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Dave Barry is a millionaire who writes best-selling books and has Hollywood up his ass. Does he really want to write this daily dreck any more? And do we want to read it? I revere the guy and consider him the greatest humorist of his generation, but the newspaper gig is tired. It reminds me of those old Godzilla movies, where the great monster was taking on all comers, like, say, Megalon. This is "Dave Barry Vs. Super Bowl." Enjoy.

Speaking of Super Bowl stories, I have one. Well, it's not my story, since I'm chained to a story this week. I live it vicariously through a sportswriter buddy of mine who was in town for Media Day. The News-Press's David Dorsey, who was a companion during my early exhilarating and turbulent days in Fort Myers, went to the media party last night in South Beach and, as he's walking to the place, he sees a big black sedan pull up to the sidewalk and a familiar-looking character come out of it with a friend and a hulking chauffeur/bodyguard.

It's Don Shula and the old coach walks into Pizzafiore, a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint at 1653 Washington Ave. Dorsey walks into the joint and strikes up a conversation with Shula, telling him he likes the steak sauce he's marketing.

"Where do you get it?" the coach asked, genuinely curious.

"Publix in Fort Myers," Dorsey told him.

Shula was obviously pleased at this, Dorsey reports, as if his team had just scored on a surpise end-around. Dorsey's not sure, but there may have been a fist pump involved.

They wind up chatting for ten minutes, while Shula scarfed down a slice of Italian sausage, New York-style. Said he was going to a function of some kind, wanted a quick bite, and happened to pop into this place. Then he started talking about, God no, the Nutrisystem diet that Dan Marino has been hawking all over the airwaves.

He told Dorsey that Marino had turned him on to

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Sun-Sentinel sports reporter Dave Heeren is retiring after 45 years in the business, 41 of them with the Sun-Sentinel. In his poignant final Sentinel piece, Hereen, who has covered high school sports for years, goes down memory road about his career, Mickey Mantle, George Steinbrenner, the Dolphins, et al. Here's wishing him a wonderful post-newspaper life.

Worth noting is that Hereen begins his story with a telling snafu at the Sun-Sentinel office. He said he came into work three weeks ago and couldn't log onto the computer a month before his scheduled retirement. "A tech expert somberly informed me: 'You're on the termination list.'"

The termination list, huh? Another thing to add to the list next to

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Now If We Can Only Clone Him

Editor & Publisher just announced that Earl Maucker has been named its Editor of the Year. Maucker was named, according to an E&P press release, "for his leadership role in growing the newspaper's readership and integrating marketing efforts -- while nurturing aggressive watchdog journalism that was recognized by winning three finalists spots in the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes."

So the lesson is that you:
A. Gut the paper of newshole and fill it with meaningless bells and whistles
B. Let marketing side dictate the nature of coverage
C. Pander to readers with

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I was going to give you some staid and measured commentary on Jeff Ostrowski's story in the Palm Beach Post on the dubious economics of Super Bowl hosting, but when I got to the bottom of the article I noticed ...

The Palm Beach Post is pimping porn!!

Yes, that's right, somehow a porn site has broken through the Post's filter system to advertise "Absolutely FREE PlayBoy & Penthouse" on the messageboard under Ostrowski's article. The site features apparently very lonely local femmes like SillyGirl739 from Fort Lauderdale, who seems to like to show her almost-bare ass on the beach. Then there's plenty of nude pics to choose from.

Let's see how long the ad stays up there before the Post gets wise.

[ADDED: Should have noted that the Sun-Sentinel's Sarah Talalay and Charles Bricker beat the Post to the punch on the Super Bowl econ story. Read their Sunday story here].

After the jump: Honey I Killed The Prostitute and They're Talking About Us

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The numbers are in and the state of the State of the South Florida Housing Market is ... sputtering along.

It's interesting how the Big Three handled the data released yesterday by the Florida Association of Realtors. The Herald's Mathew Haggman led with the bad news: sales are at historic lows and the market is flooded with unsold houses and condos. In the next graf, though, he points out that home prices, amazingly, rose in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, albeit by only seven and two percent, respectively.

