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There is a post today at goodmorningfloridakeys.com, which you should be able to reach by clicking on this link: No Name Key fact and fiction cotillion
Meanwhile, Tim Gratz wrote yesterday:
I just now noticed your post in which you stated that someone had seen me pushing a shopping cart, talking to myself. Having lost a vehicle, I do use shopping carts to lug brief cases to the bus stop (I do not carry light) but I assure you that I do not talk to myself and hope you will have the courtesy to retract that comment made by your unidentified source. I may well have been talking to a friend on my relatively small Blackberry cell phone. (I remember when I first thought I saw someone I respected talking to herself before I discovered the miracles of Blue Tooth.)
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Tim is one of the founders of Keys Coalition, whose mission, as I understand it, is to try to prevent child-sex trafficking in the Florida Keys.
I wrote back:
Sorry to hear about your car.
I cannot retract what someone else told me, someone who knows you, but I will forward yours to that person and see what comes back.
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The person who had told me about seeing Tim pushing a grocery cart and talking to himself wrote to me almost right away.
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Tim replied:
Thanks for the sympathy on the car. It was the first car i’d had since my car was destroyed in Wilma.
Yes, please talk to your source. He/she ought be careful about what they say. To claim someone talks to himself is pretty serious stuff.
I wrote back:
Hi again, Tim -
I copied the other person with my reply to yours. Received this back …
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Hello Sloan,
Tim has a point, I may have mistaken him talking on wireless headset for him talking to himself.
Curious what Tim thinks happens to those shopping carts when he leaves them at the bus stop?
From what little I know of Tim, he seems like a good man. He is very well spoken and an excellent writer. I simply worry about him and those he is trying to protect if his crusade runs off the tracks.
Tim replied:
Thanks. I agree that to be a good citizen I should be careful re returning the carts. But of course if I use a cart to go from Domino’s to the WD bus stop, the cart ends where it belongs. Now I agree that if I use a cart when I disembark from the bus stop to go to Domino’s I should stash my stuff and return the cart. This exchange has been productive in teaching me that lesson.
Jerry Weinstock, of Key West, replied to yesterday’s new Key West homeless shelter won’t attract mainland homeless people to Paradise, channel-widening study will lead to quality of life improvement in Key West post at this website:
Sloan —GOOD ! GOOD ! ___ Jerry
In The Key West Citizen today - www.keysnews.com - my interjected thoughts in italics, I added pics.
Voters should reject channel-widening study
Amen, voters Exhibit 1
The recent letter by Dr. Jerrold Weinstock noting the perils of widening the channel was excellent. In just a few paragraphs he summarized the all-too-many problems that will occur if we try to widen the channel. Dr. Weinstock just wasn’t giving his opinion, he provided references to support his remarks and offered to provide more if asked. He also pointed out that, in his opinion, a recent guest column by Mr. John E. Wells was self-serving and full of distortions. I agree with this opinion and will go further:
When I read Mr. Wells’ column, I felt he was not-too-subtly trying to put those opposing the widening into the same category as people who opposed civil rights or some other monumental injustice. I don’t remember if I laughed or felt queasy after I finished it, but I do know it still disgusts me.
Hmmm, being from the Bible Belt, this image immediately came to mind
If I may, I would like to contrast Dr. Weinstock’s comments to those of Ms. Jennifer Hulse, who was profiled in more than six columns (half-page) as someone in favor of the study. Ms. Hulse disguises well her desire to not be the “spokesperson” for the study by using several hundred words to tell us why it should be done and how widening the channel will help us. But how much credence can you give to a person who states that dredging “would do wonders for the reef” because “financial help for the local environment” might be available.
The day Hulse’s letter to the editor was awarded, I gave her the first ever Memorial Day Duval Street Working Girl Award.
If she believes destroying our present habitat is all right because we can pay to bring it back, I disagree, and actually believe this attitude to be another valid reason for opposing the channel widening. And as for her view that “widening” doesn’t equate to “dredging” — only in the way it’s spelled.
Mea culpa, I also should have given Hulse this award:
Peter Gray
Key West
Stick with the facts in channel discussion
As a member of Key West Bar Pilots, an association of active state and federally licensed harbor pilots, I feel compelled to correct inaccuracies in a letter written to The Citizen concerning cruise ships. Recently, Dr. Jerrold Weinstock supplied erroneous information when he said “cruise ships have a displacement of 30 feet and scrape the bottom.”
