Recapping The Highs & Lows Of This Summer’s Paris 2024 Olympics Coverage 

U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles took home 3 gold medals from Paris. 

Although the United States again dominated the overall medal count, the deep American squad ended tied with China for the most gold medals (40) won at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games held in Paris, France. 

But, for someone who has passionately watched every Olympiad since 1968, the obvious highs of this year’s games also were matched by some lows. 

In the swimming pool the first week, Katie Ledecky won her record-tying 8th gold when she broke her own world record in the 1,500m freestyle, but finished a disappointing 2nd in the 800m. Clearwater’s Bobby Finke defended his 2021 Olympic title in Tokyo with a new world record in the men’s 1,500m. The U.S. women’s 4x100m Medley Relay team also set a new world record in winning the gold. And, Caeleb Dressel won his eighth career Olympic gold with the men’s 4x100m free relay, but finished a disappointing sixth in the 50m free and failed to qualify for the 100m butterfly final, as hometown French hero Leon Marchand grabbed the headlines in men’s swimming with four golds and five medals overall, even the U.S. haul of eight golds and 28 total medals led the world. 

On the women’s side, American Torri Huske won gold in the women’s 400m fly, in the mixed 4x100m medley relay and the women’s 4x100m medley relay and led the U.S. squad by winning five medals overall at age 21. 

In gymnastics, the great Simone Biles took home the gold in the women’s vault and both the team and individual all-around competition, but lost the gold in the floor exercise to Rebeca Andrade of Brazil and didn’t make it to the podium in the balance beam or uneven parallel bars. Even so, her eleven Olympic medals are the most won by any U.S. gymnast in history. There were other great performances by the U.S. men (who won the bronze as a team in the all-around) and women in gymnastics, but no other golds. 

On the track, the U.S. men’s and women’s teams dominated both the total and gold medal count, with seven golds each and 34 total medals between them, but there were still some disappointments. Sprinter Noah Lyles came back to win the 100m in a photo finish but finished third in the 200m after reportedly contracting Covid between the two events. But, favored Sha’Carri Richardson took only silver in the women’s 100m when she was beaten by Julien Alfred of St. Lucia, the first-ever Olympic medal for that country. 

Meanwhile, Harvard grad Gabby Thomas dominated the women’s 200m and also won gold in the women’s 4x100m and 4x400m relay teams, while the men’s 4x400m relay team set a new Olympic record in winning gold. The favored U.S. men’s 4x100m relay team, which ran without Lyles, was disqualified due to a botched baton handoff. The still-dominant Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone broke her own world record in the women’s 400m hurdles to defend that title and also was part of the 4×400 relay squad that won gold. 

Other U.S. winners included Masai Russell in the women’s 100m hurdles, Rai Benjamin (who led off the winning 4×400 relay team) in the men’s 400m hurdles, Grant Holloway in the men’s 110m hurdles, Quincy Hall in the men’s 400m, Tara Davis-Woodhall in the women’s long jump, Valarie Allman (who defended her Olympic gold) in the women’s discus, the dominant Ryan Crouser, who became the first-ever three-time Olympic gold medal winner in the shot put (with teammate Joseph Kovacs taking the silver) and the incredible surprise, come-from behind win by Cole Hocker in the men’s 1,500m. Also notable was Kenneth Rooks, who came out of nowhere to fall just short of the gold in the men’s 3,000m steeplechase. 

Among the disappointments in athletics was the U.S. mixed 4x400m relay team, which set a new world record in qualifying, but finished 2nd to Norway in the final. Alexis Holmes anchored the gold-winning 4x400m women’s relay team but didn’t reach the podium in the individual 400m, finishing 6th. And, if high jumper Shelby McEwen had agreed to split the gold medal with New Zealand’s Hamish Kerr, instead of losing the jump-off between the two, the U.S. would have broken the tie for overall golds to go with our 126 total medals (to 90 for China). 

Meanwhile, China won all 8 diving golds (the U.S. had just one silver medal) and every table tennis gold to achieve the gold medal tie. 

