Last night, while staying out way too late at Tampa’s Channelside pre-fab dancetoriums (note to self: three hours of sleep doesn’t work once the approach to middle age sets in), I had the most minor of epiphanies:

The extreme fragmentation of pop music output that’s a result of legal and illegal Web downloads? It’s nowhere as apparent than it is in an all-comers danceclub. Far too many dance standards from 15 years ago, as if not enough of note has been produced since to push the 90s stuff into (usually thankful) retirement. And the most pathetic part is that the crowd, including the 20somethings who were in diapers when the soundwares of House of Pain and 2 Live Crew were still fresh beats, were actually appreciative of the warmed-over songs.

I guess this means I can revisit a place like Banana Joe’s or Splitsville in another 5-10 years — by which point I’ll be undeniably too old to show my face in such a joint, but whatever — and hear pretty much the same grooves. With a random new iteration of Soulja Boy tossed in, despite itself. The recurring feeling of familiarness just won’t go away.

On the plus side, there was enough eyecandy to make that imperceptible pivot that turned midnight into 4AM within seconds a most pleasurable ride.

It’s the big-box retailer equivalent of unplanned pregnancy, and the end result is the biggest Wal-Mart in America at 260,000 square feet, located on the outskirts of Albany:

Real estate planners at the Bentonville, Ark.-based company - the world’s largest retailer with more than 4,100 stores in the United States and 3,100 more overseas - never set out to build their biggest store in New York’s Capital Region. In fact, the larger stores tend to be built in rural areas, [Wal-Mart spokesman Phil] Serghini said.

In the 1990s, Wal-Mart co-located a Sam’s Club - its members-only warehouse store - with a Wal-Mart department store in a dual-level shopping center, with the Sam’s Club on the lower floor.

The company closed the Sam’s Club in 2006 because of low membership and decided to use that space to turn the department store into a supercenter.

“It’s the largest one really only because of the situation involving the former Sam’s Club,” Serghini said. “But it is unique, and the customers are going to be very pleased with the layout.”

Finally, something of interest in the state capital. Maybe the steady stream of gubernatorial sex partners can catch up on their sundries shopping while they’re in town, after their visits with whoever’s currently in the Governor’s seat (or even before, to prep).

I’m disappointed the article doesn’t mention the current largest Wal-Mart title-holder. I could swear it’s a big ol’ SuperCenter location in Pinellas Park, Florida, by which I used to live; but it may just be the busiest/most profitable, not necessarily the biggest.

It may not have invented junk mail, but Valpak, that St. Petersburg-based firm that’s celebrating 40 years of business this year, certainly maximized its potential with direct-marketing precision that drills right down to neighborhood demographics:

From the beginning, the company has staked its success on measurable results. [Company founder Terry] Loebel required advertisers to record how much coupon-carrying customers spent. Valpak remains an intensely data-driven company, with the ability to divide neighborhoods into blocks of 10,000 residences.

For instance, Valpak can tell businesses which neighborhoods have swimming pools, where new houses are being built and where people with certain income brackets live.

If you have a mind to sabotage this sort of datamining, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do so, other than promptly tossing the unopened baby-blue overstuffed envelop to prevent further information compilation. That just slows down the machine — it doesn’t pervert the already-collected data. If it makes you feel better, you can always tear the coupons to shreds, or burn them, before depositing them into the trash bin.

Wait, wait… I work in marketing now. Strike everything I just wrote. Redeem the hell out of those direct-to-your-door coupons!

I was well-aware of Valpak’s presence in St. Pete when I lived there, but I never followed them particularly closely, either personally or for the business magazine I worked for. That’s probably because it sold itself to Cox Target Media long ago, and as a result was no longer considered a “local” company. Too many layers of corporate crud to cut through to get any information.

A bit of news that originated in the Sunshine State, even though it has national impact: The recovery of Dick Vitale from potentially career-ending vocal chord surgery, and his return to his usual ESPN-hosted bombastity.