The banner headline over the Palm Beach Post's Linda Rawls' very solid and sober front-page story on the newly released numbers was decidedly negative: "Home sales dive as inventory soars." But she noted that prices have seen only a "neglible" decrease during the so-called slide.

And the Sun-Sentinel? Well, they had it both ways. In business reporter Paul Owers' first article, posted yesterday on the Web at 3:49 p.m., the news was bad: "South Florida home prices continue fall." But, of course, prices haven't fallen much, it's sales that have taken a dive as inventory has dramatically risen. By this morning's newspaper, Owers had a decidedly different

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I just don't know about the decency in running this article on the Sun-Sentinel website. I mean, the guy died in his house, what the hell does it matter to the public at large that he was naked at his computer at the time? It doesn't and that means it's not news.

Sure he was a sex offender -- convicted of a 1996 charge of lewd and lascivious assault on a child under the age of 16 -- but does that give the media the imperative to needlessly strip him in death of whatever hair-like fiber of dignity he had left? And aren't police and medical examiners supposed to have some discretion in these matters? This is just salacious gossip that hit the ears of Jamie Holmes, a reporter for

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Out Of The Frying Pan

Mayor Oliver Parker can breath easy for a while. A Broward Circuit judge has thrown a recall effort to remove the much-reviled-at-the-moment Lauderdale-By-The-Sea honcho out of office, Melissa Hoyos reports in today's Sun-Sentinel.

I've been paying attention to the turmoil in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea and have to say the decision by Barry E. Goldstein doesn't surprise me very much. The grounds on which the petition recall was based were shaky and ticky-tack. The fact that Parker voted for a special assessment to fund fire service that (apparently illegally) also funds EMS service just never felt seemed like proper grounds for a recall under the current laws. To call it misfeasance seemed a stretch simply on the common-sense level.

Here's the irony: In defending the recall, Parker may have given the people a new reason to knock him out of office. He used the minutes of a commission meeting to defend himself against the suit, specifically a passage wherein he asks the town's finance director if the assessment is going towards EMS. Problem is that tapes of the meeting show the question was never asked. The scandal is shaking up LBS, with Town Clerk Alina Medina, who is in charge of the minutes, under all kinds of fire. Before Medina is sacrificed, everyone should ask the question: Who was to benefit from the addition of the phantom question?

After the jump: A Few Must-Reads

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It's Black Male Mugshot Day at the Miami Herald, apparently. Dominating the web site are mugshots of two youths accused of committing armed robberies. They are immortalized in short Web article by Natalie P. McNeal. They are accused of, first, committing a "string" of robberies, then later in the article it's "rash" of things. The exact number isn't specified, but I'm pretty sure a rash is more than a string. Isn't it? Ah, who cares, really. Let's just put their faces on the lead headline of the homepage and make everyone half-believe they committed all the damn robberies in both Broward amd Miami-Dade.

Dubious play, I say, dubious play. Under those mugshots is

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Who killed the Birdman? David Ovalle writes a great story in the Miami Herald this morning about a true South Florida character ... who was beaten to death in the daylight on a matress he slept on behind a gas station.

In light of last night's State of the Union speech, during which George Bush boldly trumpeted his "No Soldier Left Behind" plan, I thought I'd say a few words about the State of the Pulp. I've heard it said from numerous people in recent days that this blog has slowed down, that it's not hitting as hard, that I don't seem to be putting as much blood into it as I used to. To them I say, "uh, yeah, I guess so."

