Anitra’s on the board of the Glazer Children’s Museum, and their big upcoming attraction is Big John, the world’s largest triceratops, who’s moving into his own exhibit in the museum at end of May.
Last night was the museum’s annual fundraising gala, and as people involved with the museum, we got a sneak peek at the 65 million year-old, RV-sized fella, and he was impressive.
More photos (including one with my ridiculous triceratops mask) later.
We’ve just come from a “hot glass date” at Susan Gott’s glass workshop, which is conveniently located in our neighborhood, Seminole Heights. We opted to make a fluted bowl together, and I’ll post pictures of the finished work once it’s cooled off in the annealer.
As for “glory hole,” I’m using it in the glassblowing sense — it’s the opening for the furnace for reheating glass to shape it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably more familiar with the other usage of the term. Slate has an interesting article on the use of the term by glassblowing and other-kind-of-blowing cultures.
More photos (and video too!) later.
Big John, the largest triceratops skeleton ever found (he’s in the Guinness Book of Records) is making his North American debut by moving to his new home: Tampa Bay, but more specifically, the Glazer Children’s Museum!
Named after the South Dakota rancher on whose land he was found, Big John is 8 meters (26 feet) long, 3 meters (10 feet) tall, and about the size of an RV. He’s also surprisingly intact, with 60% of his body bones and 75% of skull present.
Big John is a recent find — 2014! He was found by Walter Stein, founder of PaleoAdventures, who are in the business of digging up fossils for commercial sale.
The Italian firm Zoic srl purchased Big John, after which they removed the rocks from his skeleton and replicated the missing bones using a combination of sculpting, casting and 3-D printing.
Big John then went on display in Europe and was put up for auction in 2021. He was purchased by the Pagidipati family of Tampa for almost $8 million. Rather than have it sit in a private collection which almost nobody would see, the Pagidipatis chose to find a place where everyone could see it, and that place is the Glazer Children’s Museum, located right on Tampa’s Riverwalk.
“Our interest in purchasing Big John and other specimens is first and foremost to make them available to
the public and for research,” said Siddhartha Pagidipati. We want to do our part to help the Tampa Bay area become the best place in our country for families to live and raise their children.”
You’d better believe there are big plans to show off Big John properly. He’s going to be the centerpiece of a brand new exhibit at the Glazer Children’s Museum, and I’ve included the exhibit designs in this article.
You won’t have to wait long to see Big John — his exhibit at the Glazer Children’s Museum will open on Memorial Day Weekend (Saturday, May 27th)!
Want to know more? The Tampa Bay Times has an article: Tampa’s Glazer Children’s Museum to receive record-setting dinosaur skeleton for new display.
The Glazer Children’s Museum is Tampa’s children’s museum, located in downtown Tampa. It’s the home of a lot of interactive exhibits, hands-on activities, and space to run around, climb, read, and make friends.
Children’s museums are important. They provide a place to learn and explore interests through hands-on experiences and activities. When you’re young, nothing expands your mind like interactivity that engages all the senses, and that’s something that children’s museums do very, very well.
The Glazer Children’s Museum’s mission is to serve the children of Tampa Bay by providing a clean, safe, and fun outlet for imagination and discovery.
Common Dialect Beerworks, Seminole Heights’ newest brewpub, held its grand opening this past weekend. Located on Florida Avenue a few blocks south of Hillsborough, it’s the latest brewpub to appear our neighborhood over the past few years.
It’s also a hotly-anticipated arrival. The day I went, Saturday, January 14th, was its second day in operation. It wasn’t just their main parking lot that was full, but both overflow parking lots as well. It helped that it was a bright and sunny (if brisk, by Florida standards — 12° C / 54° F) day. The place was busy, but not uncomfortably so, at least in my extrovert opinion.
Common Dialect is owned by a couple from the neighborhood — Kendra and Mike Conze. If you’re a local dog owner, you probably know Kendra from her other business, Health Mutt, which is probably the most-loved pet food and supply store in Tampa. Health Mutt recently moved from its corner store location on Central Avenue to very spacious digs nearby on Florida Avenue. This gave them a large warehouse space next door, and that space became Common Dialect.
Here’s what I saw when I stepped inside:
The place was hoppin’, even though it wasn’t any time near peak beer hours — I’d arrived at about 3:00 p.m. to check out the place after getting my hair cut just up the street.
One way they’ve decided to make themselves stand out from the other pubs in the area is by being the most brightly-colored of the lot.
Make note of the people in the foreground if you want a sense of the wall mural’s size:
After admiring the mural for a moment, I decided to help the bar fulfill its business purpose and buy a drink.
The line moved pretty quickly, and the staff were friendly and seemed experienced. If they were having opening-weekend issues, I didn’t see them.
With my freshly-acquired beer (alas, they didn’t have any darks or stouts on hand, so I decided to go for vitamin C with a citrus wheat beer), I made my way to the patio.
There isn’t space for a kitchen inside the pub, but there’s a designated area for food trucks, and it appears that they plan to have a different food truck on the premises most nights. On the Saturday I went, they had two: Queen B Ice Cream and the cleverly-named A Boy Named Sous:
I lucked out and a seat on the patio freed up…
…so I set my accordion down (remember, I take it with me to pubs and bars because it’s a magical machine that often turns music into free beer)…
…and proceeded to enjoy my beer and some conversation with the people around me.
