it appears.”

***
In Hindu tradition, the flower is sacred, and any wish made while watching it bloom is believed to come true.

I made a bunch of wishes the other evening. Here’s hoping.

***

And when I walked through Mead Garden the next morning, she (because the night-blooming cereus’s mystique is most definitely feminine) was already fading.

Her message: Cherish fleeting moments. Nothing lasts forever.

***
Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be back soon. Meanwhile, seize the moment, punch some buttons.

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Hello, hungry people

Last year about this time attorney John Morgan was tossing around the idea of running for governor of Florida and the Bob’s Diner Super PAC threw its considerable political weight behind him with an enthusiastic endorsement.

Despite this significant display of support, which surely would have swung the upcoming election, Morgan announced last month that he won’t be a candidate.

Instead, he wants to launch a new political party and is offering $100,000 to whomever comes up with the best name for it.

That’s a whole lot more than Thomas Jefferson and James Madison got paid when they created the Democratic-Republican Party in 1792 (yes, they used to be one party!) or when Andrew Jackson split off to form the Democratic Party in 1828 or when newspaper editor Horace Greeley popularized the name Republican Party in 1858.

But enough with the history.

The important date to know is June 2, 2026 (this Tuesday.) That’s when Morgan’s contest ends. Meaning, if you want a shot at the hundred grand, then you best jump on it. Here’s a link to the contest.

***

For the record, while the Democratic and Republican parties are the only two political parties that are ballot-recognized throughout the U.S., there’s a slew of minor parties in individual states, with a couple of dozen here in Florida.

This would include the Men Going Their Own Way Party. I’d never heard of this outfit until I Googled “stupid names for political parties” and MGTOW was the top hit.

Its “platform” advocates “male independence, self-determination, and the total rejection of relationships with women.”

So, yeah, a real mainstream bunch.

The MGTOW is fielding a candidate for Congress in the November election. This would be Amr Metwally, of Jensen Beach, who is a total wingnut businessman. He is running against Rep. Randy Fine, of Melbourne Beach , who is also a total wingnut businessman. Fine might have the edge based on a record of having called a Brevard County School Board member a “whore” and threatening to pull funding for the Special Olympics because he wasn’t invited to its fundraiser at a Chick-Fil-A in Cocoa.

I’ll not waste our time here discussing these guys any further except to remind you — this is Florida.

***

Have I entered John Morgan’s $100,000 contest?

Of course, I have. Am I gonna tell you what name I suggested? No, I am not.

Because the rules stipulate that, in the event of contestants submitting the same name, the money will be split between them and I want it all for myself, OK?

But I promise to spend it foolishly. Bob’s Diner will throw a party, a real party, not the political kind. All y’all will be invited. And if there’s any money left over, I will spend it on my grandchildren, all of whom have better sense than Amr Metwally and Randy Fine.

***

In the meantime, let’s turn to Today’s Poll.

And in a Related Poll.

That’s all I’ve got. Except for the $100,000 that will soon be coming my way. Stay tuned for the official announcement.

Just in case that doesn’t happen, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Bob’s Diner. I promise to spend that money foolishly, too.

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Hello, hungry people.

It’s time Congress made room on the calendar for another national holiday: 143 Day.

It would be celebrated annually on May 23 — today! — the 143rd day of the year.

It would be dedicated to a commodity that seems to be in short supply, one that our country could use a whole more of — kindness.

And it would memorialize the man who originally came up with the idea.

This guy.

For Fred Rogers, 143 was code for “I love you.”

The one-letter word “I,” four letters for “love” and three for “you.”

Yes, it’s corny and sappy. But given the choice, I think most of us would pick corny and sappy over cynical and mean-spirited any day.

In Pennsylvania, where Mister Rogers was born, May 23 is already officially recognized as 143 Day. And as befits the man who was its inspiration, the observance is humble and low key.

“With everything going on in the world, it’s no surprise that we are all feeling a little weary and overwhelmed,” the 143 Day website reads.

It suggests hitting the pause button today and taking time to to do something nice for someone else. The possibilities are endless. I couldn’t even begin to make suggestions. It’s one of those random-act-of-kindness things.

