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I’ve just revived much of this site (specifically, everything that wasn’t visible on the front page) from oblivion.  If that means that you just now received 1000 rss updates… I apologize.

Judging from a quick scan of storefronts and occasional radio-listening, Florida has many more plastic surgeons than Minnesota.  Also, a lot more malpractice and injury lawyers.

I’ve already seen a bunch of commercials for getting advances on annuities and structured settlements.  That stuff has been around for decades.  Just now, though, I heard a radio commercial for something that’s new to me:  a service to get a cash advance in anticipation of a legal settlement when the case is still pending in court.  The ad was careful to mention that if my suit fails and I don’t get a settlement, then I don’t have to repay the loan.

So… it’s obvious where this is heading.  A structured settlement is essentially the same thing as a mortgage (but with lower investor risk since there’s no equivalent to pre-paying) so presumably there were a bunch of financial vehicles similar to mortgage-backed securities which were created to generate the cash that was fronted to those “I need cash now!” customers.  Since the real estate crash, all those bankers are kicking around looking for other places to use their skills, and they’ve created some kind of hedging model to predict the average settlement value of pending legal suits based on raw criteria.

All of the actors are in place, just like before: Instead of realtors we have lawyers, instead of Household Finance we have Peachtree, and instead of overly-optimistic homeowners we have whiplash sufferers and botox-mishap victims.  I predict that all of those bond-traders who hit the bricks a couple of years ago will be back behind desks by 2013.

Yesterday I rode out to Shark Valley (which is in the everglades, and doesn’t have anything to do with sharks — I believe it’s named after the Shark River).  As I approached the everglades there was a lot of nice fuzzy pine forest, and I sort of imagined that the everglades would get pinier as I approached, but that was totally wrong.  It looks much more like the mangroves in Yucatan… lots of brownish scrub, nothing more than 8 or 10 feet tall.

The Shark Valley park mostly consisted of a paved road and canal built long ago by an oil company.  A plaque along the road explains that the canal produces an ‘unnatural concentration of wildlife,’ and they aren’t kidding!  Alligators must travel from miles around for an uninterrupted patch of sunshine.

Parking lot for cars and alligators

Turtles compete for a patch of sunshine

This warning sign actually did me some good. The alligators were sleepy and statuesque, and I was sorely tempted to pose with my hand on their backs for scale.

These guys ('Anhinga') spend a lot of time swimming, and a lot more time stretching their wings out to dry in the sun. Right before I took this photo I watched one catch a fish which it then tossed into the air before swallowing. Showoff!

Also in the parking lot, a Great Blue Heron. It's always nice to see other Minnesotans when I fly south for the winter.

Mammals cuddle for warmth, but what's the point of of cuddling if you're a reptile? I guess this is the answer: a three-way cuddle between mom, baby, and Mr. Sun.

The thing in the everglades that I spent the most time staring at was unphotographable.  Everywhere in the water were giant schools of mosquitofish.  Each school seemed to contain one, and only one, melanic fish.  That means that there’s always 100 grey fish with one black fish stuck in the middle.  Why only one?  And why aren’t the black ones always immediately scarfed up by birds since they’re much more visible?  Google shows a fair bit of research on the topic but nothing very revealing.  The black fish are always males and often more aggressive than the normal-colored males.  So maybe it’s a trade-off between deliciousness and attractiveness… a blurb on this page confirms that the low % of melanic males remains constant over time but, frustratingly, it doesn’t say if those experiments are in populations with predators or without.

I’ve been in Miami Beach for about a week now. My first few days after arrival were deeply inconvenient, about which more later. I have a nice oceanfront condo a few miles up the road from South Beach, in the ‘Castle Beach Club.’

Trip Advisor strongly recommends against staying in this building.  Choice quotes:  “really bad, stinky, old, disgusting”;  “Stay here under no condition”; “pool was closed by the Health Department.”  I was reading those reviews during my bus ride to view the place, and nearly turned back.  It didn’t help that the rental agent who met me in the lobby was a movie-star-beautiful blond Russian who had clearly spent 90 minutes at the salon just before our meeting… everything suggested the setup to a detective movie with me behind bars or dead before the second reel.

The lobby did not look too bad, and the desk clerk was friendly.  I like having a desk clerk!  Olyna and I rode the freight elevator up to the apartment (there are three ‘normal’ elevators, but only one of them is working and it is slow and clunky.)  Stepping outside the elevator I saw what the reviewers were talking about:

The hallway carpet was incredibly filthy, and clearly hadn’t been vacuumed for months.  The door to the available unit suffered ‘doorknob in the center of the door.’  DICOD is a serious warning sign — you only get this when a handyman decides that fixing the latch on a door is too much trouble, rips out the door mechanism, throws it away, and saws a new hole with closed eyes.  It indicates a building super who has stopped trying, stopped caring, is probably on the verge of suicide.

Olyna fumbled with the key to the (apparently functioning) deadbolt in the door.  I took a deep breath and followed her in.  Behind the door was this:

And, out the window, this:

So, I took it.

So far the place has pretty good vibes!  The building is being rehabbed, and the rent is fairly cheap during the construction phase (the pool is indeed closed, being demolished and rebuilt.)  The people who stay here are largely polite and friendly (although also generally non-English-speaking which seems typical for the area.)  There’s a pastry shop with an orange-juicer in the basement, and a not-at-all-stinky gym on the 2nd floor.  I just have to remember to never visit the laundry room without first putting on shoes.  I still have both my kidneys.

Posting has been off-line for several weeks, thanks to a variety of unclear hacking/security/permission issues. Fritz graciously sacrificed his weekend to fixing things, but now each time I post I feel slightly guilty.