It’s indicative of how much my sports-television viewing patterns have shifted that I honestly wasn’t aware that Dickie V was off the air. With NHL games long gone and SportsCenter having morphed into more of an endorsement platform than a news service, I’ve had scant reason to tune into ESPN, other than a weekly limited dose of “Sunday NFL Countdown” during football season. On top of that, I’m not a college hoops fan anyway, so I’d rarely seen Vitale in action; but his stature as a network personality pretty much transcends his specific beat.

But anyway, he’s back, after an extended recovery period in his home base of Sarasota. That residency is enough reason for me to yank out this accompanying image of a long-ago Florida Trend cover, from when Vitale headlined a feature piece on the most influential Floridians.

I’m sure the link to that article rotted away long ago, and I’m not going to fish for it now. But I will recount the Dickie V photo-shoot experience, as related to me when I was at the magazine:

The Art Director told me he was a lot of fun to shoot. The goal was to get Vitale to keep up the animated look for the camera. When he would start to flag, the Director would do a terrible Dickie V impersonation, saying “INFLUENCE, BABY!”, and that would recharge Vitale for another several minutes.

I was hoping to get a nice Floridian recharge myself over the next few days, somewhat in parallel with Vitale’s. But I had to cancel at the last minute. At least I won’t run the risk of some baldheaded ex-coach yelling in my face, with the need for a V-Speak Glossary to translate what a “PTPer” is.

Since this likely will be the last time I get to post this vintage Tampa Bay Bucs creamsicle-orange uniform photo of Vinny Testaverde, I’m going take it. Because today’s otherwise meaningless season finale between the Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers at Tampa marked the quarterback’s official retirement from the NFL after 21 years.

It’s too bad the only signifier for it was Carolina sending Vinny in for the final kneel-down to end the game. Given that the site was the same city where he began his career in 1987, I was hoping for something more. If not actual game action for Vinny, then the Bucs should have hauled out some vintage Florida orange, Bucco Bruce-emblazoned uniforms to wear in honor of the occasion.

Last week, when the the Brookings Institution released a report on urban quality of life called “Footloose and Fancy Free: A Field Survey of Walkable Urban Places in the Top 30 U.S. Metropolitan Areas”, don’t think I didn’t notice which city came in dead last:

The survey looked at which cities have the largest number of “walkable urban places” per capita, defined as compact areas in cities and suburbs that put residents within walking distance of work, entertainment venues, schools and shopping. Every city on the list has at least one success story.

Top-ranked Washington, D.C., has Georgetown. Boston, No. 2 on the list, has Harvard Square. The Miami area, in eighth place, has Coral Gables.

The Tampa area has nothing, according to [Brookings study author Christopher] Leinberger.

Having lived in the Tampa Bay area for 15-odd years, and having attempted more than once to do walkies around town, I can attest to the absence of pedestrian routes. There’s some question as to whether or not Brookings gave fair weight to St. Petersburg and its fairly friendly walkaround downtown area. I’m not going to bother digging into the full study; I’ll assume that whatever pluses the ‘Burg contributed were far outweighed by the car-centric concrete ribbons that dominate the rest of Pinellas and Hillsborough.

This isn’t anything new, of course. The funniest part of the reaction wasn’t this subsequent attempt by Sue Carlton to walk one of Tampa’s unwalkable walkways; rather, it’s that it was practically identical to Sandra Thompson’s walking experiment more than two years ago.

Actually, I take that back. The funniest part of the reaction is actually this pathetic rebuttal:

[Pinellas tourism chief D.T. Minich] touted a survey by the Web site RunThePlanet.com that ranked the city of Dunedin as America’s most walkable small city. While Brookings relied on transit statistics and demographics, the Web site took input from real visitors, he said in a news release headlined “Dunedin’s Top Ranking Debunks Brookings Institution Study.”

