View from Virginia Key: Miami Artist To Open Studio Featuring Biscayne Bay's Endangered Species

This area is home to the defunct and abandoned Miami Marine Stadium. The stadium, I do hope, will be saved for future generations to enjoy.

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South Beach: Whopper and a beer

A new Burger King restaurant model will open in Miami Beach's South Beach in mid-February. The Whopper Bar will feature the usual BK fare plus Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors beers served in special designed aluminum bottles to keep them extra cold.

A Whopper combo with a beer will cost roughly $2 more than the same combo with a soda; Sorry, no free refills.

Don't expect a Whopper Bar to come to your neighborhood any time soon. Regular Burger Kings across the nation will not be retro-fitted with this high-end features.

If you find your self in Germany, Burger Kings have been selling beer for years; In Singapore and Venezuela, Whopper Bars have already opened.

Should the South Beach Whopper Bar become a success, could NYC be next? -- Maybe.

— USA Today Story

Call it intuitive, but....

Well... I called it. Our 500 drops of rain has awoken FPL and it has now decided that we are not paying enough. So, it is going to raise our rates so that we can continue to enjoy their high quality services, not to mention upgrade the nuclear plants to produce more power which, while it may be fine for keeping the air clean, will still continue to produce radio-active waste.

Lovely... just fucking lovely!

FPL wants to boost electric rates by at least $1 billion a year

The company submitted a proposal Wednesday to the Florida Public Service Commission to increase base power rates by $1 billion in 2010 and $1.25 billion in 2011.

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'Tis the Season for FPL Ranting

We here in South Florida have a little less than 11 weeks to prepare for hurricane season. Last year, there was a storm two weeks before the season officially began.

I have just started making lists and I was hoping that Florida Power and Light (FPL) would also be working at making our fragile electric grid a little stronger. We lucked out last year with no strong storms, however, even after all the time since Hurricane Wilma passed, I still have 3 to 4 outages a week. Some weeks, it goes out every day. Some of my friends, along with me, have lost some appliances due to power surges.

Our bills have doubled and it has been promised that electricity cost will rise even more in the near future and most of us are just stuck with a company that doesn't care about its customers, I guess because there is no competition.

I just cannot accept the excuse that the reason power went off in 3 counties in the last 24 hours is because it rained. That is not an excuse. That is a cop-out.

Thousands still without power after South Florida rain storms

Electricity has been restored to about half the 24,000 Florida Power & Light customers left in the dark after heavy overnight rains doused Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, causing dozens of traffic accidents that snarled the morning commute.

About 11,200 utility customers are still affected.

As of noon, those still affected were 4,000 customers in Miami-Dade County, 3,200 in Broward and 4,000 in Palm Beach County, FPL said.

"It's a shifting number," said utility spokeswoman Sarah Marmion. "It's been going up and down all night long. We anticipate there will be outages throughout the day. But we have ample crews ready to go."

Among the reason for the outages are brittle branches that broke free during the storm and struck power lines. At least one transformer also malfunctioned somewhere in Broward, Marmion said.

The number of outages, Marmion said, is small when considering FPL serves more than 2.2 million customers in the tri-county area.

"We haven't had a storm in a long time," she said. "These are relatively common numbers."

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