• In golf, shooting your age is a difficult achievement – even for a former quarterback. But Thursday, former University of Florida quarterback and coach Doug Dickey, 76, did just that, shooting a 76 at San Jose Country Club. No word if he did the Gator Chomp in celebration.
• Thursday marked the first day of group ticket sales for the Jaguars. The team designates 4,500 seats a game for groups, said Jaguars Senior Vice President of Business Development Tim Connolly, with group seating consisting of 10 or more seats together. Connolly said he is expecting many to be purchased by the local business community and the pace is already above the sales of 2006.
• Football fans aren’t the only ones with an eye on the upcoming season. City officials, in an effort to halt free metered parking and clear lanes on football Sundays, have attached “No Parking Football Gamedays” signs on all Bay Street parking meters from the stadium to Ocean Street.
• If you are headed to The Players Championship this week, tune in to AM-1700 for traffic updates.
• A couple of corrections to Friday’s article about Glenn Cohen and his client Phil Mickelson. Cohen is not a Vietnam veteran, although he did serve in the Air Force during the war. Also, Cohen did not win the Gator Bowl Pro-Am golf tournament four times in a row, although he did finish near the top several times.
• Just to put you ahead of Wednesday’s headlines, they’ll have a truancy sweep today and they’re not only after the kids who skip school — parents will get the hook, too.
• Bolles School President John Trainer is back in action after a lengthy bout with throat cancer. “All the cancer is gone,” he said Monday, “and 40 pounds to go with it.”
• Lot of baseball talk around Independent Square. Robbie Scantling, a stylist in A Cut Above, is the mom of the area’s best high school player, Hunter Scantling of Episcopal.
• Can you envision 15 million cigars? That’s how many are made each day at the Swisher plant on the Northside. And yes, it’s probably the only business in town that allows smoking in the building.
• The Northside Rotary Club meets at the zoo and they get to meet one of the animals on the first meeting of each month. Last week, a zookeeper brought out a ferocious-looking lizard called a Blue-Tongued Skink and one Rotarian asked, “What kind of law does he practice?”
“There is one difference between a tax collector and a taxidermist—the taxidermist leaves the hide.”
– Mortimer Caplin, former commissioner, Internal Revenue Service