It is time for true confessions. Florida has been hard hit by the recession. All the pictures and stories you have experienced in my Blog are fictional. The pictures you see are of the Potemkin Village of Ft. Lauderdale. I created them using Photoshop. For those of you who don't know what a Potemkin Village is let me enlighten you. It's like a movie set of a western town with its false fronted buildings.

When Catherine the Great was touring in Russia in 1787 the locals created false fronts to buildings and what she saw on the tour were thriving settlements. So, while "Potemkin village" has come to mean, especially in a political context, any hollow or false construct, physical or figurative, meant to hide an undesirable or potentially damaging situation. The village in question was Tula and when Catherine the Great passed through it on her way back from the trip, the local governor, indeed attempted a deception of that kind in order to hide the effects of a bad harvest. So the following photos are what Ft. Lauderdale is really like today. It has reverted back to the poor farming community it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Be sure to read the captions underneath the pictures to know where they were taken.