We can retire the "Florida Man" threads. We have a winner.

As a native Californian visiting FLA for first time in 30 yrs, there are many FLA people who are nice too. Sounds ignorant I admit.

 

Those are just the retired Midwesterners.

 

The retired midwesterners are the not-nice ones.

 

Truth

 

It, at its core, is a breakdown of what makes a good lede. What it really is, however, is a hall of fame breakdown of a Florida woman biting a camel’s nuts. This right here is why I had no hope of writing for the New Yorker.

Florida Woman Bites Camel

 

My favorite paragraph:

“When cops arrived, the two local women had already left, but investigators were able to track down their car, which was reportedly filled with glitter.”

Glitter as a weapon? Two women arrested in sparkly attack of man at a Florida home

https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article257243597.html

 

"Notice how the reader is drawn in with a single unpunctuated sentence that starts slowly and gradually becomes an express train that whistles right by the local stops without providing an opportunity to get off."

 

The suspects in the New Year’s Eve torching of the Southernmost Point monument in Key West were rounded up because a bartender remembered one of them clearly … because he stiffed the bartender on tips for his drinks, which he paid for by credit card.

“It took five minutes to breeze through the credit cards and find it,” (the manager) said.

With the time stamp on the receipt, she then found camera footage that she said showed both suspects at the bar.

“We could follow them the whole time, in and out of the bar,” Starks said. “We could see them getting rejected from all the girls they were trying to hit on.”​

Tip your server, folks.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article257192587.html

 

At my old paper that would be considered a second-day lede -- someone else may have broken the story about the bite, so the reporter played up the antibiotic angle. And I hope the name of the dog was in the story somewhere. And the camel.

"A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics" seems a lot like the tried-and-true "Police are investigating."

 

The author of that piece, Calvin Trillin, is my father-in-law's first cousin. I don't know "Bud" (as he's known in their family) well at all, but he and my father-in-law are pretty close. He also got a cameo in one of Bud's books (a memoir, Messages From My Father). Bud's father always challenged the kids to try and spell some weird word he made up and they brought in a ringer, Cousin Keith from Salina (my father-in-law), who was the Kansas Spelling Bee champion (or maybe runner-up or finalist), but he didn't get it right either as I recall.

 

Add Florida teen to the mix.

 

Oh, he's going to wind up somewhere where all his sexual fantasies about men are about to come to fruition.

(And there's something awesome about the Oakland TV station responsible for the racist chyrons following the Asiana Air crash at SFO posting that.)