State mandated and approved operating guidelines require and provide for a safe under-keel clearance for all vessels piloted in any Florida port. Our association will not pilot any vessel with a draft greater than 29 feet.
Okay, Jerry overstated the displacement by one foot.
With a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project depth of 34 feet, and often greater existing depths throughout the channel, a safe under-keel clearance is maintained.
Hmmm.
A ship scraping the bottom of any channel is a serious matter, with probable damage to the ship resulting in state and federal investigations. Either Dr. Weinstock is misinformed or he is conducting a propaganda campaign of misinformation. I believe the latter is the case.
Hmmm.
He continues on in his recent letter to state that cruise ships dump indiscriminately and pollute nearshore waters. All of these accusations are of a serious nature and in complete violation of MARPOL (International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution From Ships) Annex V pollution regulations, which ships worldwide are regulated by. The penalties for violating these pollution regulations are severe, and any cruise line or shipping company would not remain in business for long if these regulations were routinely violated as Dr. Weinstock alleges.
Hmmm. Drug traffickers break US laws ongoing in Key West. Drunk drivers break Florida laws ongoing in Key West. Duval Street crawlers break the city open container law ongoing in Key West. I wonder if the bar pilot breaks any of those laws? I wonder how he knows cruise ships are law-abiding? Does he work for a cruise ship company? What say you, Jerry Weinstock, M.D. (Psychiatry) to this bar pilot’s allegations against you, a decades long Keys fisherman and environmentalist?
The harbor pilots support moving forward with the channel-widening study. All parties involved here need to steer away from the innuendos, misinformation, and the dubious “facts” concerning cruise ships and channel improvements. A comprehensive study will give the city leaders the honest facts and the tools to later decide if they want to move forward with channel improvements.
Hmmm. How about this comprehensive study already done? Sure looks to me like they need to deepen, as well as widen, the entire channel. If you not think that’s what they really have in mind, there is some swamp land in the state park across from my place on Little Torch Key, which I want to sell you.
Capt. Robert Maguire
Key West
Hmmm, the channel-widening “study” referendum is about “studying” gouging out and removing to wherever a 150-foot wide, maybe 40-feet deep, 1.4 mile long native seabed, so cruise ships currently unable to crab into Key West’s channel on windy days can do so, and so longer, wider, and, I wager, deeper-hulled cruise ships not able to get into Key West’s channel can do so. You seem to have left out a few minor facts, Capt., including you and the other bar pilots might stand to make a bit more money if that 150-foot wide, 34-feet deep (or deeper), 1.4-mile long native seabed is gouged out and removed to wherever, along with what lives there now.
wild queen conch
Do they mean to build another man-made island from those murdered seabed dredgings, for Keys West developers to bid on and turn into another Sunset Key? Never, ever, underestimate the motives of the people who want the channel-widening “study” approved.
Moving laterally …
It’s been too long since vote on senior center
The best reason why we need a new referendum on the location of an independent living facility is because the vote took place over six years ago. Usually a referendum results in immediate action, depending on the project.
That referendum was doomed from the get-go because it was not worded to allow for the city to lease the city’s Truman Waterfront land to a developer at a nominal rent for 99 years, and because the people who pushed for the senior living facility did not have the wherewithal to build and run it, nor did they known anyone who did have the wherewithal. Putting that referendum on the ballot was akin to throwing spaghetti against a wall, hoping some of it would stick.
Six years is way too long. During that time a number of new potential locations have surfaced that are significantly better suited than the Truman Waterfront.
I sure would love to know where the number of new potential locations surfaced. I sure hope, if they put another senior living facility on the ballot, they word it accurately, for a change. Including, they limit who can live there to Key West seniors, since it’s for them all this commotion happened. And, before they put it on the ballot again, I hope they have a developer ready, willing and able to build and operate the senior living facility, if the new referendum passes.
G. A. Smith
Key West
a bleah, and a bleah, and a bleah, and that’s all folks! …
except you might find the post over at goodmorningfloridakeys.com today sort of … hmmm … maybe it’s title is sufficient … No Name Key fact and fiction cotillion - click link
Sloan Bashinsky
keysmyhome@hotmail.com