Florida: The Punchline State
By Dave Barry (A Floridian himself so can be forgiven, but, really a hilarious piece).
It’s not easy being a Floridian. We’re dealing with scary mosquitoes and major storms with unpronounceable names such as “Hermine.”
And then there’s the fact that the rest of the country thinks we’re nuts. Every few months, I get a call from some media person wanting to interview me about Florida, where I have lived for three decades. The tone of the interview is never positive, or even neutral. The interviewer never asks: “Why do you live in Florida?” Or: “What do you like about Florida?” No, the tone is always: “What the hell is wrong with Florida?”
These interviewers are not always calling from states that have a lot to brag about. I have been interviewed on the wrongness of Florida by people who live in, for example, Illinois, which constantly has to build new prisons just to hold all of its convicted former governors, who form violent prison gangs and get into rumbles with gangs of convicted former state legislators.
(snip)
But we weren’t always the Punchline State. We used to be the Sunshine State, known for our orange groves and beaches and deceased senior citizens playing shuffleboard. People might have seen Florida as boring, but they didn’t laugh at it. They laughed at New Jersey, because it contained the New Jersey Turnpike and smelled like a giant armpit. Or they laughed at California, because it was populated by trend-obsessed goobers wearing Earth shoes and getting recreational enemas. But today, all of these states are laughing at Florida. Everybody is laughing at Florida. Mississippi is laughing at Florida.
How did this happen? As far as I have been able to determine without doing any research, the turning point was the 2000 presidential election. On election night, almost all of the other states were able to figure out pretty quickly whether they voted for Al Gore or George W. Bush. But not Florida. Florida had no earthly idea who it had voted for. By dawn we still had no winner, and network TV political analysts were openly shooting heroin on camera.
Meanwhile, the morning skies over the state were darkened by vast fleets of transport planes swooping in from Washington, D.C., opening their doors and dropping tens of thousands of election lawyers. Some landed in the Everglades and were consumed by Burmese pythons. But tragically, many survived, and, without taking time to remove their parachutes, they commenced filing lawsuits.
This finally ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 7-2 decision, that Florida should be given back to Spain. OK, not really. But by then, that was basically how the rest of the nation felt. And the nation did not forget. The nation had formed a negative, stereotyped image of Florida as a subtropical festival of stupid. From then on, every time anything stupid happened here, America rolled its national eyeballs and went, “There goes Florida again!”
More..
http://www.wsj.com/articles/florida-the-punchline-state-1472845591
Forgot to add:
Adapted from Mr. Barry’s “Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland,” to be published Sept. 6 by Putnam.
= new reply since forum marked as read
is because so many are from somewhere else.
I would say one of the least boring places in the US
in the drive-through window at Wendys?
http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/02/09/man-throws-alligator-in-wendys-wptv-dnt.cnn/video/playlists/alligator-encounters/
We have annual alligator & python hunts, who else can say that?