I wouldn’t expect much infrastructure change in two years, despite all the hand-wringing from local politicians. Like I said, it’s nothing new, and as long as more people keep moving in — a trend I’m sure is as strong as ever — there’s no reason to give more than lip service. I still have friends and acquaintances in the Bay Area, and while the complaints about traffic are getting more and more frequent, I haven’t heard from anyone itching to move out or look for a walkable home-work neighborhood.

Personally, I don’t miss the disconnectedness of having to drive a long haul to and from everywhere. I’ve gladly traded the worn-out shoe leather that New York requires for the car-cocooning that comes with Tampa Bay living. The weather is another story, but no trade-off is perfect.

Yes indeed, someone in the Sunshine State — Tampa, specifically — is driving around with a vanity license plate that reads: A SINNER.

The above picture is real, all right. It’s an artifact from my brief Florida visit last month. I saw the van sporting this plate in a parking lot one night, and whipped out my cameraphone to capture the evidence.

So needless to say, even though I’m saying it: If you’re in Tampa, and you see this van a-rockin’ — don’t come a-knockin’.

What was my first thought about news that the invasive Burmese python is making itself at home in the Sunshine State?

Some very rough estimates put the state’s pet python population above 5,000. More than 350 have been found in [the Everglades] since 2002, with others showing up in mangroves along Florida’s west coast and farther north in the state. There are perhaps 10 more for every one that is seen, [Everglades National Park biologist Skip] Snow said.

In May 2006, biologists confirmed that Everglades pythons were not a transient curiosity when they found the first eggs. “There were 46 eggs, 44 fertile,” Mr. Snow said. Shortly afterward, they found another clutch of two dozen, already hatched.

My thought was that the state’s notorious stomach-bursting alligators aren’t doing their part to stem this slithering spread.

The other day my friend Kirby, down Tampa way, told me that one of his daughter Dayna’s pre-kindergarten classmates is the daughter of Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Nolan Pratt.

In addition, Dayna shares a class with the daughter of Tampa Bay Buccaneer cornerback Ronde Barber.

I told Kirby that he’s famous-by-association via two of the bay area’s major-league sports franchises. Now he’s got to finagle getting the kid of a Devil Ray into Dayna’s school, and complete the set. I’d target Elijah Dukes, since he seems to have sired a paternity court’s worth of offspring.

The message found inside my lunchtime fortune cookie today:

You are heading for a land of sunshine.

Amazing. How did this cookie know that I would be going to Florida — alleged land of sunshine (when it’s not torrentially raining, or a hurricane is blowing through) in two weeks’ time? Because I am. I’ll be hitting Tampa and Orlando to attend a wedding, visit with friends and generally downshift.

I’m actually a little creeped out that a fortune cookie could draw such an accurate bead on me. Who expects these things to even get close in their predictions? It’s not the first time one of these after-meal treats has unsettled me; all told, I’d prefer to receive a blank-shooting empty cookie.

With the book series winding down, it’s time to really ramp up the merchandising-extraction on all things Harry Potter. To wit: An Orlando theme park called the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, set to open in 2009.

Sounds like the rides will be fly:

Speculation is rampant among theme park fans over the type of ride system Universal will use after recently landing a 10-year exclusive license for a new type of industrial-strength robotic arm. The arm is strong enough to lift and spin a ride car full of people around - 360 degrees - then precisely lower it into another themed environment.

One Hollywood movie industry Web site claims to have learned of a mockup in a heavily guarded Hollywood soundstage of what Universal called Project Strongarm. The site shows a rendering of a flying Ford Anglia car - like the one Ron Weasley and Harry Potter take to Hogwarts in the second book. Park ride designers declined to confirm or deny any speculation about the ride system.

As long as Universal is in the spitballing stage, I’d like to forward on my own ride suggestion, as conceptualized in the image above. Inspired by the Goblet of Fire book/film, I give you “Harry Potter and the Gobbler of Fire”! A pyrotechnic thrill-roll any time of the year, but particularly around Thanksgiving time. Burn baby, burn!

