Your Happy Mother's Day time waster

Via latimes.com:

So you think you and your significant other are pretty good at karaoke? Well, you've got nothing on Will and Monifa Sims, who delivered an impromptu gas station concert that was so impressive Jay Leno invited them on "The Tonight Show" on Wednesday.

It all started out as one of the show's recurring gags, "Pumpcast News," in which actor Tim Stack, pretending to be a cable news anchor on a gas station TV, startles customers by speaking to them.

While most people tend to jump in the air or scream comically and then move on, "The Tonight Show" struck gold with the Simses, a couple with serious musical talent and an even greater sense of fun.

The Canadians are coming!!

It's time again for that most special of times in Miami Beach...Urban Beach Weekend.

According to the Miami Herald, "This year’s festivities are scheduled from May 24-27."

The Herald's David Ovalle and Evan Benn reported in today's paper:

Now in its 13th year, Urban Beach Week has long drawn complaints from residents angry about the debauchery and rise in crime, while spurring visitors and civil liberties groups to criticize what they call heavy-handed police tactics.
[...]
As the city prepares for another weekend, some 50 residents and business owners met with Miami Beach Police Wednesday, listening to investigators and neighborhood-resource officers discuss Memorial Day preparations.

Officers assured the group that the department will be ready to deal with anything, from prostitution to pot to drunken driving.

Officers will patrol Miami Beach streets on foot, on bicycles and in marked and unmarked vehicles in 12-hour shifts from May 24 through May 27. A DUI checkpoint will be set up on May 24th and DUI saturation patrols will be rolling on the 25th and 26th.

Like last year, police will use license-plate readers on the MacArthur and Julia Tuttle causeways to check for outstanding warrants and other red flags.

The Herald quotes Miami Beach Police Capt Enrique Doce as saying "[Last year's event] was safer and more enjoyable for everyone. And that’s our message: Come on over, and enjoy what we have to offer. If everyone follows the rules, we’ll all have a good time.”

But it wasn't always like that.

The first Urban Beach Weekend in 2001 caught Miami Beach cops and officials by surprise.

In June, 2001, Tristram Korten wrote in Miami News Times...

An estimated quarter-million revelers swamped hotels and restaurants, spilling into the streets in a bling-bling parade of ice, Lincoln Navigators, and Motorola two-way pagers, taking everyone by surprise. It all begs the question: Is South Beach ready to be thug paradise?

No one -- not city planners, not the police, not even the club owners -- was prepared for how popular South Beach had become to hot rappers and the middle-class kids who followed them here.
[...]
The concept of race was so problematic that the Miami Herald didn't use the words "black" or "African American" until its followup stories, a week after the action. Some Miami Beach police officers, paralyzed by the same issue, decided to substitute the word "Canadian" for "black" in radio transmissions, as in, "There's a large group of Canadians gathered on Washington and Fourteenth."

With that in mind, this year the Herald has produced a special issue designed to welcome our "Canadian friends" back to Miami Beach.

Pick up a copy at a newsstand near you tomorrow!

Click here to enlarge.

Filomena Tobias, the Heat fan who gave Joakim Noah the middle finger, is Michael Jordan's Jupiter neighbor!

Photograph by Steve Mitchell/USA Today

Tim Elfrink at Miami New Times posted this early this morning. We've since learned who the woman is who owns the most famous middle finger in the world:

Middle-finger lady: Riptide salutes you, for you are truly the soul of Miami embodied. Your patterned silk shirt: Glorious. Your tan: Immaculate. Your leather purse, gold jewelry and white pants: Perhaps wrong for a basketball contest, but oh so right.

And your look of pure glee as you shove your middle digit directly into Joakim Noah's recently ejected face? Well, that just speaks for all the Magic City. WE MUST KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Help us out, Miami!

The woman in the picture that's now blowing up the Internet is one Filomena Tobias.

Elfrink writes, "If her name sounds familiar, it's because she was all over the news in 2008, when her then-husband, trader Seth Tobias, was found dead in their swimming pool."

Jose Lambiet at GossipExtra.com reveals that Tobias is "Michael Jordan’s Millionaire [Palm Beach County] Neighbor!"

The woman in the expensive courtside seats who famously flipped the bird at Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah last night when Noah was ejected from the game at the Miami Heat was identified by her daughter as Palm Beach socialite Filomena Tobias!

