We're Having Leftovers

Every so often, we in my household will have a big dinner consisting entirely of leftovers. Not just what we couldn't finish the night before, but the full backlog of the way too much food we inevitably prepare each evening. They're not the most exciting meals, to say the least, but they help clear out the fridge, and more importantly, break our habit of using Tupperware as a kind of purgatory for uneaten food that tends to end up in the garbage rather than our stomachs.

I mention this only because today's post is essentially the editorial equivalent of leftovers, three small courses made of the scraps of stories it would be a shame to let go to waste. It won’t be the most memorable meal we’ve ever shared, but like my parents used to say to a finicky little Aesop, “STFU and eat your goddamned dinner” “a boring dinner is better than no dinner at all, sweetie.”

You’ve Been Served

According to well-placed sources, the City has officially served the illegally-operating M.E.D. Expediters of Coral Gables with a 30-day cure notice due to the company’s failure to obtain a valid certificate of use and business tax receipt.

For those of you just joining us, Dr. Castro insists this M.E.D. with offices at 55 Merrick Way Suite 214 has nothing to do with her M.E.D. with offices at 55 Merrick Way Suite 214, despite both companies overlapping in every conceivable way, all the way down to the corporate name, which itself is derived from Dr. Castro’s late mother’s name: Maria E. Delgado. Because it’s a legally distinct business, it’s required to obtain its own CU and BTR in order to operate in Coral Gables—something one would expect a supposed expert in municipal licensing to know.

For the record, this marks the 1,456,697th time I’ve reported something only to have a small chorus of delusional KFC supporters dismiss my reporting as baseless propaganda only to then have the actual reality in which we live vindicate said reporting.

Anyway, they'll most likely cure it within the 30-day window, and thus the inside-track permitting racket that gave Dr. Castro a reason to rent an apartment here in the first place will continue unabated.

All is not Wells

Speaking of delusional KFC supporters, Thomas “Burger Tom” Wells has once again slipped into my comments section to continue what I can only assume is some kind of ongoing humiliation ritual stemming from the soul-crushing electoral ass-kicking he received from Rich Lara last April.

While I’ve come to find arguing with Burger Tom to be about as worthwhile as arguing with that random drunkard at the bar who’s on his 12th scotch and soda and is thus convinced that the waitress is a “fed” trying to poison his bar peanuts, I’m not entirely above dunking on the man when he makes an utter fool of himself.

Enter this comment, which was buried in the Great Wall of Text that Burger Tom spasmed out in response to my last post:

The COE dismissed the complaint 4-1 because it was told that Cabrera’s permit was like a special permit for a wedding – not for operation of an exclusive repeated business on Coral Gables’ exclusive pedestrian shopping area. Like most of the lies that you spread to your echo chamber, THERE IS NO BAR COMPLAINT.

The first complaint he’s referring to is the frivolous ethics complaint he filed against Nicolas Cabrera, the one that was dismissed for being legally insufficient—a legally insufficient complaint authored by a cognitively insufficient attorney.

But the lie? The big fat lie that I, a big fat liar, spread through my echo chamber? It was my simple claim that he was getting hit with a bar complaint. A bar complaint so illusory, so non-existent (like Burger Tom’s credibility), that it elicited this close-out memo from the Florida Bar:

It’s also worth noting that Burger Tom posted "THERE IS NO COMPLAINT" on the very same day the Florida Bar dated its close-out memo, which would be a cute semantic trick, if closing a file erased the underlying event. It does not. The complaint existed, was processed, and will remain on record for the next year. Closing a case is not time travel.

But if you really want to talk about things that never happened, Tom, I’m more than happy to discuss your political career.

Whither Ariel?

Those who tuned into the February 10th commission meeting saw an increasingly familiar sight: an empty chair on the dais. Once again, Ariel failed to show up for the only paying job he has due to what he claims was some kind of illness. Granted, he did manage to appear via Zoom for the last substantive item of the day, but why he couldn’t Zoom in earlier isn’t exactly clear.

That’s at least the fourth meeting Ariel’s missed, or substantially missed, since being outed as the architect of those shady People Count USA tracking surveys. That’s 25% of the 16 meetings that have taken place since Ariel was officially crowned the “Phishing King.” To put that in perspective, it's the rough equivalent of missing one out of every four workdays at a normal job in a single year. No wonder he needed the extra salary.