Mr. Exemplary Child-Care, stage left, is located in Vigelands Parken, Oslo, Norway. He’s just one of the worldwide instances of downright bizarre statuary art.

More than one of the photos in that collection look Photoshopped.

Even though it wouldn’t quite fit into the theme, I’m disappointed that downtown Tampa’s exploding chicken sculpture didn’t make the cut.

Let the record show:

When Paris Hilton argues that she should rightly avoid jail time because she “provides beauty and excitement” to the world, she’s actually drawing on solid legal precedent.

What precedent, you ask? None other than the “too pretty for prison” defense that Tampa Bay-area teacher Debra Lafave’s lawyer used to beat a pedophile rap. And both women are blondes — I’m sure that served as some sort of legal litmus test for Hilton’s counsel.

Order in the court, indeed.

I’m having a hard time doping out how Southern California’s “human directionals” — guys who spin advertising placards at roadsides for hours on end — can be at such a high premium:

Thanks to growing demand, the business has turned cutthroat. There’s a frenzy of talent poaching. Spinners battle one another for plum assignments and the promise of wage hikes. Some of the more prominent compete for bragging rights by posting videos on YouTube and Google Video, complete with trash talking. One YouTube comment reads, “i don’t know if you stole my tricks or i just do them better.”

Special spinning moves are guarded fiercely.

[Aarow Advertising of San Diego] keeps dozens of moves in a “trick-tionary,” which only a handful of people have seen, said co-founder Mike Kenny. The company records spinners’ movements and sends them in batches to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “We have to take our intellectual property pretty seriously,” he said.

Yeah, it’s a unique method of delivering your ad message, and the performance-art aspect undoubtedly makes it memorable to the audience. But does it really break through the media clutter effectively enough to prompt this talent race?

Not to mention that it’s hardly lucrative for the talent, at average wages of $10-15 an hour. But I guess it slots well with similar low-end job categories.

I’m surprised I never encountered much spinning in Florida. It seems to be as fertile a territory for it as SoCal: Welcoming year-round weather, miles of car-centric infrastructure, loads of entertainment/tourist oriented businesses that would find it ideal for their target audiences, and plenty of cheap labor. Maybe this wave will make its way East in due time.

When the 2007 edition of the Cyberstates report, a state-by-state detailing of the tech industry, came out today, I’ll bet Florida economic boosters winced when they read this quip by AeA president William T. Archey regarding the Sunshine State’s robust job growth in this sector:

“It’s diffused and there’s no identity to go along with it — you don’t think of Florida as a high-tech state,” Archey said. “I keep thinking the Florida Chamber of Commerce needs to get its act together and start promoting this.”

The joke is that Florida has, indeed, tried to promote itself as a tech-friendly mecca. Using NASA’s presence at Cape Canaveral as a base, the state launched the Florida High-Tech Corridor initiative more than a decade ago, specifically to get the word out. The hope was to spur economic diversification beyond the traditional pillars of tourism and agriculture — at least perceptionally.

That the head of a prominent technology association hasn’t gotten the message means some folks in Tallahassee are heading back to the drawing board.

I’ll admit it: I was a bit flip regarding the impending hazard of this past weekend’s big storm. Not only did it make for a generally ugly couple of days, it also brought more than enough flooding and related damage.

The preponderance of the wet stuff certainly put me in mind of the many Florida dousings I experienced, courtesy of hurricane/tropical storm near-misses (or even a particularly harsh Gulf Coast thunderstorm). A further mirroring of that mood was provided by this writeup, which I’ll assume was a collaborative effort among all the NYTimes reporters who were on this beat yesterday:

The day was, in a way, like great theater: the drama of the approaching storm, the searching wind at the panes and rain dancing on the pavement, the smudged sky, the iron-gray day like a movie in black and white. The overcast was solid, great plates of corrugated iron fused from horizon to horizon, and the streets glistened in the rain: a metallic futureworld.

