Florida Is The Real Weirdo State

Alright, we've been making fun of California a lot, but to be quite honest, I don't think of California as being the weirdo state in the Union; that honor belongs to Florida, hands down.

Don't take my word for it. Consider some of the attractions in Florida. Live "mermaids" - women in mermaid costumes who swim in a large aquarium tank. Monkey Jungle, where they have monkeys who skin dive. Alligator wrestling. The Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest in Key West. Consider some of Florida's other signposts of civilization. Clusters of senior-citizen condos from Miami to Orlando. Cheap restaurants with "early bird" specials for said senior citizens, which fill all the restaurants along the highway with oldsters and creates a rush hour preceding the afternoon commute. Vulgar estates in Palm Beach. Venice, once the home of a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus-owned "clown college."

And there's everything else Florida has become famous for. The National Enquirer. Botched elections. Flight schools that train terrorists. Dog racing. "The Redneck Riviera" along the Gulf Coast from Palm Beach to Pensacola, where the best restaurants serve chicken-fried steak and the most common vehicles on the road are pickup trucks. Not to mention some of Florida's most famous people. Pat Boone. Anita Bryant. Motormouthed swimming champion Brooke Bennett. Governor Jeb. I could go on. (Although, I will grant that Florida has given us a few decent folks such as Tom Petty, Jimmy Buffett, Dave Barry, and Janet Reno, and, to be even fairer, making fun of Florida for its having embarrassing residents/natives is an ultimately pointless exercise that could be used against any other state.)

I know California has been an embarrassment of late, but I don't honestly see how electing actors to the state's governorship - even if the actor in question is Gary Coleman - is possibly as moronic as electing Jeb Bush governor of Florida. Also, California has about three more respectable art museums and one fine classical orchestra more than Florida. Which is to say, California has three respectable art museums and one fine classical orchestra. To clinch my argument in favor of Florida as the wackiest state in Union, I offer these pearls of fact:

Florida has Disney World, a theme park complex the size of San Francisco.

California has San Francisco.

San Francisco, as Herbert Hoover once noted, is the Athens of the American West. And, it's the hometown of the Jefferson Airplane.

Nuff said.