Tagged: Under the Sun

Give Good Works, a Wynwood thrift store and charity, gives your old and gently used items a second chance.  However, the point is to give people a second chance.  Jennifer Rousseau, who works at the store, transformed her life with the help of the shop’s founder Heather Klinker.

“A lot of people would have given up on us girls,” said Rousseau. “Heather didn’t. She kept going. She’s a hero to me. I love her.”

That’s according to Blair Blacker, and he should know.  In this story, host Dan Grech visits a warehouse in Florida City with Blacker to have a look at a novel product– mats made from human hair.  Blacker says the mats fertilize plants better than most herbicides, plus they prevent weeds and conserve water.  The circular mats, made by SmartGrow, fit snugly around a plant’s base and biodegrade over time.

This photo of a forlorn, slightly bored young hotel elevator operator was taken on the beach in 1955, at the Sherry Frontenac Hotel (65th and Collins).  It has become one of Frank’s most famous photographs and the face of the exhibition, “Looking In:  Robert Frank’s the Americans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It runs through Jan. 3.

When you see a book titled Florida Poems, you might imagine titles and verses about bright sunshine and sand-swept beaches, with a picturesque Key West sunset thrown in.  You know, kind of like the poetry version of those generic landscape paintings that hang in every Florida seaside motel? (With the exception of paintings by the Florida Highwaymen, but that’s another story for another time.)

Host Alicia Zuckerman was intensely curious about how young poets graduating with Masters of Fine Arts degrees expect to make money.  Since the average poetry journal pays just $20 for a poem, it’s not exactly a way to make a living.   Sure, writing by candlelight because you can’t pay FPL has a certain romance to it, but what happens when you run out of matches?  So how do poets expect to pay their bills?

For years, billiards aficionados made a kind of pilgrimage to a place called Star Cue. It was a tiny shop just off Fifth Street in South Beach—tucked behind Flower Bazaar, an upscale floral boutique. Holocaust survivor Abe Rich made some of the country’s most coveted pool cues. Tristram Korten stopped in and spoke with Rich shortly before he passed away.

If you’ve spent time at South Pointe Park in Miami Beach, you might have noticed the steady stream of cruise and cargo ships going in and out of Port Miami.  These hulking ships are one of the signature images of South Florida.

All of these ships are driven in and out of the port by a highly trained group of sea captains, also known as harbor pilots.   Harbor pilots know the waters around the port well–they have to be able to draw a map from memory as part of their qualifications.