Um, you do realize that the Palin story is from a parody site, right?
Haha, no I didn't. I just tacked it on as a last minute thing.
Maybe the link will disappear while I'm at class, since it was an add-on!
MAE beat me to it. The hints are the other articles like Romney: 'I Should Have Offered Them Fried Chicken'.
The Daily Currant is never funny. It's just mildly plausible. I'm convinced that it's a clever right-wing endeavor to get liberals to post made-up stuff to Facebook. Except that instead ranting about AbortionPlectes, liberals just get a little bemused as to why Sarah Palin would work for Al Jazeera/Harvard/Whatever.
You were hardly alone in taking the Palin story seriously; Twitter went nuts over it. Kieran Healy's take: "So, a huge number of people found it plausible that Sarah Palin might teach a course at Harvard on 'Pascal, Chateaubriand, and The Modern U.S. Evangelical Movement'. Depending on your taste and situation, you'll see this as an indictment of the Internet, Harvard, or Americans."
Don't worry, Heebie; you're not the only one who has fallen for a Daily Currant story lately.
My kid and I were joking about #39 on that list the other day, the one about getting used to really big bugs. It's true, though, that definitely happens when you live in Florida -- anything less than about quarter-sized scurrying in the bathroom just doesn't phase me anymore.
90% of that list boils down to warm, warm, warm, but I would add flowers in winter (the hibiscus are in bloom right now) and the weird animals. A few days ago, I saw a gigantic turtle crossing the road -- biggest turtle I'd ever seen outside of a zoo, easily three times the size of my dog -- and today two sandhill cranes were hanging out by my mailbox. There's something nice about wildlife everywhere. (Of course, the corollary is that there's a lot more road kill than I used to see in CA.)
easily three times the size of my dog
I'm going to need to know the size of your dog before I decide how awesome this is.
Things I remember liking about visiting my aunt/uncle/cousins in FL: 1. catching lizards 2. having manatees swim up in the back yard 3. dolphins/porpoises doing their crazy dances next to the little boat we'd take out 4. swimming pool 5. Disneyworld (which wasn't so close and we didn't go often).
Depending on your taste and situation, you'll see this as an indictment of the Internet, Harvard, or Americans.
I was briefly taken in because it sounded exactly like something Harvard would do.
Texas Woman semi-nostalgic for her days as Florida Girl. (Human moments in super-herodom.)
10: Far and away my strongest memory of visiting grandparents in Cape Coral is of the regular afternoon rainstorms, which my sisters and I often gathered to watch through an open garage door.
That I have no memory whatsoever of the fauna suggests either that I didn't care about them or that my parents were neurotic enough to avoid them as far as possible (without being neurotic enough to make their anxiety memorable).
As I've noted before, I didn't really like growing up in Miami, and I hate hot/humid weather, so that list did especially little for me. Furthermore, it captured very few of the things that I did enjoy (such as catching lizards and lubber grasshoppers).
OTOH, there's a FB group roughly on the subject (it's So Fla specific) that I enjoy much more, partly because it's more specific, but also because it seems to do a better job (although it does make the same mistake of citing national chains as somehow special to Fla, when in fact that simply reveals that Florida is a horribly generic place).
Texas Woman semi-nostalgic for her days as Florida Girl. (Human moments in super-herodom.)
I consider myself not to claim any state as my own. I'm omni-fraudulent.
That list is terribly constructed in comparison to the Texas one. I love visiting Florida south of Okeechobee, though I mostly hated being a teenager in it (even then . . . illegal dance parties in the Everglades borderlands, etc.). There is a lot of awesome weirdness, as well as some beautiful and largely-under-the-radar-because-everyone-is-at-the-mall places.
I know Sifu (I think, or apo) linked it here before, but anyone with a fondness for/fascination with Florida really should follow Florida Man on Twitter.
Today's sampling, for instance:
Naked Florida Man Shot In The Foot After Trying To Choke Family's Dog
Florida Man Kills Roommate Over Missing Corn Dog
Florida Man Accused Of Firing Gun While Driving On I-95, Told Deputies He Thought He Was Fishing
Florida Man Blames BMW Theft On Having No Phone To Call For A Ride
I think I like the bird-watching pron the best.
Also Florida as the kind of place that could inspire/serve as the backdrop for something like Swamplandia!.
There is a lot of awesome weirdness
If you are ever in Ona, Florida.
The sculptor Howard Solomon started building the castle in 1974 out of aluminum printing plates thrown out by the local newspaper. Years later, the ever-evolving, gleaming three-story-high castle covers 12,000 sq. feet, including the courtyard filled with sculptures made from discarded automotive parts and a 60-foot replica of a 16th century Portuguese galleon that serves as the Moat restaurant
it takes some serious bugs to freak us out here in narnia too. and we had a monitor lizard in the yard like three weeks ago. that was creepy. way, way creepy. I can kind of sort of deal with them being in the canal but in the yard is like "aaaaaaaaack!!!"
