Thanksgiving? November 2024
The Annual Tree Lighting at Bayside Marketplace
The Miami Children's Chorus headlined a two hour event at Miami's Bayside Marketplace mall, in an event that featured, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, the Three Kings, Santa, Baliwood Dancers and The Madstuntman. All photos credit Philip Cardella 2024
Until relatively recently, the name Juila Tuttle was obscure in Miami's history. Tuttle recruited a hotel and locomotive magnate to extend his train line from Ft. Lauderdale down into what would become Miami in 1896, just about where the Miami River meets Biscayne Bay. Today, north of the river sits Bayside Marketplace, a bougie, touristy outdoor mall and the site of an annual tree lighting festival. This year's lighting featured musicians and dancers from many backgrounds, including the globetrotting Miami Children's Chorus, and The Mad Stuntman, Mark Quashie, who wrote the song, "I like to move it" (yeah, don't ask me, I think he had a concert later in the night in a club and decided to join Santa on stage).
With Baliwood dancing performances and songs celebrating Kwanza, Christmas, and Hanukkah sung by and taught to the audience by the Miami Children's Chorus, it was a fun multi-cultural celebration that represented the best of Miami, including the weather. The weather outside was not frightful, it was paradise.
The 41st Annual Miami Book Fair
The 41st Annual Miami Book Fair took place this last week during the first week of Miami's second, shorter season, paradise (the other two are hell aka hurricane season--it either is north of 100 degrees with the heat index, raining both, or hurricane) and Spring Break, which is like, paradise but with a host of horny, super high young tourists). Thousands of people descended on Miami's Downtown (just across the street from the Christmas tree in the above story, it turns out--yes, we were Downtown two days in a row!) for food, folks, books, and fun.
From its humble beginnings in 1984 as the Books by the Bay in a humble backwater city that played second fiddle to Ft. Lauderdale to the north (except when it was in the news for civic rebellions or massive boatlifts of refugees from Cuba), the Miami Book Fair has grown to a premier event that attracts authors and artists worldwide. A website with images from the first twelve book fairs can be found here and is worth a look. Founded by Miami Dade College and the, at the time young, owner of the local bookstore Books and Books, Mitchell Kaplan, the fair has attracted authors from James Baldwin to George W. Bush to its tents, booths, stalls, stages, and conference rooms.
For book lovers, the Miami Book Fair is paradise on Earth each November.
So what's the deal with the robotic bull? Well, a bull market is a market that rises continuously, making investors a lot of money. Believing the cryptocurrency scam to be a source of an endless bull market and Miami to be the "World's capital of crypto," a group called Trade Station commissioned the bull and it was placed near some Miami Dade College business classrooms--and just down the street from the home of the Miami Heat, FTC Arena. The bull is, more accurately, right next to the main music stage at the Miami Book Fair. What's that? Didn't FTC go out of business? Indeed, it did, and Miami-Dade County sued to have FTC ripped off the arena just months after it was put up there. The mayor of Miami, a man who envisioned crypto being so bullish thought it would replace property taxes. Given cryptocurrency is nothing but a Ponzi scheme (or worse), the bull was fittingly neutered.
All photos credit Philip Cardella 2024 taken at the Miami Book Fair on November 23, 2024. The tasty food is Jamaican jerk chicken, rice and curried potatoes. The colorful crocheting photo was a group project for families where people were encouraged to make "pom poms" and put them up as community art.
Revenge of the Bullshit: I never said there'd be no politics
I had a long piece here about how state and national politics were directly impacting my life and how they tie back to Governor Ronald Reagan's brutal attack on students at Berkeley University in 1969. I didn't want it in a mailed post, especially near Thanksgiving. So, I posted it without mailing it. You can read it here.
Thanksgiving
What can I say about Thanksgiving? I imagine if you get these newsletters or follow me on social media you already follow historian Heather Cox Richardson. In case you don't, I highly recommend her recent post on what Thanksgiving was historically about. Yesterday I posted on social media what I am thankful for. So I think I'll just put it here too.
Things I'm #thankful for on #thanksgiving2024
They think they got all of my mom's skin cancer.
They think they got all of my sister in law's ovarian #cancer
I graduated with a master's in history this year
My wife
My kids
My pets
My youngest kid loves their school and is thriving for the first time (at 15)
My oldest is in college in #Florida and thriving
The new #photography gear I got this year
The #Everglades
My friends
My woke af church
My mom and brother and his wife
My wife's family
Kamala Harris
My dad, who passed away May 20 of this year.
Follow Me to the Fediverse
Think social media like X, Xitter, BlueSky, Threads, only not owned by CryptoBros, Would-be dictators, TechBois, or anyone else for that matter! The fediverse is made up of thousands of little Twitter-like things (called instances) that are privately controlled, and users can come and go as they please. X or Xitter, is owned by the Saudis and their little democracy-murdering apartheid lover Elon Musk; Threads is owned by democracy-hating Meta (Facebook) and Mark Zuckerberg; BlueSky was started inside of Twitter, broke off when Musk bought it and is funded by shady investment groups, the known ones being mostly cryptocurrency ponzi+ schemes. It is run by a CEO whose primary experience is technical work for...cryptocurrencies.
The fediverse: all the assholes, none of the fascist rule.
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