"Darden Restaurants (DRI) has been struggling to make its brands relevant again as diners increasingly head to chains like Chipotle and Panera, where they feel they're getting restaurant-quality food without paying as much. As it looks for ways to catch up to shifting trends, Red Lobster this week started testing a 'pay-at-the-counter' concept at two locations near its headquarters." —The great divide between people who like to occasionally eat at a restaurant with table service and the food-obsessed coastal elite snobs grew a little wider this week, as mall chain stalwart Red Lobster began selling its Krab Dinners at the counter, McDonaldland-style.

Photo by Daniel Oines.

If you are interested in real estate or fashion or entrepreneurship, this history of the Bal Harbour mall is pretty fascinating. The Shops at Bal Harbour, if you don't know, just north of Miami Beach, holds last year's record for retail dollars made per square foot in the U.S. It is full of trees and turtles and koi and ashtrays and crazy-rich people. And its original success is based on low base rents with a percentage of store revenue for the landlord—as well as a pretty crazy geographical noncompete, which has since been greatly eroded. The percentage rent thing is smart, when Bulgari and Graff and Van Cleef are [...]

"The mayor’s chief ally on the commission is Bob Welsh, known as Bicycle Bob because he spent years pedaling around town on a girls’ blue coaster bike handing out political flyers and railing against “big money interests.” During the Mariel boatlift, he met newly arrived refugees and handed them Spanish-language joke books that he had written. Bicycle Bob was elected this past February, beating Armando Oliveros, a former commissioner whose time on the dais was interrupted by a prison sentence for money laundering." —"South Miami: a city where weird things are always happening."

With 11 complicated ballot measures—all of them state constitutional amendments, all of them far-reaching and bizarre—the ballot for election day in Florida runs to ten pages. Already several days before election day, lines are running long at voting places in Miami Beach—so long that candidates for local office can work the voting lines, reports a local spy, because the voters lined up are well over 100 feet from the actual polling place. Among other measures, the ballot gives voters the opportunity to amend the constitution to:

• Not use public funds for abortion

• A crazy Tea Party judge selection amendment, which is basically an attempt to get [...]

The winner of a Florida roach-eating contest collapsed and died immediately after downing piles of filthy roaches and worms. Why did the man do this? To win the grand prize! (The grand prize was "a python.") This is what happens when an entire generation of Americans grows up believing the key to success (in the absence of hard work or talent) is doing something disgusting for media attention. Thanks, Survivor!

Terrific news! Florida is about to be the first state in the US of A to hit a million residents with concealed carry permits. (Fun fact: "the majority, 243,505, are between the ages of 51 and 65." And 80% are male.) Now, Florida, the fourth most populous state, has 19 million people. So it's not like EVERY dude has a gun. Just the ones who'll get out of their car all mad after they rear-end you.

"Prosecutors say Noah Mitchell, 35, savagely beat his Labrador retriever, Bubba, during a barbecue on Oct. 3, 2010, because the animal took a steak from the kitchen counter. The six-member jury took about six hours to deliberate." And now he faces up to a year in jail. But where is the puppy! "Bubba is reportedly healthy and doing fine. It is not clear where he now lives." (In my heart???)

"Florida Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carroll has resigned because a firm she once consulted for has been linked to a racketeering case, the Miami Herald reported …. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement scheduled an afternoon news conference in Orlando to discuss a racketeering investigation involving Allied Veterans of the World, a nonprofit organization that runs Internet cafes." —Governor Rick Scott has lost his anti-gay Romney-supporting number two in a scandal involving illegal gambling software and Internet cafes. And apparently there is racketeering and money laundering going on in Florida!

In the nights before the promised Mayan Apocalypse, mysterious configurations of bright lights hovered over Brooklyn and San Francisco's Mission District. The first commenter here made the reasonable assumption that it was all some kind of viral marketing aimed at overpaid young urbanites.

But the product of such clever, vague and expensive advertising has yet to appear. And the silent, terrifying craft are now being seen over far less desirable urban areas including Detroit, Indianapolis and the Gulf Coast of Florida. What could it mean? Is Detroit poised for a comeback? And why are they also appearing in Poughkeepsie?

Alleged 2016 GOP hopeful Marco Rubio was interviewed by his favorite magazine, GQ. And now Twitter is all abuzz because the Republican senator from Florida claimed that the Earth's age is one of the Great Mysteries. In the Q&A, Rubio says: "Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

The scientific elite scorn such talk, because of course they have used "science instruments" to figure out that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old—when the rest of our solar system took shape. But this semi-precise [...]

Good luck, Mystery Monkey.

"[A]fter months of searching, only one alien falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen has been caught, charged and convicted in Florida. It turns out he is a Canadian, a man who registered and voted in at least two presidential elections while masquerading as a citizen so he could also buy and 'bear arms,' that other right cherished by many Americans."

Florida is going to stop killing itself person-by-person and will begin to eventually kill us all. While Rick Scott's government kept a horrifying TB outbreak secret (while ordering the closure of the hospital that treated such!), let us not forget dengue fever outbreaks in the Keys and all that scary other stuff. Basically we need to wall off the subtropical portion of the United States before it's too late, before crocodiles with hoof-and-mouth Legionnaires bird flu storm our gates.