Island artist Patty Tacquard is also showing this month at the Michael Banzhaf Gallery, and these aren’t delicate little floral paintings. The show is called Body Art and Patty, who loves to paint people, decided to do a series of tattooed subjects after researching body adornment through the ages. These are strong images! “People always say you don’t paint girly paintings, and I suppose that’s true,” she tells us. Patty moved to St. John seven years ago, from Laguna Beach, California. Her sons Jim and John run Ocean Grill, and her husband Tim is a plumbing contractor.She says it took a lot of experimenting with technique to make the tattoos look real, not just like paintings on top of paintings. How are people reacting to her tattoo paintings? “Now people come up to me all the time and say Hey, wanna see my tattoo?” she says. “You’d be surprised how many people of all ages have them.”Patty also shows her work at the Mango Tango Gallery on St. Thomas, and does private showings at her studio in Johnson’s Bay too. Her Body Art show at Michael Banzhaf runs through the end of May.

This is one busy man. Up until very recently, he played in a band. He works full-time maintenance for the National Park Service, he runs Slimman’s Parking Lot, and now he’s got a brand new business about to take off. He’s also a native St. Johnian and a really nice guy. Meet Slimman below!

That’s right. As if working for the Park Service, running a parking lot, and playing in a band (which unfortunately he says he’s given up for now) isn’t enough, now Slimman is in the livery business.  A big, beautiful, white, 1995 Lincoln was just delivered and he’s ready to launch Slim O’s Limo. (Oliver is his middle name.) Here it is just after a wash and shine Saturday afternoon. 

How in the world does he plan to get this thing up and down hills and around hairpin turns?  We’ll ask him! Stay tuned. Video Alert: Meet Slimman tomorrow On-StJohn!

Posted on the usvi-on-line forum by forumite Xislandgirl:

“I really only need a towel to go to the beach. Other people need to pack the living room.”

But it is so fun watching them pack up the living room when it’s time to go. We watched a man spend 20 minutes setting up a shade tent at Trunk Bay once, only to have it tumble down the beach in the wind while he and his family were snorkeling.  There is something about watching a big tent bounce and roll across a beach in the wind that paralyzes the people watching from doing anything about it.  

Helpful advice in a welcome book spotted at a rental villa recently: Honk once means “attention.” Honk twice means “thank you.” We would ad this. If you hear an air horn frantically blowing again and again accompanied by the sound of a big truck engine gearing down as you approach a curve, it means “slow down and get as far left as you can.”

A bad flight is one thing. When it seems to be happening a lot, that’s a real problem. We’ve had bad luck 3 times in the last 3 months with US Airways flights. All of them delays in St. Thomas, in our case because the arriving flight from Philadelphia was late. And two of those three times, those delays were compounded by missing connections in Philadelphia. Just bad luck we figured. But then there was THIS! posted on the usvi-on-line forum. Gads. That is the worst St. Thomas Airport story I’ve ever heard. Like I said. A bad flight is one thing. Lots of them, that’s an ongoing problem. “The people of US Airways area dedicated to meeting our customers’ needs. We did not do that in the first quarter of 2007 and are taking the necessary steps to improve our performance,” said US Airways chief executive Doug Parker in a news release last week. You can read the apologies and promises here.