Brilliant deductions
Tim Bowers is a 39-year-old Grand Strand father who works multiple jobs to provide income for his family. Bowers has worked seasonally at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville several nights a week, works for his father-in-law's pool maintenance company in the mornings, and has his own photography business, Tim Bowers Photography, in the afternoons.
The Powers That Be
“Come on, get back to it. I can’t go to goddamn Myrtle Beach with the most disgusting jet-ski man has ever seen.”
Bandit on the run
I’m of a generation, maybe the last, which played cops and robbers outside. No X-Box, no PlayStation, no Internet – they didn’t exist. We ducked in and out of the alleys and backyards of our neighborhood with toy guns blazing, pitting good guys against bad guys with no qualms about who was who. In fact it was always a...
Stages of development
The Grand Strand is rife with professional entertainers. While those with musical talent have decent employment options, those with professional acting skills (and resumes to match) may have found it more difficult to ply their trade along the Grand Strand. That was until four years ago when...
Stages of developmentSOPA on the ropes?
Did you head to Wikipedia on Jan. 18 to settle a heated debate only to find a blackout screen? By now, you’ve probably heard about SOPA and PIPA, but what does it all mean, and why did some of the Web’s most popular...
A waste of convenience
One of the perks of living along the Grand Strand is having the ocean as our backyard. Even in the dead of winter, nothing beats a beach walk to calm the mind and stir the senses. Ocean breezes, crashing waves, seagulls roaming the shoreline and pelicans diving into the surf...
A waste of convenienceShut up and sing?
If our nation’s politics and the artists and their songs that surround it make strange bedfellows, then there’s a lot of strange been going around.
Shut up and sing?The Top Surge Cover Stories of 2011
By many metrics, indicators and gut feelings, 2011 downright sucked.
The Top Surge Cover Stories of 2011Help is on the way...
New Year’s Eve (it’s Saturday night, if you’re calendar-challenged) is quickly upon us and besides turning the page on yet another 12 months, it also means...Amateur Night.
Recliner Rewind:The year’s best and worst home video releases - with an eye toward stocking stuffing
Down here in the comfort of the recliner, we review more than 200 movies per year. Loads and loads of discs are thrown into our player, notes are taken, research is done – all to bring you the straight dope, to inform your decision on selecting the right movie for your at-home leisure time. With bushel baskets full of movies covered, it’s time to reflect, retrace our annual history of Recliner Reviews published in these pages in 2011 – just in time for last-minute gift ideas for the holidays.
The 12 Daze of Gen-Xmas
Historian pinheads can wax scientific on generational theory all day long, but when you melt it down into a soupy mess, it goes like this…anyone born between 1960 and 1980 are part of what is called a Nomad Generation, otherwise known as Generation X.
The Top 10
The people have spoken - or clicked their mouse - and the results are in.
2011 Hot Pour Finalist GallerySurge’s spectacular guide to holiday TV specials
From Christmas variety specials to annual traditions such as “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” we’ve got you covered with this comprehensive schedule of holiday TV programming for the Myrtle Beach area.
High lonesome homecoming
Nashville, Tenn. may be the home of country music, and Kentucky may be the birthplace of bluegrass music, but the Grand Strand has been quietly making its contribution to both forms of these American music cousins for generations.
SWAN SONG?
There’s no way to say making the new Chimaira CD, “The Age of Hell,” was business as usual. That’s not possible considering that three of the six members of the metal band...
It’s brew to you
On a recent Thursday evening, I met two guys at Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant at The Market Common in Myrtle Beach. They walked into Gordon Biersch with a six-pack of...
Welcome to the occupation
It’s becoming a pattern in the social wallpaper, white noise on a TV screen – a mass of people roaming the streets of New York City, carrying signs, sleeping outside, occupying Wall Street. And it has started to spread across the country...
Necessary Adjustments
Patrons enjoying $2 draft beers and mild October temperatures also enjoyed a free outdoor concert by local act The Necessary Band on a recent early Thursday evening at Broadway at the Beach’s Celebrity Square. “We haven’t done a ton of these main stage shows,” said 32-year-old Mark Necessary, the band’s bassist/vocalist, and namesake bandleader, “but it’s great to get out and play to new faces.”
