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Here is a list of random facts about Florida that prove exactly how weird of a place it is without the news stories.
In the north west there is a waterfall. The water falls from a stream for 90ft into a sink hole and disappears into the earth.
The capital of the state is filled with ancient live oaks and every spring the city turns yellow with pollen. The pollen is like a plague on the population. Even people without allergies develops allergies living there.
You’ll be floating down a river in a boat or on an inner tube when you see something fall from a tree ten feet away from you. You scramble out of the water as you see that the what you thought was a limb is now a water moccasin swimming past you.
Extensive systems of tunnels fill the landscape. They’re the hard work of the gopher tortoise. You know to never reach into one of these gopher tortoise borrows. They’re filled with rattlesnakes.
The largest native snake in Florida can reach lengths of about six or seven feet long. It is appropriately named the indigo snake for the blue sheen its black scales. Have no fear though. It is non venomous. Despite this fact, it’s diet includes rattlesnakes.
In the south, two invasive species of snakes are cross breeding to form an aggressive giant. This monstrosity will even feast on alligators.
There is a forest surrounding a spring populated with monkeys. The monkeys are not native to the state or the region. They were brought here as an attraction and left on a small island in the middle of a river. No one realized they could swim.
There are dozens of places claimed to be fountains of youth located throughout the state. One is in the north east in the oldest city in the state. It’s also the oldest European city in the country.
Ancient fish populate the rivers throughout the state. They can reach sizes of up to 10 ft in length and weigh over 300lbs. They’re jaws are like that of an alligator.
The cypress trees turn the water tannic and black. The water is so opaque you can’t see but six inches deep.
I never knew the USA had a mini Australia of its own.
@ryuuenx
MINI AUSTRALIA OH MY GOD
Bull sharks swim in our springs sometimes. They’re the only shark that can tolerate fresh water.
Twice a year, black “love bugs” come out from wherever they’re hiding and do nothing but mate. They look like catdog with how they walk. Their dead guts mess up car paint worse than bird poop.
Hurricanes, water spouts, and tornados are pretty common.
There are projectors in every classroom because when Jeb Bush was our governor, he wanted everyone in the state to be taught by one teacher per subject.
There’s at least one strawberry festival every month, but the best ones are in March. There are at least two manatee festivals a year.
Most of the animals from one of the Tarzan live action movies live in the state, usually at state parks. The hippopotamus is named Lucifer and he is a legal Florida resident. He likes watermelons.
There’s no way to live in Florida without the outside becoming the inside. There’s nothing you can do about it. Spiders and palmetto bugs will get inside no matter how much you spray or what pest company you use. Frogs and lizards will appear in your bed and bathtubs with no explanation. Snakes will somehow make it 200ft into a company building through 3 locked doors. It’s a mystery.
Walking to your car every morning with an arm raised cautiously in front of you as you go. No it’s not a Nazi salute, you’re preparing to walk through unexpected spider webs. The one day you don’t do it is the day you walk into one. That web is easily 6 feet in circumference.
Praying for the day the city finally starts spraying for mosquitoes.
Being that poor asshole that lives in the county where they don’t have a budget to spray for mosquitoes.
FUCKING GREY SQUIRRELS
Driving 45 minutes to an hour one way for work is pretty common. Driving 2 hours one way is not unheard of.
Pretty sure it’s impossible to be more than an hour and a half away from the coast.
It’s actually 91 degree F outside, feels like 110, and you’re wearing a sweater in your clerical office because they set the A/C to 68. Condensation on building windows is a common occurrence in the summer.
Long-term residents genuinely do not give two fucks about a hurricane unless it’s a category four. Three-hour afternoon squalls can do more damage than a category two. You can drive through a category one and not even realize you’re under an alert until you see the news the next morning.
That feel when you’re new to Florida and driving through an afternoon rainstorm for the first time, and the wipers are on high, you’re doing 20 mph, and you still can’t see.
That feel when you’re a long-term resident and some friends from out west come visit and comment on how dark the sky is, and you’re like bitch, that’s barely gray, does your sky never actually turn black during a rainstorm? There are literally storms that roll through that make it feel like night has fallen at 11 in the morning, it’s terrifying when you’re not used to it.
Seriously everyone in Florida is pretty immune to the idea of death, we walk past it constantly
Of the top 30 cities in the US with the most lightning, Florida has 17 of them.
Florida loves food festivals. In addition to the above mentioned strawberry festival, there’s also multiple seafood festivals, a peanut festival, giant shiitake mushroom festival, several chocolate festivals, a kumquat festival, a zucchini festival, and festivals for corn, honey, wine, swamp cabbage, sour oranges, pumpkins, tomatoes, catfish, pigs, watermelon, oysters, grapes, flan and a hell of a lot more.
Did I mention palmetto bugs are 2 inch roaches that can fly
Me: *lives in Miami; experiencing none of this*
Mysteriously digging up a skeleton while working in your backyard, it’s ok though because on your local beach there were a lot more bodies excavated there.
