There’s an elephant in the room.
In fact, it’s in the whole state.
Actually, the elephant is the state.
It’s time to talk about Florida.
Welcome to Florida, where apparently it’s perfectly fine to be insane.
Remember Lisa Nowak, the female astronaut who went nuts and drove across the country wearing a diaper to kidnap her ex-boyfriend? That happened in Florida.
According to TIME’s article titled “Houston, She’s Got Some Problems,” she was charged “with attempted murder after driving 900 miles from Houston to Orlando, Fla., allegedly carrying a knife, a BB gun, pepper spray, latex gloves and rubber tubing — wearing a diaper all the while so she wouldn’t have to stop en route — and assaulting a romantic rival in a parking lot.”
It seems that there’s always something weird going on in our state.
In fact, the Sun-Sentinel has a whole vertical of its website dedicated to “weird, wacky, strange, news from the Sunshine State” called “FloriDUH.”
We’re just trying to brace you for what happened here in the past week.
Edward Archbold died from ingesting too many insects.
He stuffed himself with “handfuls of crickets, worms and cockroaches,” according to an Associated Press story. Why? To win a python, of course.
There’s no way we’re going into the gross details of this story, thats headline is “Man’s roach-eating death raises question: Why?”
Archbold may have “hit his tolerance level to cockroach allergens” and went into anaphylactic shock, said Mike Tringale, the vice president of The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America in the AP story.
The story references Sarah Bernard, an entomology student at UF, who attended the contest at the Ben Siegel Reptiles store in Deerfield Beach. She shot video of the contest on her cellphone.
“I was focusing on him because I was closest to him and he was really entertaining,” she said in the story. “I saw that he had a clear strategy. He would push everything into his mouth and try to swallow it with water. He figured out what worked and he did it.”
Just. Um. Ew. Really, Florida?
Let’s try to get a better reputation than one of totally tubular party college campuses or severely weird and gross stories like Archbold’s.
Is this a cautionary tale? Probably. Don’t eat strange insects in copious amounts. Try eating them in normal amounts first, because who knows how it will affect your body.
Try not to act crazy. Florida’s already got it covered.
