Miami area Public Policy Bloggers Should Meet Here!

Happened to come across this great-looking video -about 17 minutes long- while looking at the TF1 website yesterday after the Dolphins-Bills ballgame, which I'll have more to say about in a separate post. http://www.tf1.fr/

Personally, I've never been that enamored of the whole cruise ship thing, myself, perhaps from growing-up down here and being innundated with TV commercials.
That said, this video from this popular French TV program does make it look awfully tempting!

Just thinking out loud, it's hard to imagine a better possible location for South Florida's public policy bloggers to have a weekend convention, a meeting of the minds if you will, something that happens in other cities, but which I've never heard of here in South Florida.
Now all we'd have to do is find a foundation to drop some serious coin and...

Besides some great shots of folks obviously enjoying La Dolce Vita aboard Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas, it features some great shots of downtown Miami.

See http://www.freedomoftheseas.com/ and
http://videos.tf1.fr/video/emissions/septahuit/0,,3647219,00-tf1-video-sept-huit-croisiere-xxl-.html

For now, due to time constraints, I'll pass on this chance to go on a tangent and needle the Miami Herald's constant softball treatment of the South Florida cruise ship industry, and their practically ignoring relevant developments the last few years in suspicious cases involving customers who go "missing" aboard ship.

I'll just mention that when the famed forensic investigator Dr. Henry Lee is in town on behalf of a family, and the case is being given hours of time on Court TV and yet the paper in the town where the company is based ignores that, you can draw your own conclusions, and they aren't at all favorable to the Herald.

Consider for instance how long it took for them to concede that Carnival Cruise Line was putting up FAR TOO LITTLE money to get exclusive naming rights for the much-maligned Center for Performing Arts in downtown Miami, which, typically, Michael Putney of WLPG, Channel 10, was saying from the very beginning

( http://www.local10.com/station/269244/detail.html , http://www.miamiherald.com/443/index.html , and http://www.local10.com/putneyperspective/index.html ) along with a handful of other area bloggers.

See these blog posts below, among others, rightly complaining about aspects of the Carnival Center
http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/2007/04/house-of-lies-and-more-on-carnivorous.html ,
http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/2007/04/eight-dead-manatees-in-miami-dade-this.html , http://outside.in/places/carnival-center-for-performing-arts-miami )