I would think monitor lizards would add to the ecstatic color you're always painting.
I'm a wimp about large bugs, I guess because I didn't grow up in Florida.
But a lizard?! I had to google "monitor lizard," btw, I'm that clueless. That creature looks primeval and primordial, and would seriously freak me out.
Some beings (insects, fish, reptiles, what have you) have a certain quality of 'alien creatureliness' that just creeps me out. I'm more frightened of a grizzly bear than of a cockroach, for example, because the bear might kill me, after all, whereas I could kill the roach. But it's the cockroach that makes me shudder with revulsion, and not the grizzly.
I agree there is a certain irrational, "get away!!" thing with bugs, lizards, snakes, and even big frogs that mammals don't always elicit. however I can't help thinking that if I saw a grizzly bear in the wild I would, quite rightly, freak right the fuck out. when I was a kid, my favorite creatures in the national zoo in dc were the kodiak bears. so big! so...unable to harm me! yay!
21: generally I'm paying helpful, quiet chinese girls to paint things for me at my work, so the monitor lizards at my house are neither here nor there when it comes to ecstatic color painting. it's a nice thought, though.
oh, yeah, florida does dominate in "fucked up shit happened to/was perpetrated by area man" news stories. south carolina does its best, but we just don't have as many people. so even though they're every last one of them crazy, we still can't win. florida takes the crown every year.
I remember noting some Florida story a while ago that was so off the wall it crossed the Atlantic, and saying that it looked like a Carl Hiaasen plot line. And somebody replied that Hiaasen in fact writes documentaries.
The place liked in 19 actually looks pretty good.
Ooh. "South Carolina Man Arrested for Attacking Fast Food Worker Because Onion Rings Were Cold."
"Willie Merriweather, a 53-year-old South Carolina man, was jailed Monday after he allegedly masturbated during an interview at a local staffing agency."
The place linked in 19 reminds me of the very strange Κάστρο των Παραμυθιών (Fairytale Castle) in a remote backwater of the western Peloponnese. (Apparently the work of a local boy who made good in the U.S., and came back to live out his dream of bringing some semblance of the magic of Disney to the old country.)
Is there any way you could smuggle a few of those monitor lizards into the US? Because I would really really like one for my house.
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Getting invited to a no-men-allowed baby shower (Buck's closer to the mother-to-be than I am) shouldn't surprise me, but it does. It just seems like a weird way to run a social event. Unless there are going to be strippers, but that seems unlikely.
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Is that not the usual form of a baby shower? All the ones I hear about (including the one that was thrown for my baby) are like that - I've never been invited to one.
It is the usual form, but people I actually know personally have either not really had baby showers, or had more of an ordinary afternoon party with baby-related presents and an unrestricted guest list. It's the living in a bubble thing again -- I know the rest of the world is out there, but I'm always sort of surprised to encounter it. And this family I would have pegged as fellow bubble-residents.
Women-and-monitor lizards-only would be sweet. Guess the baby's weight! Eat water buffalo carrion!
40: So that's what the kids called it back in the day.
41 is both funny and meta. M-funny!
34: Extremely regional, ime, having put together two showers this semester. Coastal people's baby showers are co-ed parties where one person gets cute things for a baby, others seem to think it's only for women.
Is there any way you could smuggle a few of those monitor lizards into the US? Because I would really really like one for my house.
http://www.gherp.com/pricelist.php?filterCat=Lizards
They've got a croc monitor that walks on a leash. Make it happen.
17: One of my only 2 childhood camping experiences was Matheson Hammock. It was like 3 miles from my house. And I love Coral Castle so much.
Explicitly co-ed or not, I view baby showers as a great opportunity to TCOB. There's always been this sort of weird dynamic by which, if AB is going out on a weekend day, I'm expected/eager to tackle all sorts of home projects. I have no idea why these projects go untackled while she's around.
On my end, I view it as, "I've got 4 hours in which I can do whatever I want, as long as X also gets done." I don't think it's AB-specific, but rather goes back to the part where I always preferred living alone.
We would have pegged ourselves as bubble-dwelling coed-baby-shower-having parents-to-be, but honestly, it was easier to outsource it to Mrs. K-sky's mom, traditional to the frill.
My father-in-law, brother-in-law, and I also hung out, so when one of our friends innocently brought her husband, it wasn't totally awks. Also, single-sex cuts the guest list in (more or less) half, which is so nice.
44 -- hot damn!! I could turn my dog pen into a reptilian killing machine pen and take it out for walks in the neighborhood. The internet says:
Monitor lizards can be very hostile and lash out their tales when angry. This may cause a stinging injury on the skin.
Monitor lizards have a very high metabolic rate compared to other reptiles.
Monitor lizards hunt down live prey using their sensory adaptations.
Some monitor lizards can undergo parthenogenesis, that is, produce unfertilized eggs.
Monitor lizards are very intelligent and can even count numbers up to 6.