You’ll know what to do when the moment is upon you.

***
Interesing factoid:

Mr. Rogers was so dedicated to the symbolism of 143 that he kept his body weight at 143 pounds.

OK, that might be a tad extreme. But there you have it.

***
Mister Rogers is something of an institution where I live. He graduated from Rollins College, just a few blocks down the street here in Winter Park. The college even has a “Mr. Rogers Walking Tour.” Among the highlights:

The Olin Library has a collection of Mr. Rogers’s letters, along with a sweater knitted by his mother and worn on the TV show, and a pair of his trademark sneakers.

There’s a memorial stone from his hometown of Latrobe, PA.

This plaque on the wall near Strong Hall was installed long before Mr. Rogers attended Rollins, but it inspired him and he carried a photo of it in his wallet until his death in 2003.

And there’s this wonderful sculpture by the British artist Paul Day.

***
So how about a National 143 Day?

Back in 2020, during the pandemic, Time magazine ran an editorial proposing that Congress official recognize May 23 as a holiday in which Americans simply took tiime out to do nice things for each other. It never got much traction. But maybe now the time is right.

Of course, Congress being Congress, and America being America, it’s hard to imagine that any such proposal wouldn’t get politicized.

Still, I’m just corny and sappy enough to think it’s worth a shot.

Just planting a seed here. And hoping it grows.

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Hello, hungry people

What will you be doing at 11 a.m. EST today (May 13)?

Here are some possible options. I’ll be (choose one):

a. Trying to earn a living.

b. Doomscrolling, per usual.

c. Making my weekly Ozempic injection.

d. Joining Bob’s Diner on Trail Mix Live!

Do yourself a favor — choose “d.” And sit down with me and my friend and former colleague, Craig Crawford, along with others in his crew for a a conversation about … well, no telling where it will lead.

Craig is a longtime D.C-based political writer/pundit who, being a funny, sensible guy, talks and writes about a lot more than politics. He saw Tuesday’s post on Bob’s Diner (Dear Graduates: Bite It!) and suggested I join him on Trail Mix Live to chat about AI.

But knowing Craig and knowing myself, the conversation will likely go in all directions and probably involve food, music, idle gossip and the sorry shape of things in our home state of Florida.

For all you Substackers, this will be an off-campus field trip. Here’s the link: Trail Mix Live.

And if you can’t join us at 11 a.m., you can click that link above and watch the video.

See you soonish …

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Hello, hungry people.

Imagine you’ve been invited to give a commencement speech at the second-largest public university in the U.S.

Your audience — 2,000 or so graduates of the college of arts and humantiies.

These are students who have majored in journalism, advertising, digitial media, film and television production, theater, philosophy, music and other creative fields. And these are students who are, after four years of classes and, for some, $50,000 or more in college loans, on the threshold of starting exciting careers in their fields of study.

Note: I use “exciting” here in the same way you might call a heart attack exciting.

Because the future does not look quite as rosy as it did when these students were starry-eyed freshmen. The jobs that might once have been available to them are being devoured by artificial intelligence faster than you can say, “Pass the Prilosec.”

***

Enter Gloria Caufield, shown above, who was in that exact position as a commencent speaker last week at the University of Central Florida.

Caufield carries the title of vice president of strategic alliances for Tavistock Development Company, big players in the Florida real estate business and whose owners are worth an estimated $10 billion.

Let’s just say that Caufield did not demonstrate a particularly wise strategy in creating an alliance with UCF grads when she gave a speech that touted the wonders of AI and the brilliant work of “visionaries” like Jeff Bezos.

She was only a couple of minutes into her address, telling the students that “change is exciting, very exciting. The rise of artiificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution …” when the boos began and someone in the audience yelled: “AI sucks!”

I don’t know Gloria Caufield. She might be a lovely person. She might also be totally clueless and incapable of reading a room.

Caught off guard by the reaction, she turned to others on the podium, including UCF’s president, and said: “Whew, what happened?”

But give her credit. She stuck to her prepared speech and carried on.

“Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” she said.

At which point, the audience broke out in loud applause and more cries of “AI sucks!”