Tobias, Phyllis to her friends, is the Ferrari-loving widow of deceased CNBC analyst and hedge fund manager Seth Tobias, who died under mysterious circumstances at their Jupiter home in 2007.

“I’m humiliated,” said Tobias’ daughter, Victoria Racanati from the family’s $4.4 million-home at The Bears Club in Jupiter, three doors down from NBA legend Michael Jordan‘s digs. “Why is everybody calling me about this? She’s a Heat fan who got a little excited. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that the photo of Tobias throwing her extended middle finger at a beaten down Noah went national in record speed. (Read the rest of Lambiet's story by clicking here.)

God, I love this town!

The Random Pixels Losers Corner welcomes...

Louis Dominic Paolino III.
(BSO booking photo, May 8, 2013.)

....Louis Dominic Paolino.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of crimes are committed in South Florida every day.

Most are committed by people who, while not particularly smart, at least take some precautions to conceal their identity.

But it takes a special kind of idiot to commit three felonies in front of a professional TV cameraman who's rolling tape.

That's what Louis Paolino did last night and that's why he's been arrested and booked into the Broward County Jail this afternoon, charged with those three felonies.

And even though Paolino is facing some serious charges, for some unknown reason, Ft. Lauderdale Police left his home last night without arresting him. Instead they allowed him to surrender today.

But worse than all that, Paolino now has to suffer shame and humiliation that goes along with being the newest inductee into the Random Pixels Losers Corner.

Watch below as Paolino goes all Norman Bates on some of Local 10's lighting gear, all while reporter Ross Palombo prepares to go live Tuesday night in front of Paolino's multimillion dollar home at 2626 Delmar Lane in Ft. Lauderdale.

Louis Paolino Arrest by Random Pixels blog

The way we were....The day Joel Hirschhorn made Judge Nesbitt watch a dirty movie....the whole damn thing!

From the Miami News, Sept. 20, 1973.
(Click here to enlarge)

September, 1973 in Miami: Apparently Miami police have eliminated all crime in the city and now keep busy by raiding seedy, X-rated movie houses and seizing copies of dirty movies.

In early September, plainclothes detectives raid the King Art Cinema on the corner of NE 79th Street and 2nd Ave. and seize a copy of "Devil in Miss Jones."

The owners of the theater hire a 30 year-old attorney named Joel Hirschhorn to plead their case.

According to Miami News reporter Ian Glass, Hirschhorn will "argue on the constitutionality of [Florida's obscenity] law and the legality of the [film's] confiscation" at a hearing on Sept. 21 before Judge Alfred Nesbitt.

But first Hirschhorn wants the judge to see the film.

Nesbitt asks if he can see just part of it. But Hirschhorn says he wants the judge to watch the entire film; all 70 minutes of it.

On Sept. 19, in a screening room at the Gusman Philharmonic Hall in the Olympia Building on Flagler Street, about 30 people show up to watch the film with Hirschhorn, Nesbitt and two special assistant state attorneys.

Glass reports that onlookers invited by state attorney Leonard Rivkind include, four Roman Catholic priests, a Little River church group that includes three women, an FBI agent, several sheriff's deputies and seven - count 'em, seven - assistant state attorneys.

The judge sits in the second row of seats of the theater, saying "I don't want to get too close."

After the screening, Glass goes straight to the Catholic priests for a comment on what they just saw.

"You couldn't possibly quote me," one of the priests tells him.

There's no word on how Judge Nesbitt ultimately ruled on the film, but the Miami News reported on Sept. 26 that Judge Nesbitt and six jurors returned to the Olympia to screen the film again.

It was Nesbitt's second time seeing the film.

The way we were...Don Wright's Watergate cartoons

Forty years ago today the Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.

No one at Miami's two newspapers won a Pulitzer that year, but Miami News cartoonist Don Wright was producing some of the best work of his career, much of it inspired by Watergate.

(When Wright retired from cartooning a few years ago, he had two Pulitzers under his belt.

Here's a selection of some of Wright's best Watergate-inspired work from 1973.

May 8, 1973.
(Click all images to enlarge.)

May 23, 1973.

June 16, 1973.

Sept. 6, 1973.

Sept. 20, 1973.

Sept. 26, 1973.