There’s haunted doll that lives in a old fort which is now a museum, you have to ask his permission for a picture and he has an official holiday.
In key west there are infinite cats, infinite roosters and infinite cigar stands. 3 roosters live in my yard and somehow our local dumpster cat has killed none of them.
Palm rats, extremely large for a rat. Key deer, extremely small for a deer.
Local sugarcane companies and cattle farmers have created a toxic algae sludge that causes organ failure, it’s found all along the silver coast, slowly killing people who live there.
Key lime pie is a way of life.
In key west there is a large scale festival once a month, one is a week long and called fantasy fest. This includes body painting which causes throngs of naked people covered in paint to litter the island.
Seems like every week a new sink hole opens and you somehow don’t find it odd at all after a while, they are sometimes lovingly dubbed “hellmouths”
If you don’t bury people deep enough the bodies unearth themselves during heavy flossing and rain.
Large frogs that excrete hallucinogenic mucus and sound like loud speakers pumping bass. My dog used to bite them and trip for the next day or so.
On the topic of hallucinogenic things, the angels trumpet flower, which has cause people to jump off buildings and amputate their own limbs.
Run in zig zags
There are so many strip clubs and adult stores you literally could not imagine life without seeing one once a day. They are often close to local churches.
Gatorland.
Our governor, who looks like Lord Voldemort, was involved in overseeing one of the largest cases of health care fraud in US history, involving a $1.7 billion settlement, before he was elected. He has since been reelected and is in his second term.
Apparently other parts of the country do not have an entire wall in their local grocery stores dedicated exclusively to orange juice.
The sun is so tremendously powerful that almost-black freshly paved asphalt is burned into the same lighter gray as the surrounding asphalt in a matter of weeks.
We have, almost certainly, the worst and most hostile drivers in the country.
Someone above mentioned that it is 91 degrees F outside. This is misleading because that is our outdoor temperature at night. In the dead of winter. It’s also never below 75% humidity.
Florida is so oppressively hot and humid that the air actually does not feel or smell like air. Florida has its own local atmosphere composed of sweat and the vaporized particles of everything that has direct sun exposure. This includes garbage, asphalt, concrete, paint, wood, and people.
But The Shade Is Where The Mosquitoes Dwell.
You have been to at least most of the theme parks in Orlando, multiple times each. You know your favorite two or three as intimately as your own home, and get very defensive around people who have different favorites.
“Pool Parties” were more common than birthday parties growing up.
If you are still in high school, you likely know of several dozen people who just wear bathing suits under their school uniforms on Fridays, so they can take their clothes off in the parking lot on their way to the beach immediately after school.
More than 50% of the people you know, at least at some point in their life, have owned or had immediate access to a swimming pool.
You can tell how many tourists have used a public pool by the degree to which sunscreen has altered the consistency of the water.
During the summer, you have seen licence plates from all 50 states, and Canada. Yes, including Hawaii. You are not sure how. You don’t question it.
You can tell how far north a tourist has come from by the secondhand pain you experience based on the particular hue of their sunburn.
If you think about it, you have actually never seen asphalt directly – it is always obscured by the waves of heat visibly rising from it at all times.
North Florida is the Deep South. Central Florida is the midwest. West Florida is the Pacific Northwest. Southeast Florida is a mix between New England and Southern California. Miami is north Cuba.
There is one particular city in central south Florida that thinks it is Texas. Slighty south of it is a wealthier area which also has a southern aesthetic, but with a lot of horses. Southwest Florida is the Everglades, which means it is uninhabitable swamp full of alligators, crocodiles, a dangerous outbreak of invasive pythons, Many Many Bugs, and other wildlife.
Of all the wildlife in Florida, you probably feel least threatened or annoyed by the alligators and crocodiles. At least they keep to themselves.
Speaking of crocodiles, this headline is not particularly out of the ordinary:
Speaking of Florida News, there is a wikipedia page dedicated to the Bath Salts Zombie Incident:
http://ift.tt/1HFZF8SHere is a very, very partial list of Florida Man’s various misadventures. My personal favorites from this list are:
“Florida Man attempts to leave store with chainsaw stuffed down his pants” "Florida Man caught with “active” meth lab in his pants” and in an accurate summary of our politics,
“Florida Man, once arrested for fighting drag queen with a tiki torch while dressed like KKK member, now running for mayor.”
There are at least five different animal species that permanently reside inside your home, and that’s not including any pets you might keep voluntarily. You have learned to live with some of the spiders, because at least they eat some of the bugs. You actually like the geckos, because they eat more of the bugs and some of the spiders, without being as creepy. There are probably another dozen or so species that do not permanently reside in your home, but make unexpected guest appearances from time to time.
The indoor temperature is several degrees higher than whatever you’ve set the thermostat to, simply because the AC cannot actually keep up with the Merciless Death Ray From Above.
You do not, and never will tolerate the two inch long cockroaches. Your fear to annoyance ratio when the next one inevitably appears is directly proportional to how easy it will be to kill in its current location.
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