Once again, Caufied wasn’t quite sure how to react.

“OK, all right,” she said. “We’ve got a biploar topic here. OK, uh, and now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands . . .”

More boos. And, although I have no proof of it, I like to think that some of those palms were extending middle fingers toward the podium.

Also, I was unfamiliar with “bipolar” being used in that particular context. Perhaps it is an example of psychotic expressionism favored by clueless corporate executives.

***

The speech lasted 11 minutes, 11 very long minutes, during which the audience largely stopped listening and Caufield had to speak over all the laughter and conversation.

Interviewed by the Orlando Weekly, Houda Eletr, a graduate of the college’s school of journalism and communications, had this to say:

“To stand in front of a graduating class of artists and communicators and discuss Jeff Bezos . . . is to spit on our efforts to flip the script. I’m embarrassed to have had to endure [this] most embarrassing, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement speech,” Eletr said, “It will not be the rise of AI that is the next Industrial Revlolution. It will be the booers who refuse to take a check from the top 1 percent to present an empty agenda. It will be humans for humans.”

I couldn’t have put it better. Indeed, I won’t even try.

Except to say: Here’s to all you booers. Stay loud! Stay human! I hope you all find decent jobs that make you happy.

And now, here’s your chance to chime in with Today’s Poll. Granted, there aren’t a lot of options here. There’s no middle ground. It’s what you might call a bipolar poll.

And if you’d like to show that you are human, please consider pushing one of these buttons, especially the one that let’s you throw a little money my way.

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Grace Worthy (center) with her daughter Annette and friend Chris Baker, head fryer.

Hello, hungry people.

Today, being Mother’s Day, I have two words for you: Pork rinds.

Yes, the skin of swine, fried and salted. A southern snack par excellence, packed with protein and crunchy goodness.

Forget flowers or chocolate or boring brunches. If you want to properly honor the mothers in your life on this their day of days, then give the gift of pig epidermis.

At least, that’s what I’m giving My Lovely Wife today. And she’ll be delighted by it.

***

If our favorite foods are those imbued with memory, then among Debbie’s favorite memories is riding around with her dad eating pork rinds.

“Whenever he pulled into a gas station, he’d always buy a big bag of pork rinds,” says Debbie. “And we’d eat the whole bag before we got home. Just the two of us in the car, talking and laughing and driving around eating pork rinds. I loved it.”

So to show my love for her on this occasion, I set out to make a batch of homemade pork rinds. Yes, love does indeed work in mysterious ways.

Stunt double with pig skin.

I’d never before made pork rinds. But it seemed easy enough. Remove a big hunk of skin from a pork butt, dehyrdate it in the refrigerator overnight, cut it into bite-sized pieces and then plop the pieces into hot grease.

Yes, it looked promising. But the results were, let’s say, less than delicious. Truth is, they were less than edible.

I don’t know what I did wrong. I’ll blame it on the pig.

***
Fortunately, I had a fallback plan.

The world was made a much better place a few years ago when Grace Worthy retired from her corporqte HR job and started selling homemade pork rinds at farmer’s markets around Central Florida.

“I always wanted my own business and pork rinds seemed a good way to go,” says Grace. “I grew up on a pig farm. We ate every part of those pigs. And pork rinds were the best part.”

So she bought a top-of-the-line commercial fryer ($7,000!!!) and started experimenting with different flavors.

Nowadays, Grace sells about 300 bags a week at $8 per bag. And these are big bags. If you wanted to finish a bagful while driving around in your car then you’d need to plan a trip of a couple hundred miles. Napkins and cold beverages should also be involved.

When I stopped by Ms. Grace’s Kettle for Debbie’s Mother’s Day surprise, she had trotted out a new flavor — shrimp-boil pork rinds! Trust me, they taste better than they sound. Be that as it may, I know my wife. I went with plain ol’ pork rinds.

When I told Ms. Grace her pork rinds would be my wife’s Mother’s Day gift, she said: “Oh, she’s gonna love you for that. I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t happy when they were eating pork rinds.”

So, Happy Mother’s Day, baby. Munch on!

And, what the heck, let’s conduct Today’s Poll.

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