There are a number of pubs and bars within cycling distance of our place, including the Corner Club, 7venth Sun, Southern Brewing and Winemaking, The Independent and Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe, to name a few, and we’re “regulars” at many of them. Because of this, I’ve become familiar with a lot of neighborhood faces, and there were many unfamiliar faces here.
I struck up conversations (and played tunes for) the people at the tables around me, and they turned out to be new arrivals to the area who’d moved here for the usual selling points: classic houses, tree-lined walkable streets, nearby places to eat and drink, local quirky shops, and so on.
If anything, these new faces are a sign that we haven’t yet hit “peak brewpub” in the neighborhood and all the existing places, each with its own qualities and charms, will be around. One of the reasons we moved here was for the healthy ecosystem of “third places,” and I’m happy to see another player in the mix.
Welcome to the neighborhood, Common Dialect!
I, of course, went with the goat.
Here’s the video — you’ll need to turn up your sound:
If you’re in Tampa, you can experience the goat, along with some really good coffee in a pleasant outdoor space, at the Seminole Heights branch of Spaddy’s Coffee.
I can’t justify spending $28K on this monster analog synth setup, but maybe you can. If you’re working on a soundtrack or sound design for a movie or game, or the next big electronica/EDM/electroacoustic masterpiece, this collection of systems assembled into three racks just might be the thing you’re looking for!
The seller’s based in Clearwater, and the lucky buyer will have to pick it up there or someplace nearby, and you’ll probably need at least an SUV with the back seats folded down to drive away with three racks’ worth of gear.
Here’s what the ad in Facebook Marketplace says:
Condition: Used — like new
Massive Eurorack setup including three Doepfer A-100 cases. Everything has black panels and has a nice aesthetic. I have extra panels for a few items that didn’t come in black. I have almost all the original manufacturer boxes.
Also will include a huge lot of organized eurorack cables, extra power cables, and misc screws and parts.
This is a truly incredible setup!
Must pickup in Clearwater or arrange for meet-up in Florida. I can drive to your or meet you – free – depending on location. Not willing to ship – way too large, heavy, and delicate.
Here’s a modular grid view of the upper case:
You can see a larger view of the upper rack here, and it contains the following:
Here’s a modular grid view of the center case:
You can see a larger view of the center rack here, and it contains the following:
And finally, here’s a modular grid view of the lower case:
You can see a larger view of the lower rack here, and it contains the following:
For those of you who aren’t familiar with synthesizers (I used to be — and still am — a synth keyboardist), this rack is a killer collection of:
The asking price is US$28,000. I can’t tell you if this is a good price or not; I’m more familiar with the more conventional synths you’ll find at Sam Ash or Guitar Center than with this sort of rig.
Maybe someone should contact Trent Reznor and see if he’d be interested in coming down to Clearwater, and maybe, you know, meet up with me for a beer or two?
To the French, bread isn’t just sustenance, but a way of life. It’s a good thing that most Parisians live within a five-minute walk from a boulangerie, as indicated by the map above.
Paris is a very walkable city, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they coined the term flâneur for “someone who spends their leisure time going on strolls with no particular destination in mind.”
A walkable city and the presence of flâneurs is also a strong indicator that it’s a great place in which to live. This thinking has given rise to the concept of the “15-minute city,” a term coined in 2016 that refers to a place where dwellers can get to the places for their daily routine with no more than 15 minutes of walking, or at most, 15 minutes of cycling.
A 15-minute city or neighborhood should feel like the ideal presented in Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In such a city or neighborhood, it’s reasonable to regularly walk or bike to places such as:
The idea is so catchy that when Anne Hidalgo was running for re-election as Paris’ mayor, she made turning Paris into a 15-minute city one of her campaign promises:
The idea is that communities within each arrondissement of the French capital become more ‘self-sufficient’, with grocery shops, parks, cafes, sports facilities, health centres, schools and even workplaces just a walk or bike ride away. This triennial survey of the city’s commerce shows that – in this one particular area important to French people – it already is.
In case you were wondering what a boulangerie is, it’s a kind of bakery. The French are so into baked goods that they’ve created a number of terms for different kinds of bakeries:
After finding out how easily accessible boulangeries are in Paris, I decided to see if I lived within walking or cycling distance of one. If you live in Seminole Heights like I do, you probably do!
First, there’s the Seminole Heights branch of La Segunda, which used to be Faedo Family Bakery. Faedo has been making Cuban bread for over five decades, and La Segunda’s been baking for over a century. They are truly a Tampa answer to the boulangerie.
Then there’s Gulf Coast Sourdough, who not only make excellent bread on the premises, but fantastic sandwiches, and a very good cinnamon roll.
And finally, there’s Brazilian Fun Foods, who don’t just make bread, but gluten-free bread in the style of pao de quejo, a cheese bread made from corn flour and cassava starch. Their wares cover a wide range of carby goodness, from bread to pizza dough to churros.
Seminole Heights also has a grocery, a couple of pharmacies, many restaurants, cafes and bars, riverside parks, and even a Home Depot and Walmart (this is America, after all), all within walking or cycling distance. It’s a pretty nice place, and I like it here.