But, while both the men’s and women’s basketball teams won gold (the women’s was a record-setting 8th straight Olympic win), both in thrilling finals over the host nation, and the women’s soccer team redeemed a disappointing performance in Tokyo to claim the gold 1-0 over Brazil, there were other U.S. athletes who fell short. 

None of our favored indoor and beach volleyball teams finished first, nor did our men’s or women’s water polo squads. We did earn one rowing gold — in the men’s fours — but earned zero boxing golds and only one bronze medal. 

What I didn’t understand was why we didn’t see any of the boxing matches (see below) or rowing finals live. The most controversial thing at these games was the boxing gold won by Imane Khelif of Algeria, who had previously been banned from competing because she had both men’s and women’s chromosomes, a rare condition — even though she had been born and lived her whole life as a female — but we never saw her fight. 

NBC-TV and its Peacock streaming service, in my opinion, did just an OK job overall, and fell short of showing all of the events of these Olympics, despite having multiple channels to show them. 

No Matter Which Party You Prefer, Please Vote In The August 20 Primary Election! 

No matter which party or candidate you support, there can be little doubt that U.S. Vice President’s Kamala Harris suddenly seeming to be the new Democratic candidate for president has made the Presidential Election on Tuesday, November 5, at least more interesting, as well as more controversial. 

To be honest, right now I’m much more interested in what happens with our local and state elections — both on Nov. 5 and on Tuesday, August 20 — also known as Primary Election Day. 

No, the ballots aren’t nearly as full as they will be for the General Election and there’s no State Constitutional or local Amendments on the Aug. 20 ballot (something else to be thankful for), but there are several important local and two national offices being contested on Primary Day. 

For example, incumbent U.S. Senator (and former Florida Governor) Rick Scott faces two Republican challengers — John S. Columbus and Keith Gross — in the primary, with the winner squaring off against the winner of the four-way Democratic primary between Stanley Campbell, Rod Joseph, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Brian Rush. 

Meanwhile, incumbent District 15 U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee, who has an office in Tampa Palms, is facing two Republican opponents on Aug. 20 — Jennifer Barbosa and James Judge. The winner of the Primary will face outgoing Hillsborough County Commissioner Pat Kemp, who is finishing the second of two four-year terms on the Commission, on Nov. 5. Kemp does not face a Primary opponent. 

Primary day will include races for two Pasco County Commission seats and one seat on the Pasco School Board (where Dist. 4 incumbent Alison Crumbley faces history teacher Jessica Wright). 

Dist. 1 and 2 commissioners Ron Oakley and Seth Weightman — the two districts that include Wesley Chapel — do not face primary challenges and Weightman isn’t on the ballot in November, either. Oakley will face Lisa Moretti, who lists Dade City as her address (as does Oakley), on Nov. 5. Moretti has no party affiliation. 

In District 5, which mainly includes Port Richey and Hudson, incumbent Jack Mariano faces Spring Hill resident Gina Finocchiaro on Aug. 20, and the winner will still face opposition in November from Hudson resident Thomas A. Celotto, who is running with no party affiliation. 

The most interesting local race on Aug. 20 is between former Commissioner Christina “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick, current Commissioner Lisa Yeager (who was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to fill the seat vacated after the passing of Comm. Gary Bradford in May of this year) and the county’s former community services director Gabriel “Gabe” Popadopoulos. The most curious thing about this race is that the winner will serve only a two-year term (as there is no Democratic or other candidate), since Bradford would not have faced a challenge for his now-vacant seat until 2026. 

Please also note that all Pasco residents are able to cast ballots in all County Commission and School Board races, regardless of which of the five districts the candidates represent. 

