Your Evening Sift

What a great day for blogging in the SoFla blogosphere. Make sure you take in this evening Sift...it's a good one.

A- Artlurker explains the drama of the last couple days and claims that the post that drew all the attention was a fake post. The site is still slow and for the life of me I don't "get" any of this. Is this the only way to "spark conversation on the state of art?" By posting fake information?

By publishing The Rape Tunnel our intention was to spark conversation on the state of art for a few hours with coverage of an entirely fake art project. We then planned to post a disclaimer revealing The Rape Tunnel as a fake, however, further to the story being picked up Gawker a surge in traffic knocked out our comparatively meager server making that impossible. The site has only just been restored and is still not without problems.

B- Transit Miami likes the Omni Redevelopment Plan. Not so much the port tunnel.

Here we are in a financial crisis that is tearing apart our city services, and the city is still moving forward with plans to spend millions of dollars it doesn’t have on an expensive Port Tunnel it doesn’t need. This is exactly the same type of mismanagement of taxpayer dollars that produced the stadium deal, and that led to the current fiscal crisis. Rather than saving money, every last bit of capital the city has (and even some that it doesn’t have) are going to go into pushing the tunnel.

C- The Burger Beast walks us through one of his home barbecues so you can see how a pro does it.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is where do you buy meat for BBQs? When we're going to do a BBQ right, we usually go to Fresh Market. We've also purchased burgers, hot dogs and sausages from Whole Foods but prefer Fresh Market. Fresh Market sells Sirloin burgers (my favorite) with Bacon/Cheddar, Blue Cheese & Cajun Seasoning/Swiss mixed in.

D- Food For Thought continues to question the New Times' criticism of Whole Foods for not supporting local farmers and offers up a recipe for Spiny Lobster & Vegetable Salad with Salmorejo.

The local pickings in the produce section were indeed pretty limited, but this should come as no great surprise this time of year as there's not much that's in season yet locally. I was able to score some very nice pea greens from Green Garden Organics, which lists a Miami address. The seafood section was abundantly stocked with local product: Key West pink shrimp, whole yellowtail, snapper, mahi mahi, spiny lobsters ... I'd hazard a guess that roughly 25% of what was in the seafood case had a "local" sign on it. There was also a large selection of locally produced honeys on the shelves, with at least three different producers offering Florida tupelo, saw palmetto, avocado, lychee, orange blossom, wildflower and other honeys.

E- Shorter Coconut Grove Grapevine...

Leaving the bars open another 120 minutes will save the Grove.

F- Miami-Dade politics continues to resemble something out of high school, as this post at Eye on Miami shows.

G- Eating Local in the Tropics reveals the shocking fact that coffee is grown right here in South Florida.

We have local coffee. We are the luckiest locavores in America! Yes, you heard me. Coffee is grown and roasted right here in Davie, Florida. I'm not kidding you. There's not a lot of it, but you can get your hands on it. Right now the only place that sells the Davie coffee, from a company called Wagon Wheel Coffee Roaster, is at a small fruit stand in Fort Lauderdale on McNab off of Cypress (in the Pine Crest area) called "By Their Fruits" (I'm writing about them soon too).

H- The Reid Report urges the world to remember that the extreme right is just one, embarrassing part of the United States and not representative of the American population as a whole, no matter how much attention the media likes to pay to them.

Now, in just one short summer, barely eight months into Barack Obama’s presidency, we’ve gone from a country that went from African slavery to a black president in less than 400 years, to a country that prompts unnamed world leaders to ask the president: what’s wrong with your people? ‘We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you — I don’t — that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me…” The images emanating from our country have gone from 100,000 mostly white, young and old Americans cheering a black presidential candidate in Missouri last fall, to a town hall full of screaming old people who don’t know Medicare is a government program.

I- Random Pixels rates Miami's TV station websites and I totally agree.

Some recent visits to local TV station web sites have revealed that all web sites are definitely not created equal.

What follows is my (totally subjective) analysis of Miami's Big 4 local English language TV station web sites.

J- I Shot The Chef recaps her recent trip to Europe and includes some fantastic pictures.

We started our road trip in Frankfurt and drove to Prague, Vienna and Munich. As usual, our traveling consists of two things… eating traditional food and photo taking. Or as the Germans say… Photoshooting. Check out some AMAZING non-food images that Stephan took from our trip.

K- In an epic post, Urban Environment League explains the results from the Virginia Key workshop that was held over the weekend.

.