Cay Clubs and Other Parasites

As if they didn't have enough problems not paying their current bills, or even beginning projects they have invested millions of dollars in, Cay Clubs plan for world domination shows very little sign of slowing down. Naturally no one in town will do anything until the time for noise making is way past, and then we will see the wailing and gnashing of teeth typical of our noisy but completely useless local 'activists'. Pitiful, really.

Cay Clubs will soon own Southernmost Restaurants, a Cay Clubs spokesman said. The restaurant group owner says otherwise in the latest chapter of a summer-long debate.

“Cay Clubs exercised their option to extend the closing date,” says Chris Brown, a marketing and advertising manager for Cay Clubs, via e-mail. “The new date of closing of the purchase of the A&B [Lobster House] property is scheduled for Sept. 24, 2007.”

Frank Rego, vice president of operations at Cay Clubs, said the acquisition and all other business operations were running smoothly, even though the company was going through a “slow period.”

“We're not going out of business,” he said. “We're not in trouble.”

Gene Smith owns the leases of Turtle Kraals and Half Shell Raw Bar, both of which are city-owned. He owns A&B Lobster House and marina complex outright, which includes Alonzo's Oyster Bar, White Tarpon and Berlin's Cocktails & Cigars. Smith said his lawyers stopped hearing from Cay Clubs' lawyers.

“I assume that things didn't work out for them,” he said.

Smith enjoys managing the properties, but said he will sell if presented with a good deal. Any such deal, though, has stalled, he said. Whoever takes over the leases for Turtle Kraals and Half Shell must maintain them as restaurants and cannot transform the property at all without approval from the Key West Bight Board.

The A&B area, including a marina, is more open to development, but Smith said he hopes any owner would give credence to locals' wishes related to any changes.

“If we had more people following the wishes of the city, we'd be a little better off,” he said.

“We're not here to do anything negative,” Rego said.

Good news for heroin addicts everywhere, the war on drugs is going along fairly similar lines as the war on terror, and to show what a simply fabulous job Prezzy Bush is doing in Afghanistan, the AP reports that the country is on track for a record setting opium harvest. Junkies across the globe tried to mobilize a party of sorts but it kind of fizzled pretty quick.

Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world’s near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.

As President Bush prepares for weekend talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, divisions within the U.S. administration and among NATO allies have delayed release of a $475 million counternarcotics program for Afghanistan, where intelligence officials see growing links between drugs and the Taliban, the officials said.

U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan’s poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics told The Associated Press.

Excellent job.