SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

Congratulations. You have made an extremely intelligent choice. In a world filled with cable TV, cell phones, text messaging, Web surfing, watching The O.C., downloading tunes to your new iPod Rokr phone and trading IM's, you have taken time to pick up City Link's 11th annual Best Of. I sincerely believe that it's our best one yet, so you should really dig digging into it.

First, the new: As you have undoubtedly noticed, we are featuring Toni Kristine Romano on this year's cover. Romano won our first-ever City Link Best Of Cover-Model Search, held July 22 at Revolution in Fort Lauderdale. Props to Revolution, our multiple sponsors and the more than 40 beautiful and friendly contestants who came out and partied with us. And extra props to former cover model Diana Chiafair, who appeared on the cover of the 2003 and 2004 Best Ofs.

Recognizing the rise of multifaceted entertainment destinations throughout South Florida, we've added a great new feature this year that we are calling, for want of a better term, "Destinations." Each details the best that downtown Hollywood, the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, downtown Delray Beach or CityPlace has to offer.

Next, the repeats: As always, this is a group effort, and reaching a consensus was often extremely difficult. Many of the winners were chosen via tiebreakers such as sumo wrestling, knife fighting, staring contests, shuffleboard face-offs, chugging challenges, dance-offs, and good, old-fashioned heated disagreements that often came to blows. We are trained professionals, so please do not try this at home.

Special thanks are in order to Jeff Rusnak, who once again oversaw and coordinated the writing of the issue, along with our editorial staff and freelancer Terra Sullivan. Art director W Kelley Lucas did a magnificent job creating the layout and typography to showcase this issue's content. Designer Alyson Gold has been a pillar of cool confidence, deftly managing the editorial and advertising layouts while designing and producing regular weekly issues at the same time. Copy editor Jana Bielecki read every word in every feature multiple times. World-renowned photographer Peter Langon� again contributed his expertise and shot the cover. And we went all the way to New York to find artist Autumn Whitehurst, who produced the illustrations opening each of this issue's five Best Of categories.

We've focused our attention on roughly 300 items that we feel reflect the greatest, most unusual, most entertaining and just plain coolest people, places and things in South Florida. Even though we cut back on a number of our regular features, we still made room for our Best Bets; Barbara Lester's movie reviews; our famous Bar and Club Directory and Happy Hour Guide; our Street Squad page; and of course, the Daily Listings, the most complete and comprehensive information on what's happening in South Florida. Pick us up next week and get back into UpFront; T.M. Shine's day-in-the-life column Timeline; The Hit List; Damon Brown's video game reviews; and as always, a megadose of music, fashion, clubbing, pop culture and everything that makes City Link the most useful and compelling publication for youth culture in South Florida.

I hope you enjoy this issue, because we sure enjoyed creating it. Thanks for reading City Link.

Michael Farver

Publisher