GatorStompin.com — The debt owed to restaurants, bars, contractors and others following last year’s Gator Stompin’ event has been chopped to roughly half — or about $65,000 from an amount that once approached $150,000. But the head organizer said Gainesville’s 32-year-old annual pub crawl will go on and will still [...]

— During my trip to Berlin last year, I asked our tour guide, a university researcher in Nazi history, if there are any public displays of swastikas left in Berlin. Sure enough, he said, there are two symbols of Hitler’s Third Reich, illegal in most cases in Germany since the end of [...]

A G.I. taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge, Kurt Vonnegut was held by the Germans in Schlachthof Fünf, or Slaughterhouse Five, an actual slaughterhouse in the eastern German city of Dresden. This prison acted as a shelter for Vonnegut and other American prisoners when Allied planes bombed the city [...]

Dallas, Texas, artist Henry Darnell used my photo of a Florida panther as a model for the Sarasota Chalk Festival in November. The theme of this year’s festival, held every November in downtown Sarasota’s Burns Square, was extinct and endangered species. With a population believed to be between 100 and 200, the Florida panther subspecies (Puma concolor [...]

I‘m always so behind in the times on these things. Here are some shots from our last couple days in Berlin this past June, when the Germans tied Ghana 2-2 in the first round. Germany, of course, went on to win the whole thing, defeating Argentina 1-0 in the finals. [...]

www.whiskeyhouse.com Downtown Gainesville’s newest bar, the upscale Whiskey House, is open for business on Southwest Second Avenue across from Loosey’s. “We’ve always dreamed of opening a bar in Gainesville,” said Blake Haley, the general manager and one of three partners in the venture. “We loved going to Midtown and doing [...]