Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Cherry Red
Saturday
February 7, 2004
"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts"
-Counting Crows "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"
Oh, so little time to talk. My Gasparilla intermission will end soon, and cloud-cover sunburn and body exhaustion notwithstanding, it'll be time to see the fun that is Ybor on a Gasparilla weekend. But here goes with the rest...
The Gasparilla day parade today kept true to the form of the past two years. If you're going to have a Gasparilla day parade, you have to have the following variables in it:
-Random mix of people. This is a hallmark of the day. The whole city comes together for Gasparilla, plus visitors from other parts of the state (and country). "When Worlds Collide!" Like two years ago, where I had my Orlando crew down here partying with some of my Tampa crew. Because, you know, I have "crews" like that.
-Drinking before noon, or at least in the early afternoon. Large amounts of alcohol, usually. It's the one day out of the year in Tampa where you can be hammered by high noon and no one will think anything of it.
-Last minute transportation switches. Because parking becomes incredibly packed, and people find themselves having to adjust plans, invariably travel plans have to be shifted. Today for example, at the very last moment I had to have my friend Gary Graham (who came to town last night to hit Level III) drive me down, as Kim was afraid she was going to lose her parking space. At the end of it all, I ended up walking over to the Ice Palace, and then catching the trolley back to Ybor.
I'll have more on it tomorrow. Sadly, it didn't have all of the crazy elements of the 2003 Gasparilla Day Parade, but so it goes.
The really wild time hits in two weeks, when the Night Parade rolls through Ybor... Something to look forward to on the flip side of the Big Easy.
Some jackass decided to design (poorly, I might add) a website about Karl Malone... and he had the audacity to steal the image right from my site with a direct link. Take it if you will (it wasn't mine to begin with, though I gave due credit), but don't just link it on your page from mine and hit me up for the bandwidth. That doesn't exist in this dojo. So I decided to give the guy a "nice surprise" to reward him for that stunt.
Check it out here (if it hasn't been changed by the time you read this). Note the ad for DraftKing.com on there -- now that's cross-promotion sprinkled in with your one-upsmanship!
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