And it’s not like Ariel’s making up for it by working from home—or anywhere for that matter. According to public records, between last May and January, Ariel sent a whopping 34 emails from his city account. Of those 34, only 11 were substantive, i.e. not the one-sentence “Not available,” “Can’t make it,” “Can we Zoom instead” replies that have become Ariel’s specialty.

To recap, the hardest working public servant of all time, one who works so hard he needed to double his own salary and jack up his car allowance, has produced fewer substantive emails in eight months than you or I produce in a single afternoon, and has missed nearly one in four commission meetings in less than a year. No wonder he can’t find a job. Or can he?

Cubatec, a.k.a. Prestige Worldwide

In case you hadn’t heard, Ariel and Kirk are making big moves once again. What exactly are Glengarry and Glen Ross up to now, you ask? They’re teaming up to “activate” a company called Cubatec. I placed “activate” in quotes just now because that’s the conspicuously odd verb Ariel used in one of his Easy-Bake-Oven press releases that only very dumb people think are real.

Why use such an odd verb? Probably because Cubatec is nothing more than one of Kirk’s random Sunbiz filings, one that’s existed for 26 years despite being devoid of any activity or discernible purpose. So Ariel can’t really say “launched” or “founded” or “opened.” He has to say “activate,” as if he and Kirk just formed Paw Patrol and were activating their Mighty Pup Powers, which, come to think of it, is basically the developmental level on which these two operate.

But look, I simply don’t have the strength to pry open this giant Campbell’s can of condensed cringe today. I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack the utter absurdity of the notion that Ariel, Kirk, and Kirk’s daughter—that “team of professionals with over 70 years of combined experience”—are even remotely qualified to “advise global partners preparing for Cuba’s democratic transition, strengthening civil society and responsible reconstruction.”

Besides, I'd have to sort through approximately 12 metric tons of memes and punchlines to do this topic justice, and I just don’t have the time. I will say, though, that nothing I could write would top the image of Ariel and Kirk as Dale and Brennan from Stepbrothers, with Cubatec serving as their Prestige Worldwide. On that note, here are Kirk and Ariel pitching their new venture to investors:

I will say one thing in closing, as it's too delicious to pass up. Now that Ariel is the CEO of yet another Sunbiz filing with a website, we have a fresh opportunity to look at the digital guts of an operation we know belongs to Ariel. So let's do a quick WHOIS check on the exquisitely designed cubatec.com to see if anything stands out:

Wait a second. Those nameservers look awfully familiar. Where have we seen them before?

That's right, the fake company behind the fake phishing polls that Ariel refuses to admit was his just so happened to land on the same Skystra nameservers as his brand new Cubatec website.

So what are the odds of that? I mean the actual mathematical odds. Let’s ask AI, which is now better at this stuff than 99.9% of all human experts.

[In my best Jean-Luc Picard voice] Computer, assuming People Count USA did not belong to Ariel, please calculate the odds of peoplecountusa.com landing on the same nameserver as the rest of Ariel’s companies, including, most recently, Cubatec:

Skystra is a small-to-mid-tier hosting provider. Based on publicly available data, Skystra hosts somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 30,000 active domains. The probability of any single unrelated domain randomly landing on Skystra’s nameservers is therefore roughly 1-in-500 to 1-in-1,000 against the total universe of registered domains (approximately 350 million). The odds of two unrelated domains sharing the same small registrar’s nameservers by pure coincidence is somewhere between 1-in-250,000 and 1-in-1,000,000. Three domains? We’re now in the range of 1-in-125,000,000 to 1-in-1,000,000,000.

In other words, the odds that peoplecountusa.com ended up on Skystra nameservers by coincidence — given that cubatec.com and marketseur.com are already there — are roughly equivalent to winning a major lottery. Twice.

Ariel’s like a criminal who keeps returning to the crime scene, each time leaving a bit more DNA. Whether this is the product of brazenness or stupidity remains unclear.

And on that note, the fridge is empty. Well, maybe not empty, but definitely less cluttered. I should be back in a week or two with a write-up on the University Drive dog park lawsuit—which I have a feeling is somewhat less organic than it appears.