Why the heck do so many weird news stories come out of Florida?!
Plus a Cameo by Kit!
And: BANG-ON 10 minutes. For once.
This video series is a classic Ask Me Anything, with 1-2 questions answered each week. It’s for ThisIsTrue.com readers who are curious about whatever. Questions are accepted (only) from Premium subscribers. My wife and I live on a Residential Cruising ship, and I record from my office there.
Questions in this Episode:
- 0:16 First, for Jim in Texas: about my shirts….
- 1:20 Fred in Ohio, Ralph in Colorado, & John in Rhode Island: What the hell, Florida?!
But no, Florida is nowhere near “85 percent of stories.”
(Gilligan’s Island publicity photo: CBS)
Since Youtube Comments are typically a vast, brain-free wasteland of obliviocy, I’m putting the videos on my site where there can be intelligent discussion. The comments are NOT a place to ask questions.
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Having moved to Tampa, Florida just over a year ago from New England, it is definitely a culture shock. I’ve driven in Boston and NYC, and the drivers here are crazier. Also, they have the stand your ground law here that we did not have back home. I wonder if that has an effect. You mentioned Florida being a retirement state, and I was also wondering if anyone else noticed that older people tend to live a little more dangerously than most.
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Well, getting up from a seated position can be dangerous for some folks! Growing old ain’t for amateurs! -rc
As a 54 year Florida resident who is married to a native, I want to weigh in on “Florida Man.” First off, Florida Man is a real thing. Even the local TV reporters refer to the Florida Man phenomena. You are dead-on correct that the open records laws are a big contributor to the issue. When an obliviot (great term by the way) does something stupid all of the salacious details are public for all to see. Many of the law enforcement agencies publicize these things themselves.
You are probably also correct that the wealth of media is a factor. I’m not sure retirees wanting a physical paper to hold is a factor, but I can say that between print, digital, and broadcast media reporters are tripping over each other in Florida.
You dismissed your reader who suggested the heat and humidity. He was on a fresh track but let the fox sidetrack him. The Florida climate is warm year round, allowing obliviots to practice stupidity year round. And more of a factor is that the climate attracts people of all ilks. Much like the wild west of the 1800’s, Florida attracts misfits and ne’er-do-wells looking for greener pastures. One thing that is never reported is where Florida Man is actually from. There are few natives in this area, so when something weird happens I typically figure the perp is from out of state. (My golf buddies are from Ohio/Michigan or New York/New Jersey. So when they complain about Florida drivers or poor service in Florida I tell them the offender was probably from Ohio.)
Keep up the weird news and (un)common sense.
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Good answer about poor drivers! 🙂 Yes, it’s pretty much impossible to tell if a Florida (Wo)Man in a news story is a native or not: they just say “of Sarasota” or whatever, which means they live there, whether they were born there or moved in yesterday. -rc
I think your answer is the best complete and most spot-on about Florida Man that I’ve read. Let me add one fine-tune: it’s a place of year-round summer weather, with surf, sand and tropical vibe, that attracts an abnormal abundance of *drug* users from everywhere else in every age group.
*from alcohol to fentanyl
As a reply to both “Julius, Fla.” and “Tony in Dallas” I would like to weigh in. A life long Florida resident (since 1962*) I have enjoyed the many, many “Florida Man” themes. Let me make this a clear point, however: It is NOT NEW. Social media “Florida Man” memes go back a few decades. A newspaper once (possibly in Orlando) ran an investigative article that tracks the basic idea back as the 1980’s.
But wait, there’s more! I read an article from the early 1800’s — I think it was in a magazine article in 1847 — in which I found the writer commenting on the abject stupidity of the local populace, whom he said were known as Crackers. Yes, that is the right century: 1847 (not 1947). So we Florida Men have been around quite awhile, haven’t we?
I also read a book by a sociologist (the title escapes me) but he devoted an entire chapter to this point. I liked his analogy: if you build a maze for white rats and have an angular dead end place sticking out at the lower right hand corner, and let a bunch of white rats loose into the maze, what will happen? Well, some number of them of course will wander down into that lower dead end angle. But over time, the smarter ones will figure a way out and return to the main part of the maze. Key point to keep in mind: statistically, the HUGE population immigration into Florida is diminished by the fact that half of them move back north again. That is, in the census of 2020 which revealed 2.7 million population increase in Florida since 2010, what that means is 4.05 million people moved TO Florida but 1.35 million moved BACK. That makes a lot of population churn. The book says “It’s a lot easier to own a piece of Florida than to belong to it.” Social upheaval. All the time!
(* okay, I wasn’t born here but I proudly proclaim the self-moniker Mountaineer-Cracker. When I was four years old and my folks moved to the Sunshine State I wasn’t consulted whether I wanted to come along.)
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I took a self-described “historian” to task for proclaiming that the Florida Man phenomenon started at Fark, a clearinghouse for weird news links, when it introduced a “Florida” tag in the mid-2000s. Not even close. After establishing I’ve been writing such stories since 1994, my conclusion was that even “I do not claim authorship of the ‘Florida Man meme’ — my take is, it’s been around for decades if not generations.” SO many figure they’re the first to notice a pattern …when someone else is pointing it out to them. -rc