Craig Pittman at The Tampa Bay Times provides us with a year end recap of Floriduh Man and Woman incidents. Though with three days left to go, he may have missed a few that haven’t happened yet.
In 2017, #Florida gave us emotional support squirrels, drunk possums, DUI on a horse & lots of other weird news. My round-up of the best "Oh, #Florida!" stories of the year. https://t.co/LniYaNpXXc
— Craig Pittman (@craigtimes) December 28, 2017
How weird was the news out of Florida this year? So weird that the popular @_FloridaMan Twitter account apparently gave up trying to keep up with it all in mid-October. He hasn’t tweeted anything to his 387,000 followers since two weeks before Halloween.
But don’t worry. Florida’s largest newspaper has not slacked off on tracking all the wacky and wild news this year. As expected, 2017 produced a bumper crop of the bizarre.
Some Florida headlines became instant classics: “Man accidentally shoots self in road rage incident,” and “Possum breaks into liquor store, gets skunky drunk” and “Polk City woman arrested for DUI on a horse.”
And who could forget “Lawyer’s pants erupt in flames during Miami arson trial”?
Florida crime, as always, offered a bonanza of bonkers behavior. There was the Pinellas Park man who Googled “how to rob a bank” and then robbed a bank. (Apparently he forgot to Google “how to get away with it.”)
A woman in a bikini contest in Stuart was busted for bashing a competitor in the head with her high-heeled shoe (neither won Miss Congeniality).
A Merritt Island man trashed an ATM because, he said, it gave him too much cash.
When a SWAT team raided a home in the retirement mega-community of The Villages, police found more than just the meth lab they’d expected. They also discovered it was a chop shop for stolen golf carts.
The Floriduh Man! assaults an ATM was a hoot. Apparently he inflicted an estimated $5,000 worth of damage to the cash machine because it gave him more money than he asked to withdraw and he was frustrated because he didn’t know what to do about it.
VIDEO: A Florida man was arrested for causing $5,000 in damage to a Wells Fargo ATM because it gave him "too much money" pic.twitter.com/sxKz1bbh7O
— azcentral (@azcentral) December 26, 2017
The Villages are a notorious retirement community in central Florida. Exceedingly conservative with a hit STD rate.
And then there are the distinctions they are not so thrilled about. In 2009, the New York Post labeled it “ground zero for geriatrics who are seriously getting it on.” The story reported that couples had been caught having quickies in the golf carts and noted there was a thriving black market for Viagra. A local police officer told the paper, “You see two 70-year-olds with canes fighting over a woman and you think, ‘Oh, jeez.’ ” As a result, the place that likes to bill itself as “America’s Friendliest Hometown” has seen a huge increase in sexually transmitted diseases.
Speaking of Floriduh Man, Floriduh Woman, and what they do with each other, back to the recap…
A man who was stealing a trailer in Cooper City stopped long enough to have sex with his accomplice. In Sarasota, a tennis match had to be halted because of the noise from a couple’s amorous exploits. In Fort Walton Beach, a woman told police that she attacked her husband only because he threw her sex toys at her.
A woman donned a wig to sneak into a Palm Coast wedding where she spotted her boyfriend kissing someone else, poured a drink on him, punched another woman, fled to the bathroom and was then dragged out by angry bridesmaids and got into a brawl with them. Meanwhile, a Palm Beach Gardens mom threw eggs at her daughter’s boyfriend, then chased him through the yard with her Mercedes because he’d confessed to her daughter that he’d been cheating — with the mom.
More fun at the link!
Open thread!