Florida Culture for the Week of April 27, 2015 by Josh Garrick

April 29 – Mayor Buddy Dyer’s ‘State of the City’

The recent earthquake in Haiti, and the ongoing disaster that ensued from it, have given us all a lot to ponder. I've been thinking about the two earthquakes I experienced, both in Kathmandu.

After four years of undergraduate courses focused on finance, I felt very prepared to take the next logical step of attending grad school with an eye toward working on Wall Street. I did not, however, feel prepared to enter the “real world,” and this realization caused me to evaluate the choices I had made that left me feeling bereft of any real life experience. So I scrapped the grad school plans and opted to pursue an opportunity to teach English in Honduras.

What would you do if your whole world was disappearing inch by inch… day by day… week by week… month by month… year by year? Would you try and save it? Would you tell others about it?

Would you resign to accepting fate, as many tell you to do?  

What if your life was not the only life in danger? What if your entire family’s lives were in danger?  What if the danger threatened your friends, neighbors, workmates lives, everyone you knew?

What if there were no way to stop the danger?

Florida Culture for the Week of April 20, 2015 by Josh Garrick

April 21 – Tony Award Winning PIPPIN at the Dr. Phillips Center 

Whoever said it’s about the journey, not the destination has never traveled with my family. We get adventures, but not the kind you scream ‘yeah! Let’s do that again!’ If anything, you’re close to yelling ‘get me out of here!’ and not just because we want to escape each other.

My family could probably afford to stop and smell the roses and see the beauty of the journey, but some journeys should remain the road less traveled.

Long before Richard Engel became NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent and won the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism, he was a special education student at New York’s Riverdale Country School struggling with dyslexia.

He once attacked one of his teachers by hitting her in the head with a xylophone. "The more I was coddled and made to feel like a person with a defect, the more angry I'd feel," he said.

Named second on the list of the "World's Best Places to Visit" by U.S. News & World Report, London is an international hub for tourists looking for a destination filled with history and culture.

After Norway and Iceland, Finland is the third most sparsely populated country in Europe. For years, it hung uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union; in fact, a former foreign minister listed Finland’s three top foreign threats as “Russia, Russia, and Russia.”