Author: philipsura
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Snow in the South
Obviously, snow is very rare in Florida. However, occasionally there is measurable snowfall in North Florida. Two events stand out. The first one was on February 12, 1958, when Tallahassee got 2.8 inches, the largest amount of snow ever measured here. The most popular photos from that events are from the Florida State University campus,…
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From Good Guy to Villain
I have come full circle. In the late 1990s I was a Ph.D. student in Physics and Climate Research at the University of Hamburg, Germany. At that time the later German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was Minister of the Environment and was interested in anthropogenic climate change. In 1998 she visited the German Climate Computing Centre,…
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Before and After the Storm
The weather in the Deep-South is noteworthy. Extremely hot and humid summers; actually late spring, summer and early fall combined to add up to six month with maximum temperatures at least in the 90s most of the time and minima in the 70s. Over the last couple of years it became so hot that the…
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Church Self-Portrait
In the past, when we watched American movies like Footloose that showed religion in rural regions in the US, we always considered the depicted piety of some characters an extreme exaggeration of real life America. However, since living in the Deep-South for almost two decades, we realized that (evangelical) Christianity here is really as backward…
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Barkeepers
I have always been enthralled by barkeepers, in particular female ones. As a 16 or 17 year old teenager in Bremen, Germany, in the 80s it was a big deal, full of excitement, to make it past the bouncer at the door of a popular club or bar, to be admitted into the world of…
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The Deviant Florida
Openly queer, proudly black, nonconforming – those are the folks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warns other “normal” Floridians about. Our children should grow up normal, he often claims in the name of freedom and parental rights. However, the deviant Florida DeSantis likes to disparage still exists and is going strong. We all know the stereotypical…
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African-American Men: Pride and Prejudice
Good photographic portraits have typically something in common: They all show the pride and humanity of the photographed independent from the situation or environment the subject is in. Class, wealth, profession, outfit or other external circumstances should not matter in a portrait that captures the humanity of the subject. For example, in August Sander’s seminal…
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Outdoor Chess
By now it is well documented that during the pandemic many people got tired of online work, online school and too many Zoom meetings. Because of that, many folks and families started to look for social off-line distractions like board and card games or puzzles. In fact, puzzles and board games saw their strongest sales…
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Alphaville – ChatGPT
After the famous Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard died last September at age 91 in Switzerland, I started to re-watch some of his classic movies. Actually, I re-watched his most famous movie À bout de souffle (Breathless) from 1960 after its lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo died a year earlier in September 2021. It is still as…
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Skateable Art Park
One of the rare bicycle and pedestrian friendly structures in Tallahassee is the Capital Cascades Trail. I already described the path of the trail in another blog-post (https://my-tallahassee.com/2022/11/25/capital-cascades-trail/), but in a nutshell it starts at the northern end of the St. Marks Trail, right at the roundabout connecting FAMU Way, Gamble Street and Mill Street…
The Unknown Florida 