Here Are The Races On The Aug. 20 Ballot 
Republican Primary 

U.S. Senator 

John S. Columbus 

Keith Gross 

Rick Scott (Incumbent, or “I”) 

Representative in Congress – District 15 

Jennifer Barbosa 

James Judge 

Laurel Lee (I) 

Superintendent of Schools 

John Legg 

Michelle Mandarin 

County Commissioner – District 4 

Christina “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick 

Gabriel “Gabe” Popadopoulos 

Lisa Yeager (*) 

* – Appointed to finish term of the 

late incumbent Gary Bradford 

County Commissioner – District 5 

Gina Finocchiaro 

Jack Mariano (I) 

State Committeeman 

Shawn Foster (I) 

Stephan Hassler 

David Wallis 

State Committeewoman 

Julia Aguayo de Hassler 

Stephanie Pontlitz 

Rebecca Yuengling 

Democratic Primary 

U.S. Senator 

Stanley Campbell 

Rod Joseph 

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell 

Brian Rush 

Universal Primary 

Circuit Judge – 6th Circuit, Group 9 

Nicole Pearlman 

Kate Spurlock 

Circuit Judge – 6th Circuit, Group 14 

Cornelius Christopher Demps 

Jenn Dubbeld 

Nick Fiorentino 

School Board Member – District 4 

Alison Crumbley (I) 

Jessica Wright

The Nagers Are Thankful For The Local Businesses That Helped Us Move Into Silversaw 

Neighborhood News deadlines are almost never easy for yours truly, but the deadline week to get our July 9 Wesley Chapel issue to the printer was surely more challenging than pretty much any since I suffered a detached retina in my left eye in September of 2023. 

Jannah and I signed a lease to move into the beautiful new Silversaw Luxury Apartments (next to the Hyatt Place Hotel on the north side of S.R. 56 at I-75) a couple of months ago and we both did the best we could to try to get as much done every off-deadline week since signing that lease to make the packing and moving as painless as humanly possible. 

What’s poet Robert Burns’ old saying about the “best laid plans of mice and men?” 

In other words, despite all of our efforts 6-8 weeks before the move — although we moved into our incredibly spacious and comfortable new apartment on the usually quiet Monday of the deadline week for this issue — I guess we should have given ourselves at least one additional day to get moved in. It’s now clear to me that unpacking — and finding a place for everything in a new place — is infinitely harder than throwing out as much old “stuff” as possible and putting the rest in boxes and suitcases in anticipation of a move. It’s as though our entire previous apartment — located less than a mile from our new one — was one giant junk drawer and both Jannah and I were (and still are) determined to not let the same thing happen to our new digs. 

The truth of the matter is that other than brief interludes during my breaks between working on both ads and stories for this issue, Jannah did most of the actual unpacking, while I covered for her as much as possible to get all of our ads done. But, getting the multiple stories I had to write to fill the space in that issue to my satisfaction was an even tougher task for me. 

In fact, as I wrote this editorial on Sunday evening, with the paper due at the printer early on Monday, I still had three more stories to write, so I actually missed my deadline by a few hours, but the issue did still arrive in mailbox by (or before) its cover date of July 9. But, it sure wasn’t easy. 

Thanking Those Who Made It Easier 

The good news is that a number of local companies, only one of which is one of our advertisers, helped immensely with even making it possible for me to get the July 9 issue done on time. 

The first is Bull Moving, located on N. Florida Ave. a little north of Fowler Ave. These guys are pros. From just one phone call with Jannah, they determined what size truck we needed and how many guys (three) it would take to get our short-distance move completed on Monday. 

The crew showed up on time, worked pretty much non-stop to get everything neatly loaded onto the truck and bring it all in one trip into our new second-floor apartment. And, even though the job took longer than what was estimated, it most definitely wasn’t the fault of these three very courteous young men, who never stopped giving their all, making sure they carefully dropped off each piece of furniture and every box where we directed them to do so. 

Of course, not moving very far helped keep our cost down, but I don’t really believe any company could have done a better job for less money or in less time. For more info, call Jeremy at Bull Moving at (813) 943-6043 or visit BullMoving.com. 