No, it won’t win any poetry awards. But there’s a lyrical appropriateness to it, especially the “drama of the approaching storm”, reminiscent of the days-long hurricane landfall anticipation in the Sunshine State. Obviously, it’s as close as I’d care to get to emulating that experience up here.

It’s a shame I’m not still in the business magazine game. (Not that I’m complaining about my current marketing-consulting gigs.)

Because if I were, I’d be abuzz over the three big-big merger and acquisition deals announced today:

- First Data Corporation, a heavyweight in the electronic payments field, agreed to be taken private via a $29-billion leveraged buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.. It’s one of the bigger LBOs in recent years, and KKR’s involvement hearkens back to the corporate raider/barbarians-at-the-gate landscape of the ’80s. Incidentally, this development long-term impacts one of my current clients.

- After a protracted process, media giant Tribune Company picks billionaire Sam Zell as its dance partner, to the tune of an $8.2-billion buyout.

After previous threats of a breakup among its newspaper and broadcast components, the Zell deal now allows the company to stay in one piece — with one notable exception. Tribune’s Chicago Cubs baseball team will be sold off, with accompanying 25 percent stake in Comcast SportsNet Chicago, following the 2007 MLB season. Which appears to make the payroll watchers from this past Winter correct, although only incidentally: The Cubs’ free-agent spending spree had more to do with shoring up the ticket-selling base than positioning for a sale.

Last note on this: The $600-million valuation cited for the Cubs seems way low. This is one of the more venerable and durable franchises — and brands — in all of team sports. That, and the likely competition among bidders, will drive the price well beyond what the analysts are predicting. I’ll call it here: The Cubbies will be sold for that magic number of $1 billion, marking the first time a North American sports team hits that threshold.

- Finally, in a more understated transaction, Global Imaging Systems is cashing out, agreeing to a $1.5-billion acquisition by Xerox.

What do I care about this minor consolidation in the office equipment space? Simply the Florida connection, as Global Imaging has been one of the Sunshine State’s larger publicly-traded companies for several years, and coverage of said companies used to be my beat. While a buyout of such an on-the-rise company isn’t unusual — especially in Florida — I always figured that another Tampa Bay-based copier company would sell out before Global Imaging ever would.

What is it about the two-dollar bill that makes it so appealing to the skin trade?

First, the strip clubs adopted it as a more efficient tip-dispensing denomination. And now, central Florida nudist resorts are making it their currency of choice, as a way to demonstrate how much their members pump into the local economy that hassles them so.

I’m thinking this naked ambition has something to do with Thomas Jefferson’s general regard for libertarian freedom of expression. Maybe also for his now-infamous bedroom activities…

In any case, these notable applications threaten to permanently brand the two-note in the popular consciousness: Jefferson bill = nekkid people! Chaz seems to think that the perceptional impact will be severely limited. On the other hand, Joel is sure that it will serve as a monetary scarlet letter — so, presumably, I’m sure he’ll be happy to give you non-reproachable change for all those double-greenbacks you accumulate during your next Sunshine State visit.

Earlier today, my BlogExplosion rotation brought up Trashology, a satirically-dictioned record of life in Tallahassee’s trailerland.

The curious thing: It’s part of Tallahassee.com, the online presence of the Tallahassee Democrat, the newspaper of record for the Sunshine State’s capital city.

The thing is, I’d come across Trashology a few times before, and it wasn’t always part of the newspaper’s collection of content. I remember it started life as a standalone Blogger/BlogSpot site; indeed, it looks like it’s still powered via Blogger. So at some point (probably recently), Trashology as added to the Democrat’s lineup of reader blogs.

Not a bad pickup for Ms. Trashahassee. It seems like an odd fit for the paper, but whatever draws eyeballs, I guess. Besides, outside of university-based blogs, I can’t imagine there’s a huge pool of blogging talent in Florida’s capital region, so beggars can’t be choosers.

Everyone knows the pattern of working your life away in the Northeast and Midwest, then moving to Florida to wait out the clock.

