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Saturday, February 24, 2007
Florida's Undeground Weirdness Magnet
There's a piece in the St. Petersburg Times this morning that puts into words what I've been thinking for over a year now: Florida is weird. Consider, for example, the recent headlines of Lisa Nowak, the NASA astronaut who drove from Texas to Orlando to confront a lover's lover, the Anna Nicole Smith drama down in Ft. Lauderdale, and a middle school principal right here in Tampa who bought crack from an undercover cop right in his office. Remember Debra Lafave, the would-be attractive Tampa teacher except for the fact that she molested one of her students? That happened before I moved to Tampa but apparently she is a waitress somewhere in the area. Politically, there was Mark Foley from Palm Beach who had creepy chats with young congressional pages. Palm Beach County can also be blamed for the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Some stories are just plain shameful and embarrassing, like when the entire country converged on Pinellas Park (just across the bay from me) and refused to let Terry Schiavo die in peace.
The media carries a lot of the blame. They latched on to the fact that Lisa Nowak was wearing a diaper when she drove from Texas to Florida. Um, fine, but what about all the murdering tools in her car? That seems of more consequence to the story than a diaper. Similarly, the media seemed to be seduced by Lavave's good looks. How could such a pretty woman have sex with such a young boy? Oh, by the way, that's illegal and stuff but she's so pretty!" And nothing needs to be said about the circus in Ft. Lauderdale.
My point is that strange things happen in every state of our union. Florida does seem to get its unfair share of weirdos and oddball stories, but the media who controls the flow of information from this state does nothing to help Florida's image. One could argue that Florida is a strange place by virtue of its large population. I think it's more than that. Carl Hiaasen, an author and columnist for the Miami Herald pretty much hits the nail right on its weird, strange, whacked-out head:
"This is a place where people come, and they're either running away from something or running after something," Hiaasen once said. "It's not where a stable, honest person comes. ... Anybody who lives here is just teetering on the brink of lunacy. And once you get used to the fact that you live in such an exuberant cesspool, then the art can begin."
I like to think that I'm a stable, honest person but after almost two years of living in Florida, I'm starting to second guess myself. Dave Barry, in a brilliant column in Friday's Miami Herald, believes that there is a giant Underground Weirdness Magnet:
"It's buried here somewhere," he wrote in his weekly column that ran Friday. "It has to be. How else can you explain why so many major freak-show news stories either happen, or end up, in South Florida?"
Posted by Will at February 24, 2007 11:29 AM in Florida