At 5:40 a.m. one day in Novmber 2008, Jamie Havican decided to take his black and brown miniature Dachshund Charley out for a walk. “I went out front and as we were walking down the driveway I was looking on the ground for snakes or…
All photos Christine McCormick/Catalyst Second-year Kenneth Lee walked over to a pile of rainbow hoops, watching his reflection in the mirror. He flung it around his legs and tried to keep the hoop rotating around his knee. “I just can’t seem to keep it from…
Puneet Sandhu/Catalyst Waidele mans the C-Store in Ham Center. A new late-night convenience store is running on campus in Hamilton “Ham” Center. Called the C-store, the set up is a table in Ham that holds drinks, snacks and also pens, stamps and lip balm. The…
Instead of focusing on roses and chocolates this past Valentine’s Day, President Barack Obama was invoking images of the space race of the late 1950s and 1960s and college dropouts as he proposed a massively reduced budget to a Congress that was anything but lovestruck.…
All photos Martin Steele/Catalyst Sticks and stones may break one’s bones, but words can do so much more. Spoken by a skilled literary craftsperson, words can hurt or heal, inspire laughter or tears and change the way a listener sees a particular subject. These are…
All photos Kaley Soud/Catalyst “Something very wrong is happening in our world. Innocent people's precious lives are being stolen and destroyed by our criminal justice system. These tragedies occur far more often than most people realize. Corruption, human error and bad practices all lend themselves…
All photos Anne Larkin/Catalyst Five years ago, 37 percent of kids in Sarasota County were eligible for free or reduced-price school breakfasts and lunches. That number has now climbed to 50 percent. “We went from one in three, which was high, to one in two,”…
Park gatherers beware: condo residents surrounding Selby Five Points Park in the heart of downtown Sarasota have been circulating a petition to limit the number of people allowed to gather on park property without a permit to twelve people. Apart from cutting children’s birthday parties to a lame number of family members, the proposed policy would prevent volunteer organizations from homeless feedings and could lead to devastating consequences like that of Orlando.
In 2007 the Orlando Sentinel reported a member of the Food Not Bombs group, Eric Montanez, was arrested after serving stew to a group of 30 homeless people gathered at Lake Eola Park. After writing up the incident, police collected a vial of stew as evidence.
Montanez’s crime fell under the jurisdiction of Orlando’s 2006 city-wide ordinance limiting the number of people permitted to gather at any city park without a permit to 25 persons. Only two permits can be granted a year for large group feedings. After complaints from business owners and residents surrounding the park, the city instilled the ordinance to quash the regular homeless feedings held by non-profit groups such as Food Not Bombs and the First Vagabonds Church of God.
The 2011 Sarasota Film Festival (SFF) is still going on, with the closing night on Sunday, April 17. Students can purchase tickets at a discounted rate of $8 per ticket or $20 for four tickets to any of the films. All screenings are at the…
Spring is in the air. The birds are chirping. And New College’s tranquil campus is a war zone for the fifty-five Novocollegiate mercenaries hired to take each other out. The time-honored game of Assassins began at 3 a.m. on Sunday and the killings will continue…