As an example of my laxness, I even forgot to mention that this thing has turned a year old this month. From its humble beginning on my Florida Pulp site (here's the first page ever, starting Friday, January 13, the day after the homeless beatings). I never explained a damn thing -- just started posting. Then it went on to the site at Blogger (here's the first bunch of posts from that locale -- ah, takes you back, don't it?). And then the fateful move in March to this location on the New Times site. No, the Pulp isn't a baby anymore. It's had an eventful life, from Buddy Nevins to O'Neal Dozier to The Help Team to Tom Fiedler to Mark Foley. And it's grown. The Pulp (which originally, for like its first two days, was titled "The Daily Bob") began with maybe 9 page views a day (four of them from me), quickly jumped up to 1,000, and last month alone had

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E. Howard Hunt, who oddly once wrote me a letter of praise (for a story I'd done on the failures of the old INS to catch Mohammed Atta) that had me second-guessing my career choice for several weeks, has died at 88. Here's an interesting take on the criminal Hunt from the Pulp's blogging buddy in L.A., Tabloid Baby.

After the jump: Hodgepodge of Hunt

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Look, everybody's my friend as far as I'm concerned, so I don't have a problem with the student reporter who wrote down "friend" on the visitor card at the jail to get the interview with Michael Devlin, the newly infamous kidnapper from St. Louis. In fact when I was doing a story on serial rapist and murderer Lucious Boyd (whose story is included in all its heinous and outrageous depth in my little book), I wrote the same thing down, "friend." Only until I got to talk to him did he prove me wrong. Jesus would write the same thing, I'd like to think.

What I do have a problem with, friends, is her not mentioning that she was freelancing with the stinking New York Post. To conceal with your interview subject where his or her words will appear is flat-out unethical. And not friendly at all.

After the jump: Time To Update The Site, Sentinel

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Mummy From Texas

Kevin Deutsch's little article in the Palm Beach Post today reminded me of the time I saw a mummified baby that had been left in a briefcase.

It was at the Lee County Medical Examiner's Office and the thing that struck me about it was how perfect it had been preserved, almost like a doll. It was a little black baby with wisps of hair intact. Its skin seemed to have turned into a kind of stiff leather. The only thing that really marred its appearance was the autopsy scars and stitches. I'm not a religious guy, but I must say I felt a sense of holiness in that room that day, oh, 11 years ago.

The baby had come from the now-defunct Finley Carter Funeral Home in Fort Myers. Police found it and four more long-dead babies, I believe, in a back room during a search. As in the Deutsch story, there was also a storage shed involved. A manager had said he smelled a strange odor coming from a shed that had been rented out by Finley Carter. He took a look and found, if my memory is correct, 13 rotting corpses, many of them in their Sunday best. The Florida summer heat had caused one of them to explode to

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I could start by saying this is the first week, really, that the NT is truly without music editor Jason Budjinski and that his alter ego, Fats Pompano, is dead. But that's not the headline. The headline is that Billy Boloby has been reborn.

If you've been missing your weekly fill of Fats, it's because he's resigned as music editor of my staid, authoritative publication. He says it never felt right for him to write about the music scene. Why? Because he is the music scene. His bands, including the aforementioned Billy Boloby (he is Boloby) and The Bittercups, have entertained and astonished South Florida audiences with their musically charged performances (or is their performance-charged music?) for years. And they say the Boloby band is now getting back together in some form or another. Here's the way he described the band a few years back:

"We are revivalists of sorts, but not rock & roll revivalists — that gig is being played to death, which only makes matters worse, as it becomes increasingly generic with every new apotheosized "savior" of this decaying musical form. No, we are more interested in

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What's Graber Doing To That Bear?

Former Broward Mayor and would-be congressional candidate Ben Graber weighed in on the Pulp over the weekend (see his comment at the bottom of the page).

"Thanks for the advice Bob," he wrote, apparently referring to my suggestion that he "put on the rubber gloves and leave the politics alone."

It's good to see that Graber has a sense of humor, which is a welcome attribute for any politician. And it's obvious he suscribes to the old adage that all publicity is good publicity. So I'm gonna give him some more.

Graber asks that we check out George Bennett's piece in the Palm Beach Post about lecture on the Middle East he's been delivering to political clubs. Bennett's take wasn't very flattering to Graber, either, as his lede and the headline suggest the former mayor is boring his audience until their eyes water.

But Graber is also blatantly misleading his Democratic brethren about

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