Hey, Welcome to LOVING THE STRANGE, where we celebrate the weird and embrace the heck out of it.
This week, in honor of Shaun Farrar, our own Florida man, we are talking about Florida men.
In ancient times, so back in 2013, Florida man became a meme because there were just so many weird and bizarre news articles (mostly police beats) about Florida men doing weird and criminal and often dumb things.
Both CNN and the Miami News Times claim that Florida men aren’t that naughty or bizarre compared to their equivalents in other states, but it’s just because the freedom of information laws in that state make it pretty easy to peruse police beat.
The Columbia Journalism Review says that Florida Man is “one of journalism’s darkest and most lucrative cottage industries”, because “stories tend to stand as exemplars of the mythical hyper-weirdness of the Sunshine State, but more often simply document the travails of the drug-addicted, mentally ill, and homeless.”
Here are the links we reference during our talk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Man
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7bmp8a/weird-florida-news-america-florida-man
https://nypost.com/article/crazy-florida-man-headlines-that-made-the-meme/