STICKS OF FIRE

For those of you calling into Mike to discuss Tampa, I wanted to give a little background on the home of the Rays. The following is not original research by me:

Tampa is a United States city in Hillsborough County, on the west coast of the state of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County. The population of Tampa in 2000 was 303,447. According to the 2007 estimates, the city has a population of 342,060.^[4] Tampa is a part of the metropolitan area most commonly referred to as the "Tampa Bay Area". For U.S. Census purposes, Tampa is part of the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida MSA. The four-county area is composed of roughly 3 million residents, making it the second largest metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the state, and the third largest in the Southeastern United States, behind Miami and Atlanta. The "Greater Tampa Bay" area has just over 4 million residents and generally includes the Tampa and Sarasota metro areas.
The word "Tampa" is believed to mean "sticks of fire" in the language of the Calusa, a Native American tribe that once lived south of today’s Tampa Bay. This might be a reference to the many lightning strikes that the area receives during the summer months. Other historians claim the name means "the place to gather sticks".

The stuff below is original research from me:

Girls there are hot.
The Hooters restaurants serve a mean mahi-mahi sandwich.
The white trash part of the city is called Pinellas Park.