2012 was another record-setting year for both The Drudge Report and yours truly here at the Hallandale Beach Blog! December 2012 was the third record-breaking month in a row for Hallandale Beach Blog's monthly average with a monthly total of 62,898 individual pageviews, or an average of 2,029 views per day
Above, looking south on U.S.-1/S. Federal Highway, in front of Hallandale Beach City Hall. At the bottom of the FDOT sign you'll notice the grafitti that I mentioned two years ago at a HB City Commission meeting, where I noted with disgust how most of U.S.-1, one of the three main roads in and out of the city, had grafitti on nearly every sign and pole -and had for years- due to the city and FDOT doing such a piss-poor job of keeping it under control, thus creating a bad first-impression for visitors. Typically, then-City Mgr. Mark A. Antonio's response to my recitation with specificity was that he'd never noticed any of that before. This from the same person who had worked in that same building since it'd opened over ten years years prior. I then retorted that one didn't need to go far to see it, only walk out the door of the commission chambers we were all in and walk to the sidewalk in front of City Hall. There was no missing it, since it's all been there for years, along with the gang tags on other signs and light poles. As of today, it's all STILL there, as responsible parties continue ignoring the problem, the perfect metaphor for the city's myopia, something I said to conclude my remarks that night. April 17, 2012 photo by South Beach Hoosier. © 2012 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.
2012 was another record-setting year for both The Drudge Report and yours truly here at the Hallandale Beach Blog! December 2012 was the third record-breaking month in a row for Hallandale Beach Blog's monthly average with a monthly total of 62,898 individual pageviews, or an average of 2,029 views per day
Matt Drudge's 17-year old news and information website, the invaluable 24/7 tool in a sea of increasingly incurious, biased and not-so-bright American news media, set a new record in 2012, besting his 2011 total by over a BILLION pageviews.
Or to be specific, 1,007,231,416.
http://www.drudgereport.com/
Meanwhile, farther north in South Florida from the Drudge HQ, but much closer to home for your purposes, 2012 was another record-breaking year at the Hallandale Beach Blog, with a total of 343,830 pageviews.
December 2012 was another record-breaker, not only setting a record for THE busiest month EVER in the now six years of the blog, with a monthly total of 62,898 individual pageviews, or a daily average of 2,029 views, but with a new daily record set the Sunday before last, two days before Christmas, December 23, 2012 with a total of 5,324.
It was the third record-breaking month in a row!
Yes, thanks to readers from South Florida and around the world who let their fingers do the walking, December 2012 was, indeed, awesome!
Just to give you an idea of how things have looked this year -and the last two weeks- here's some numbers to crunch and wrap your head around:
January 2012 Pageviews: 26,636
February 2012 Pageviews: 22,584
March 2012 Pageviews: 19,167
April 2012 Pageviews: 20,626
May 2012 Pageviews: 23,979
June 2012 Pageviews: 21,971
July 2012 Pageviews: 23,036
August 2012 Pageviews: 22,312
September 2012 Pageviews: 23,290
October 2012 Pageviews: 35,433
November 2012 Pageviews: 41,898
December 2012 Pageviews: 62,898
Total: 343,830
Individual daily pageviews at HBB for the second half of the month:
Dec 14, 2012 Pageviews: 1,226,
Dec 15, 2012 Pageviews: 4,455,
Dec 16, 2012 Pageviews: 4,651,
Dec 17, 2012 Pageviews: 1,834,
Dec 18, 2012 Pageviews: 2,906,
Dec 19, 2012 Pageviews: 4,156,
Dec 20, 2012 Pageviews: 2,289
Dec 21, 2012 Pageviews: 2,476
Dec 22, 2012 Pageviews: 4,519
Dec 23, 2012 Pageviews: 5,324
Dec 24, 2012 Pageviews: 2,229
Dec 25, 2012 Pageviews: 1,464
Dec 26, 2012 Pageviews: 1,230
Dec 27, 2012 Pageviews: 1,054
Dec 28, 2012 Pageviews: 1,155
Dec 29, 2012 Pageviews: 1,059
Dec 30, 2012 Pageviews: 1,214
Dec 31, 2012 Pageviews: 970
____________________________________________Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and insight onto Florida and local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now. On this blog, locally, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger and laser-like attention on the coastal cities of Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.If you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be stuck in stultifying traffic, paying higher-than-necessary taxes and continually musing about the chronic lack of accountability among not only elected govt. officials, but also of city, county and state employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, eager work-ethic mentality that local residents deserve and expect.This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the "Perfect Storm" of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.Sadly for its residents, HB is where even easily-solved, quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and ineffective supervisory management. It's a city with lots of potential because of its terrific location, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion, merely kicked -once again- further down the road. I used to ask myself, not always rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show that through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?" Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable but skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time, and wanting questions answered in a honest and logical way that citizens have the right to expect.Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change.If there's one constant gripe in South Florida, regardless of your age, race, nationality or political persuasion, it's about the fundamental lack of PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY here among Florida's state, regional and local govt./agency officials. Hallandale Beach Blog aims to be a small step towards regaining some of that needed accountability, whether it's thru simple public scrutiny, or requires a degree of follow-up investigation and public exposure of incompetency, cronyism or simple negligence -South Florida's usual governing style."And David put his hand in the bag and took out a stone and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on the head and he fell to the ground. Amen."- Preacher Purl encouraging the underdog Hickory High basketball team before the state title game against heavily-favored South Bend Central in 1986's Hoosiers http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091217/
Audio of pregame speech:
_____________________________________________
_____________________________________The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpted from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster: In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administrations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly. At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accommodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated...
_____________________________________________
"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"
_____________________________________________"Laws and Constitutions go for nothing where the general sentiment is corrupt."-New York Times, September 22, 1851"Why do they need that in the Broward County charter?"-
Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper at April 2, 2008 HB City Commission meeting, in discussing possible inclusion of Broward County Charter Review Commission's proposal for Ethics Commission to deal with Broward County Commission, on November 2008 ballot.Six YEARS after the county's voters had overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the County charter requiring its adoption, the Broward County Commission had yet to live up to its legal responsibility. That's why!________________________________________
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
Corruption Isn't Unique to South Florida, It's the Level of the Stupidity That Is
"[Chicago Mayor] William Hale Thompson was defeated Tuesday after a campaign which he alone made disgraceful. The election was an ejection, a dirty job, but Chicago has washed itself and put on clean clothes. Thompson recognized the [Chicago] Tribune as his chief enemy. The Tribune was glad to earn that opinion. It certainly tried to do so. It has taken the fight to him on every occasion during the long and depraved course of his administration. It is unpleasant business to eject a skunk, but someone has to do it. For Chicago, Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy. He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character. He’s out. He is not only out, but dishonored. He is deserted by his friends. He is permanently marked by the evidences of his character and conduct. His health is impaired by his ways of life and he leaves office and goes from the city the most discredited man who ever held place in it."
-Excerpts from April 1931 Chicago Tribune editorial following Republican "Big Bill" Thompson's loss to his Democratic rival Anton Cermak. A friend of organized crime during the Al Capone era, Thompson was the last Republican elected mayor of Chicago. But less than two years later, Mayor Cermak was shot while shaking hands with President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt at Miami's Bayfront Park. He died from gunshot wounds to his lungs three weeks later.
See http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3686.html
Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hallandale Beach in The Miami Herald over 25 years ago "For years people living in and out of its condo-walled sector east of U.S. 1 have wondered what to do about the city of Hallandale. In the 19th Century the condo giants would have served as ideal fortresses. From top floors of the towers, enemy ships could be readily spotted and blown out of the Atlantic. Oceanfront dwellers could have been protected from the west by the Hallandale Beach Boulevard drawbridge and moat called the Intracoastal Waterway. But this is the 20th Century..."-Miami Herald Broward Columnist Bill Braucher's first paragraph from July 24, 1983.To which Hallandale Beach Blog can only say, Bulls-eye!
.JPG)
No comments:
Post a Comment