As people start living longer, that pattern seems to be reversing upon itself. Demographic data indicates that more senior folks are leaving the South than are moving in, and that they’re heading back to their former Northern stomping grounds.

Here’s the key driver behind this trend:

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, said, “The South, and Florida especially, has been a magnet for yuppie elderly: younger seniors with spouse present and in good health.

“These are a catch for communities that receive them, because they have ample disposable incomes and make few demands on public services,” he continued. “The older senior population, especially after 80, are more likely to be widowed, less well off and more in need of social and economic support.”

The way I’m interpreting this is that Florida, with its low-low taxes and ample living space, is tailor-made for people in their 60s and 70s; they’re done with the rat-race but still have some quality living left to do. But when those same “yuppie elderly” get even older, start to lose their spouses and develop health problems, the infrastructure in retirementville just doesn’t address their closer-to-the-end needs. Plus family tends to be far away, making the situation even more strenuous. The upshot: Instead of being God’s waiting room, Florida is shaping up as a stopover on the later stages of life’s journey.

This isn’t necessarily bad news for the Sunshine State or the rest of the South. Seniors are a small percentage of the migration into the region, despite their prominence. More mainstream populations (i.e., young people and families) are filling up the region, transforming the landscape. It means that priorities in many areas are going to be reassessed, to be more in line with a balanced demographic mix.

Overall, this is another example of a round-trip dynamic that seems to be going around. A year ago, a drive by suburbanites to plunge back into New York City living suggested a desire by some to come back home, in a sense. Is this a symptom of what happens in an age of longer average lifespans — outliving surroundings that were supposed to be where roots were finally laid for good?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I myself was a population statistic (ba-dum-dum) in this South-to-North (specifically Florida-to-New York) migration. I’m not quite ready to retire yet, though. But having all the old people around will impart a sense of familiarity.

I don’t suppose book publishing gets much more gimmicky than it does with Robert Olen Butler’s “Severance”.

The book is a collection of short stories. And I mean short — for a macabre reason:

Butler conceived of the idea after encountering a gruesome piece of trivia: that a human head is believed to continue in a state of consciousness for one and a half minutes after decapitation. Having then determined, from another source, that “in a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute,” Butler arrived at a new — and unlikely to be replicated — art form, the vignette of the severed head, told in exactly 240 words.

Not that Butler limited himself to human heads. Among his subjects are a dinnertable-destined chicken, a dragon, Medusa, and the Lady of the Lake. Not sure they’re entitled to the same wordcount as us regular folk, but I’ll let it slide.

Unfortunately, it looks like he got some bum information on the first part of that creepy equation:

After decapitation, consciousness remains in the severed head not for a minute and a half, as your reviewer explains Butler’s premise, but for about 30 seconds. In 1905, a French physician timed how long the eyes responded when he called the decapitated man’s name…

To appreciate the full pathos of Butler’s subjects, readers may want to pause at the end of the first 80 words, when the thinking has to stop. Beyond that lies only the author’s hope.

Maybe that’s what I should have done when I tore through the book over the last couple of days; I could have completed it in one sitting instead. The book’s physical size wouldn’t have changed — as it is, each story is self-contained within a single page (plus a preceding section cover page).

I don’t mean to imply that “Severance” wasn’t entertaining. I thought the stories for the Biblical figures (the apostles Paul and Matthew, and John the Baptist) were excellent, as was the one for the Lady in the Lake. And the inclusion of Nicole Brown Simpson was sly, as was Butler putting himself on the chopping block (fictionally) for the finale. But I agree with the Times review: The stream-of-consciousness motif resulted in an overbearing sameness, especially toward the end. It didn’t help that the author overreached on a few, trying to shoehorn the narrative of what led to the character’s death into what should be final, frenzied contemplation.

For those interested, this all has a Sunshine State connection. Butler lives in Capps, Florida (which I’ve never heard of), and is a professor at Florida State University (which I have heard of). Figures that something this kooky would come out of the F-L-A.