Of course, whenever you leave an apartment, you have to leave it “broom clean” and our friends Erica and Reggie of Final Touch Quality Cleaners, who also have provided our regular clean-ups every two weeks, specialize in “move-out” cleans. Erica handled our job herself in just a few short hours, wiping down every surface (especially those we hadn’t seen behind furniture that hadn’t really been moved in five years), packed up and threw out all of the garbage we left behind, swept and mopped every floor and vacuumed every inch of carpeting in our two bedrooms, fully cleaned our two bathrooms, our refrigerator and freezer, our oven (which we rarely used) and even our laundry room. If you’ve been looking for a new residential or commercial cleaning service, you won’t find better than Erica and Reggie of Final Touch. 

For more info, call Final Touch Cleaning at (813) 530-5591. 

And finally, although our air conditioning works great in our new place, Jannah and I have always had ceiling fans in our bedrooms and living room and we realized that there were none in our new place, which has a third bedroom that we are now using as our first dedicated home office space. 

We bought four nice-looking ceiling fans from a local home improvement warehouse and rather than pay that company to install the fans, we hired our friend (and licensed electrician) Jorge Gonzalez of GQ Electric. The day we brought the fans home, Jorge (left in photo) and his assistant showed up to professionally install all four fans in about two hours, cleaned up after themselves and did it for less than what the home improvement store would have charged — and Jorge is just the nicest guy and super-trustworthy. For more info, call (352) 467-2412 or visit gqelectricneartampa.com. 

And, for more info about Silversaw Luxury Apartments, visit SilversawApts.com.

Why Are So Many Restaurants In Our Area Shutting Down? 

When popular chains like Red Lobster tart closing, there is definitely cause for some concern. 

When I lived in New York City in the 1980s, I was told by someone I looked up to in the advertising industry that unlike the real estate business — where the three most important words are “Location, Location, Location” — the rule of thumb for doing business with restaurants was “Get your money up front, Get your money up front, Get your money up front.” 

It didn’t take me long to figure out why that was true — at least in Manhattan, where some of my favorite restaurants would get one bad review in any of the major New York media and be out of business in a week. And, this was decades before the advent of online reviews, when anyone with a beef against a restaurant owner could anonymously go online and turn a restaurant’s (especially a new one’s) Google or Yelp rating (or both) to garbage in a heartbeat. 

But, in New York, almost every restaurant on every street was an individually owned mom-&- pop, which has always been more of a gamble than opening another link in a well-funded, regional or national, mass-marketed chain. 

However, as evidenced by the recent rash of restaurant closings in our area, it’s no longer just mom-&-pop, non-chain restaurants that are being affected by everything from rising food costs and salaries, plus ever-increasing rents/interest rates, as well as the cost of things like building materials to even open a new place. 

Case in point: When you see beloved (perhaps not by me, but still by many), well-established chains like Red Lobster (photo), Tijuana Flats and Beef O’Brady’s shuttering multiple locations, that is definitely a cause for concern. 

In Wesley Chapel, it seems like 80% of the eateries are chains — whether national or regional — and almost every new place that is popping up (like Rodizio Grill) is at least a small chain. The only exception seems to be Asian restaurants — from Japanese to Indian — which are more often single-location or just 2-3 total family-owned units. 

In other words, for every solo Via Italia or Falabella Family Bistro hanging in there you have a 201st location of Fazoli’s (see pg. 49) opening. For every one-off Chick’n Fun that attracts an audience, you’re surrounded by one of nearly 200 Slim Chickens and one of 20+ Chicken Guy! (which is coming soon to the north side of S.R. 56) locations. 

Of course, the cost to buy a piece of land and build a new restaurant in Wesley Chapel is becoming prohibitive for anyone other than a chain, but even shuttered fast food places like Wendy’s on S.R. 56 are simply being replaced by another chain — such as Shake Shack, which has nearly 400 locations. 

If you visit local online communities, you’ll always see people bemoaning all of the chain restaurants we have and all of the mom-&-pops we don’t have in our area and yet, every year, hundreds of our readers vote mainly for chains and don’t seem to even know about many of the really good mom-&-pop places available to them. Here are some reasons why: 

Marketing — Even chains with food that I personally refuse to eat — like Taco Bell and Subway — spend millions of dollars every year on ads that magically make their food look absolutely edible. But, while many new local restaurants intend to spend money to promote themselves, the first thing most cut back on when their build-out inevitably takes longer than they ever expected is that advertising money. 