A Wine Awakening?
The wheels of our Vino Vano slice down a rocky, dirt road. Barreling toward one of the five nearby wine-producers, the residue of the last wine tasting lingers on our lips.
A Wine Awakening?HPV OUTBREAK
For area colleges, the school year is in full swing, meaning football games, frat parties and frantic cramming for endless tests. As the student body gets busy - in more ways than one...
Phamily Affair
Break out the Birkenstocks and fire up the patchouli. The weekend’s musical forecast calls for a 100 percent chance of jam on the Grand Strand.
GETTING INKED
In 1993, a young man sat across from a young tattoo artist in a kitchen in Garden City Beach. They discuss a tattoo the young man wants on his upper right bicep and just like that, the tattoo artist gets up, walks out to his garage and returns with his tools – his makeshift iron, a.k.a. a homemade tattoo gun, and ink he had to drive to North Carolina to buy. Then right there on the kitchen linoleum, under an unreliable fluorescent, the young tattoo artist etches the ink into the skin of the young man.
IVORY COAST
September is seen by some as a melancholy month - especially for students and teachers throwing themselves back into the school year. Many remember seeing the Jerry Lewis Telethon [now the MDA Labor Day Telethon] as a harbinger of the work to to come and the demarcation point between good times and the grindstone. And the horror of the 9-11 attacks have forever cast a pall on this already gloomy month.
Art and life intersect for Surge photo contest winner
Austin Pinckney is a 22-year-old who glides easily between two worlds in life and art. As a teenager, he started shooting pictures first with a digital camera, then moved to film and back to digital. Not many shooters of his generation growing up in today’s digital age can say they’ve mastered both formats.
9-11 Remembered: Where were you when the world stopped turning?
Most Baby Boomers can tell you where they were when President Kennedy was shot, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated or when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. These were defining moments for their generation and the world at large.
Putting the Awe in Awendaw
- "What's up, little bud?" Charleston guitarist David Dunning paused in between songs on a recent Wednesday night to look down from a stage at the edge of a sun-dappled coastal forest clearing, at a red-headed boy in a blue soccer shirt who wasn't more than four.
Kid Delicious: The last great American pool hustler?
When cleaning a pool table, you have to go with the grain - follow the weave of the felt so it doesn't disturb the natural pattern in the swath. Lightly brush across the surface, do not put too much pressure or you'll rip the felt.
You're in for a Planking
Have you ever played the game, "Light as a Feather, Thick as a Board?" It's more of a process than a game but it's really easy. You lay flat on the floor, surrounded by people as they put two fingers under you.
Hate Debate: Does S.C. need bias-motivated crime laws?
The late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) once said "Hate crimes violate everything our country stands for. They send the poisonous message that some Americans deserve to be victimized solely because of who they are.
SURGE SUPERLATIVES: A cut above the rest
Were you named Most Likely to Succeed in high school?
Or maybe your snappy duds landed you on the Best Dressed list.
Or perhaps your incessant jabbering garnered the title of Most Talkative.
Was this achievement, voted on by your peers, galvanized forever in the pages of your high school yearbook, recently to come back and haunt you on Facebook?
Gotta Have It Travel Kit
Although the Grand Strand is a top destination for visitors, for those of us that live here throughout the year, traveling to other vacation spots is an ever-increasing priority. With the summer season slowing down and classes about to start, the month of August becomes a prime time for a last hurrah of summer to travel and get away from it all.
Gotta Have It | GalleryAnother Crash Landing?
In the early-to-mid 1990s local hard rock act Sqwearl was known for starting its shows at 2 a.m. and finishing around 4 or 5 a.m., keeping long-since closed venues with names such as The Headroom, Mr. Yucks, and Club Zero, packed with adoring fans.
Seaside Smackdown:
"You suck," a little girl wearing a sundress leaning over a chain-link fence, screams at a muscular, bald man. She doesn't know the man, at least who he really is. He's a heel - one of the villainous...
