>>>>>[TAMPA]<<<<<
-Hiro (01:55:44/6-30-00)

This is some notes I took on my trip to Florida.

Gaspar is part of a powerful Barea legend, a fictional pirate who ransacked the Bay area and is remembered each spring in a celebration called Gasparilla.

Tampa got its start as an Army outpost after the first Seminole War early last century, but its future remained tenuous until 1884, when railroad titan Henry B Plant decided to bring his railroad to the west coast of Florida.

Plant extended his tracks to Tampa and built the lavish Tampa Bay Hotel as a luxurious refuge for tourists arriving by train. The railroad, along with tax and land incentives provided by local government, enticed cigarmakers Vincente Martinez-Ybor and Ignazio Haya to move their factories to what was to become Ybor City.

Dozens of cigar makers followed in the subsequent years, along with thousands of Cuban, Spainish and Italion immigrants to work in the factories. Tampa came to be called "Cigar City."

Meanwhile, West Central Florida's citrus groves and phosphate mines made the city's port important.

But cigarette burned away the cigar industry, and by the 1940s, many of the factories had closed. Ybor City declined to nearly a ghost town after "urban renewal" in the 1960s. It would take 30 years for Tampa's Latin historic district to be reborn as a trendy restaurant and nightclub enclave.

Tampa's port and shipyards flourished through the Word War II era. Thousands of servicemen trained in the area during the war; many liked what they saw and came back with families afterward, creating a population boom in Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Tampa's history has been made by a host of colorful characters, from Spanish Conquistadors to Cuban revolutionaries to Rough Riders to baseball great Babe Ruth.

Ruth, playing in an established game for the Boston REd Sox at Tampa's Plant Field April 4, 1919, swatted what some would say was the longest home run ever. The ball reportedly stopped 612 feet away.

Two decades earlier, Col. Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders camped here - and the future president stayed in the Tampa Bay Hotel - on their way to fame in the Spanish-American War.

Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary hero who died in battle in 1895, had come to town several times to enlist support from residents connected to his country for its fight against Spanish occupier.

That was nearly four centuries after Spanish explorer Panfilo de Narvaez stepped ashore across Tampa Bay and gave the natives a bitter taste of what was to come. The ruthless Narvaez cut off the nose of the chief of the Tocobaga tribe.

The Seminoles moved into Florida from Georgia in the 1700s. The United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821 and established Fort Brooke at Tampa Bay three years later to recapture runaway slaves and move the Indians west.

The Army foughht three wars against the Seminoles during the next 35 years. The fiercest war was the second, when the Seminoles were led by the charasmatic Osceola, who was stopped only after the Army arranged a peace conference and captured him when he arrived with some of his men. The second war was began when the Indians ambushed Maj. Francis Dade's troops as they marched from Fort King, now Ocala, in 1835. All but three of the 105 soldiers died in the attack near present-day Bushnell.

The Seminoles were defeated finally in 1858, the end of the third war. Within three years, Florida itself was at war with the U.S. Army. In the Civil War, the isolated outpost of Tampa became the headquarters for the Confederate "cow calvary." These troops rounded up cattle to supply beef to the starving rebel army.

Tampa languished in an economic slump after the war, battling yellow fever epidemics. Then came Henry B. Plant to spark it back to life.

----Postcards----
Genie & Rhydon: The Disintigration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54) Salvidor Dali (1904-1989)

Gary: Geaopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)

Mom&Dad (Photo): Dali during the construction of his Teatro-Museo in Figueras, Spain (1971)

----Spirals of Life----
Slavador Dali saw the symbol of life as a spiral. This is reflected in some of his paintings...Later, DNA seemed to suggest that Dali was correct.

----Circles----
It was monday night in Tampa and Mark and I stopped in the Barnes & Nobles. One of the books I see is a soft-cover coffee table size book, "Chaos And Cyberculture", by Timothy Leary. I notice on the cover that it includes some other writers of interest to me, both William Gibson and William S Burroughs.

I pick it up and flip through it. I come across a small dialouge between William S Burroughs and Timothy Leary. The conversation touches on a few different topics and I found it, actually, not in and of itelf that much of note. Leary brings up cryogenics and Burroughs dismisses immortality through remaining fixed to the body as the wrong way to go about immortality. The Egyptians tried that with their mummies and, despite the tomb raiders, maybe achieved success. Due to blood found on wrappings in the tombs we could clone these egyptians.

I continue to flip through and then move on down the aisle. Later I come back and jot down the title and figure I'll check it out through my library, ILL if need be. However, after I check out (I did pick up a Dover Thrift edition of "Sredni Vashtar and Other Stories" by Saki, really HH Munro) I pick up a local free newspaper called the Tampa Bay New Times.

When I get back to my room I flip through it and almost toss it out. It turns out that this is a new-age rag. However, one article catches my eye. It is "The Way of the Adventurer" by Bob Gonzalez. The whole issue seems devoted to the idea of adventures or inner-quests, but the others were about using crystals to control your dreams or how 1940s radio shows is like going bungee jumping now adays.

Anyways, this article stood out because I noticed it was talking about Ulysses. Back in Barnes and Nobles I had looked up James Joyce's "Ulysses" in this readers encyclopedia. So at first seeing this article I thought this article might shed further light on that book. However, almost immediately I noticed that this was about the mythic man instead. Good enough I figured and read on.

The article dealt into imortality: "At another point in his journey, the gods offer immortality to Odysseus but he ultimately refuses them because immortality would deny him te experience of death. It is vital to Odysseus that he experience all of life, even the putting aside of the body." The article goes on to quote Tennyson's Ulysses.

----book list----
"Angry White Pyjamas" - Robert Twigger
"Chaos and Cyberculture" - Timothy Leary
"Guns, Germs and Steel" - Jared Diamond

----Jefferson & Franklin----
I finished the reading 'Franklin And Jefferson: The Making and Binding Of Self ' from "A Better Guide Than Reason; Studies in the American Revolution", M.E. Bradford, 1979.

This was given to me by Rhydon after a comment made in an email regarding how I liked Jefferson, at least what little I knew of him. The essay, upon further reflection, has turned my view of the two almost upside-down. Previously I would have thought of Jefferson as the individualist and Franklin as the society oriented one.

However, the essay points out how Franklin's advice is really an artifice of how to get along with society. It is almost a duplicitious act, whereas Jefferson places the society above the individual.

The essay points the ease of reading Franklin's work as a whole as it doesn't contradict itself. At least not in the same magnitude that Jefferson's works do. Some amount of time is given to the issue of Jefferson's near total contradict on slavery.

-=-=-=-=-

"I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of [her] is more than I can see." Robert Louis Stephenson

"out of clutter, find simplicity." Albert Einstein

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world." Robert louis Stephenson

"I am a part of all I have read." John Kieran

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