A big shout-out to the Associated Press and other Florida newspapers for this summary of weird news from 2019. Keep being weird, Florida. In 2019, Florida Banana managed to eclipse Florida Man. From alligator antics to naked people doing wacky things, Florida did not disappoint in the weird news department. In December, a Miami couple spent more than $100,000 on […]
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While most families were busy Christmas morning opening presents, we were learning how to use the fire extinguisher up at Uncle Leo’s place in Strawberry. It began innocently enough. Judge Leonardo D. Strano, who happens to be my uncle, invited me to spend Christmas with he and the missus up at his cabin atop the Mogollon Rim. I usually spend […]
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A Florida woman had the feces scared out of her this week when lightning caused her toilet to explode. During a thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck her septic tank and sent a powerful electrical charge through her plumbing. Methane gas built up in the pipes, a natural phenomenon, ignited causing the explosion, a plumber said. Marylou Ward of Port […]
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The headline in the Naples Daily News was irresistible: Man barracades elf in home with baby. No, I wasn’t drawn to the story because my inner copyeditor groaned about the misspelling of the word barricades. It was the reference to the elf. If you’re going to barricade yourself in a home with a baby, why not also include an elf […]
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A fugitive from Tampa faced a dilemma as he sat in the backseat of a police cruiser in Tallmadge, Ohio, a suburb of Akron. Kirk Kelly, didn’t want police to discover his true identity because he was wanted on firearms and drug charges back in Florida. Police had pulled over the car he was traveling in and thought they smelled […]
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E-cigarettes are supposed to be the safer alternative to smoking. None of those nasty tars and carcinogenic poisons that will turn your lungs into coal sacks and over time put you on a walking oxygen tank before you croak. Well, don’t try that pitch on Cassandra Kosiol. The 30-year-old woman from Naples, Florida found out the hard way that vaping […]
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HUDSON, FL – This is a story of heroes and villains. First, the heroes. They’re the members of the Pasco County Fire Rescue Station here in Hudson, a town of 13,000 people on the west coast of Florida north of St. Petersburg. At first, it sounded like a routine medical emergency call. Forty-year-old Gene Work was in his yard with […]
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Hundreds of rhesus macaque monkeys are roaming central Florida and there have been several reports of them pestering people. Recently, Brian Pritchard of Ocala photographed a troop of about fifty of the primates in his back yard stealing food from a deer feeder. He said they consumed about 250 pounds of the feed in one week. A few weeks ago, a family […]
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NAPLES, FL–We’ve all heard the expression “get a grip,” but there’s a critter common to South Florida and the Caribbean that literally knows how to hang in there. It’s a tiny lizard called the brown anole, sometimes also referred to as the Bahamian anole, and you can hardly walk down the sidewalk anywhere around here without the little guys skittering underfoot. […]
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