Wrasslin' in Myrtle BeachGame On: Fantasy fans can't wait to dance with beloved author's "Dragons"
As a bartender at Garden City Beach's Murphy's Law South, Deborah Tyner sometimes has to exercise patience. While she's in the business of waiting, nothing has quite tested her resolve like the anticipation for one of her guilty pleasures.
Tour De Force or Farce?
OK, so it's Independence Day weekend, which means patriotic pride, fireworks and backyard cookouts, but for the Grand Strand it also means something else.
Crowded Field
We are 16 months from the 2012 presidential election. Most people are not paying much attention now, but there is a field of 27 actual, soon-to-be, and potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
GOP Hopefuls | GalleryGridiron Gridlock
The musical question asked by Hank Williams Jr. on Monday nights may take on new meaning this fall. "Are you ready for some football?"
Summer Concert Preview
The heat and clogged highways along the Grand Strand mean that summer is here, even if it hasn't quite officially arrived according to the calendar.
Born Again:
Memoirs and biographies of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances are big business. So big, in fact, that these compelling stories regularly represent the largest portion of the nonfiction book market, according to most...
Coming Full Circle
Many folks fondly remember Skee-Ball from childhood forays to Chuck E. Cheese, neighborhood arcades, trips to the beach or county fairs - the inclined ramp, the sound of the wooden balls rolling down and clicking together after dropping in a token...
Financing Creativity
Re-enactments of Civil War battles might be capturing headlines this year, but some of the biggest battles in South Carolina are being waged more quietly, in local theaters, orchestra halls, art galleries and at arts councils.
Nurse This!
When Scott Dudley, 33, was a baby his dad had a debilitating accident creating an out-of-the-ordinary father-son dynamic for a child.
Free at last (and while they last)
When Joe Field was a columnist for Comics and Games Retailer magazine, he suggested a groundbreaking event for the comic book industry, using ice cream as a model. “I proposed the idea of a ‘free comic night’ based on the successful...
Cold Cases: Missing on the Grand Strand
This week marks the two-year anniversary of 17-year-old vacationer Brittanee Drexel's disappearance from Myrtle Beach.
Cold Cases: Missing on the Grand Strand | GallerySoak up the sun
Paul Kuperman might have been worried that tapping into eco-friendly energy sources at his home in the Green Lakes section of northern Myrtle Beach would get the neighbors squawking about aesthetics, but he says his solar panels have blended right in.
Back from the Dead
The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us. If you're tuned into pop culture of any kind, every day seems like the "Day of the Dead." Zombies have moved from the stuff of horror flicks and comic books to nearly every element of today's culture, populating popular TV series such as...
Satellites Still Beaming After 15 Years
Fifteen years ago an iconic record label, Island Records, which boasted a roster including Bob Marley and U2, released with minimal fanfare a 10-song project by a relatively unknown Britpop/rock-influenced band from Myrtle Beach named The Drag.
The Hope Diamond
As March melts into April, spring rituals are everywhere in the air - sort of like pollen. Birds sing, bees buzz and every blooming thing paints the town a pretty shade of yellow.
Lets Go To The Hops
For beer lovers and partygoers, the S.C. Legislature is batting .500. That would be impressive if it was playing baseball or checking its approval rating. Not so much when it comes to messing with our cold beer and good cheer.
Arrowheads point to locals' joints
Bar hopping - or pub crawling as we're calling the activity in a year-long series of cover stories here at Weekly Surge - can take imbibers to unexpected places.
In 3D: Money grab or more than a fad?
In Hollywood, 3-D is not a new concept. Many remember the old school paper frames with a red lens for one eye and a blue one for the other. The trend came and went through the years, offering to engage movie patrons with fare designed to jump out at you...
Human Trafficking
On the other side of the world, in a rundown hotel in downtown Thailand, a 14-year-old girl is held captive. Unbathed, bruised and broken, the girl stares vacantly from two blackened eyes. She is chained to a filthy mattress in a darkened back room.