Labor — It seemed like the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated a dangerous new attitude towards work among young people — the very labor source most restaurants have to look at to fill their employee rosters. And, while the height of the pandemic has been in the rear view for at least three years now — and many fewer people are being paid more to not work than if they have a job — that attitude still seems to be pervasive. 

And, since the trend towards higher pandemic-era tipping for waiters and bartenders seemed to settle down somewhat, many restaurants have added service charges (that, unfortunately, aren’t always fairly shared with the employees), charges for using a credit card to pay and other extras that have created higher costs to dine (or take) out and turned off many regular customers. 

Food Quality — I still feel that this is the biggest issue of all. Jannah and I believe that an expensive meal is always still worth it if the portions and prices are fair, the service is good and the quality of the food is high. However, overpaying for lower-quality food and/or bad service is never OK with us and I honestly think that many chains — and some mom-&-pops — have cut back on quality while charging more for the same meals, often with smaller portions for a higher price. 

I see a lot of people warning that many more restaurant closings are still coming, but I, for one, hope that won’t prove to be true. 

Taking The ‘Story Plaques’ Fight To Another Level 

Whether or not you’re currently a business owner, imagine, if you can, working hard to create a product that provides a unique service to your customers. 

Next, imagine that someone who spent literally zero of those man/woman-hours to create that product comes along and — without your permission — represents themselves as “working with” your company in order to be able to get your customer to spend money with them as they blatantly copy that work. They even go so far as to put your company’s logo on the product — again, without so much as asking the ownership of your company “Is it OK if we do this?” 

That’s the predicament local publications like ours face every single day from companies like “In The News” (which no longer exists) and “That’s Great News” (which bought out “In The News”). This company tells our customers to lie to us and say that they need “a clean electronic copy” of a story about their business that appeared in our pages, supposedly “for our social media.” 

Then, you walk into their place of business a few weeks later and see that story on a plaque for which we received no compensation and the only credit we received is that our logo appears at the top of the plaque. 

I have been dealing with this B.S. for probably close to a decade, as electronic versions of our stories began being posted on our website. 

These “News” companies would simply grab screenshots of every Business Feature story off our website and send a proof of that story on a not-yet-created plaque to our advertisers (see left photo above), telling them they were “working with the Neighborhood News” and get a large number of those businesses to purchase their plaques for anywhere from $200-$400 — depending upon the size of the plaque(s) and the length of each story. I saw no fewer than six of these stories in our advertisers’ places of businesses in one month — and it did not make me happy. 

And, the kicker was that literally every time I would ask them who made the plaque for them, the business owner would tell me, “I thought you did,” which made me even less happy. 

Then, about three years ago, I realized that if I offered my advertisers plaques of their stories that we actually did create for them that they would probably prefer our plaques to the ones created by these outside companies. 

The problem was that I didn’t have someone on my staff who could get in contact with our advertisers to tell them about our plaques — and warn them that “That’s Great News” is most definitely NOT “working with us,” but that they are, in fact, using our work to make money for their company. But now, I have my wife Jannah following up with each business on our behalf. 

Consider this: Either I or one of my writers spends up to an hour or more researching each of these stories, up to another hour interviewing these business owners, and then multiple additional hours writing each story. I then take an hour or more of my time to edit each one, and then edit each story again once it has been laid into the paper. In most cases, I also pay our photographer Charmaine George to take the pictures that accompany each story, and then pay to print and distribute each copy of each edition of the paper. Why should anyone else make even one dollar off of all of those efforts? 

Those companies will tell you that they’re “allowed” to do what they do because of “second use” laws that permit it but, from what I — and an attorney customer of mine — have seen, they still need our permission to do so. 

That’s why I created the ad below to say we do not give anyone permission to use our work and that this is fair warning that the next step in this battle could be a legal one. To be continued…