This story says it all in the title: He was naked, on crack and in alligator’s mouth. It does make me feel a little better about waking up to single-digit temperatures and that blowing powdery stuff on the ground, I will say—we don’t have much of a problem with naked unconscious people getting eaten by alligators around here.
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Is Florida really that weird?
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Spend a summer sweltering miserably in South Florida, as I had to a couple of times when I was a kid, and you’ll want to kiss the frozen, snow-covered ground of Minnesota when you return.
…constant heat, humidity, mosquitos, sharp plants, pollution, ticks, red necks, bad drivers, bad roads, HURRICANES, chiggers, bad schools, confusing ballots, illegle immigrants, FIRE ANTS, constant development…
It was fun for college… but never again… Incedently, I think you change the title of this post to “Florida: Queerer than we can suppose.”
How does stumble upon an article about drug-induced alligator injuries? I have a vague hope that you were looking for alligator news and not “naked,” or “crack.” :)
Ripped from the pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel!
Are you referring to the same Minnesotta that put a pro westler in the highest office?
Hey, the wrestler wasn’t nearly as f**d up as the blueblood scion of a great political family whose disastrous term is mercifully about to end here in Ohio. (Not to mention the a-hole offspring of another Republican political dynasty still doing his dirty work down in Florida…)
I have the RSS feed for the Seattle Times (hometown newspaper, don’t you know) in my newsreader, and you have to admit, that was a headline that catches the eye.
Florida is that weird, yes.
I suppose, though, that in Minnesota the naked crack smokers drive their pickup trucks out onto the thin ice to search for animals to eat them.
“I have the RSS feed for the Seattle Times (hometown newspaper, don’t you know) in my newsreader, and you have to admit, that was a headline that catches the eye.”
You can’t just humor me? Next you’ll be telling me that God doesn’t exist!
Speaking of Hiaasen-esque adventure, for Thanksgiving I went down-peninsula to my hometown (I now live in comparatively sane north Fl) where I read in the local paper that Hiaasen had moved up there to get away from the sort of craziness he writes about in his books in the Miami area. Immediately after reading that, I saw a man in a hospital gown with a broken arm getting into his SUV to drive away from a gas station. My only thought was, “Not crazy? He needs to move further north.”
Of course as a native umpteenth generation Floridian I can smile at the craziness here while as I have no idea why anyone would want to live in the frigid North.
Florida has its own category on Fark.com. That tells me all I need to know. However, a state with Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry and Roger McGuinn can’t be all bad…
The funny thing about that story is that only people outside of Florida noticed it. We’ve become immune to gator/shark attack stories here in the Sunshine State. It happens often enough that we hardly notice them anymore.
What gets our attention are blizzards. We think all of you Yankees are nuts for living in an area that has naturally occuring ice. We prefer our ice delivered in plastic bags and blended into a Rum Runner.
Hey, why all the levity(?)…the gator died!
Hey, why all the levity(?)…the gator died!
I was told when I visited Sarasota last year that the standard policy when a gator is found in a developed neighborhood is the following:
under 6 feet, ignore.
over 6 feet, try to capture and move; if too difficult, kill it.
“too difficult” would be whenever there isn’t an expert on aligator handling handy (there are more of them than you might think, but still…). “Too difficult” also most likely applies if there is even the slightest indication that the suspect gator has attacked someone.
BTW, a six foot gator seems pretty small when you see them “in the flesh”, as half of it is tail.
Just you wait until the wheat moves to Canada…
Weird, theocratic, and illiterate.
I lived in Florida for six years, Gainesville specifically. I grew up in a small, rural, fairly sheltered Mississippi community, and living in Gainesville completely shattered my perceptions on a whole lot of things. I met folks and had friends/drinking buddies/classmates/romantic entanglements from all over the world, like Turkey and South Korea and Kenya and Australia and Russia and Bangledesh and Saudi Arabia and Columbia, among others. I talked with people who spent their lives studying and living stuff I’d only read about, like philosophy and biology and physics and sociology, and we’d talk about all the things I thought I knew but was wrong about. I met people who’d done things I never even considered. I had friends who were gay, friends who were former Hell’s Angels, friends who’d lived on the streets, friends who were other religions besides Christian, friends who were of no religion a’tall, friends who came from ungodly amounts of money and friends who thought a good-natured, pot-smoking, music-loving country boy was the strangest thing they’d ever seen. I also saw some of the scariest rednecks I’d ever seen before in my life, and I’ve spent significant time in Northwest Alabama.
I left because it was time to leave, just like it’s time to leave Athens, GA, after seven years. However, the only time I really questioned my decision to move to Florida was after visiting a friend one evening. She was rather cross and terribly upset. I asked her why, and she said her boyfriend left the yard gate opened and an alligator had crawled into the yard AND ATE HER GODDAMN DOG!!!!
She lived near the UF campus, fairly residential, but still far more people in a two square-mile radius than in most of the country where I grew up. Damn gator ate her damn dog, right there in the middle of town. That ain’t right, man.
30 below does keep the riff-raff level down.
I lived in Tallahassee for 2 years back when it had just been desegregated for a few years (the paper had *just* started putting black wedding anouncements on the same page as white ones). Interesting story about the restaurant with two entrances in a small town 20 miles away, with me the clueless Northern boy, but this story is about gators. Some friends lived next to a woman who had a yippy little toy poodle. Yip. Yip. Yip. 24/7. Was driving our friends crazy. They tried to entice Yippy to walk along the edge of the swamp by putting out dog food in hopes that a gator *would* get it. No such luck. However, a another neighbor’s German Shepard finally did the deed (snap goes the neck) when Yippy foolishly nipped it while it was having a bad day.
Florida may have more than it’s fair share of weirdness, however it takes me about 30 minutes to leave my home and anchor my kayak over a coral reef. Then I can dive down and see the real reason I live here. Oh, one can even encounter the occasional octopus if you’re lucky. Eat your heart out PZ.
http://www.seascapevideo.com/stock_footage/Octopus.html
Oh and tomorrow night I might go for a full moon paddle with my friends, http://kayaking.meetup.com/130/ We’ll be sure to think warmly of all you frozen folk up north while we are out on the ocean and looking at the palm trees on the beach in the moonlight.
I grew up in FL. Gator’s love the taste of dog. They also routinely show in people’s swimming pools, drainage ditches, toilets (kidding), etc. A park ranger once told me that any decent sized body of water in Florida probably has an alligator in it.
It’s silly, but we are surprisingly nonchalant abou it. If you ever visit Silver Springs, the buggers are just laying out next to the walkways.
My girlfriend’s dad also has a cat that he rescued just as it was about to get eaten by a snake.
Man, now I’m homesick.
“we don’t have much of a problem with naked unconscious people getting eaten by alligators around here”
Naked unconscious people in Minnesota this time of year would crawl into an alligator for the warmth.
Heh. I lived in Sarasota for most of the 70s. Loved to go to Myakka State Park, just a half-hour’s drive. Lots of water, woods, insects, reptiles, mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, soils, plants and people that this boy had never seen up close before.
Believe me, when you are on a narrow wooded trail with low overhang and you bend low to pass underneath for a few steps and you straighten up quickly to discover a Golden Orb Spider inches from your nose, you will know the thrill of discovery! I stuck around for a while, investigating and observing. Found a large grasshopper and tossed it into the seven foot shimmering gold web. The lady of the house had a bit of a tussle but in the end had the situation wrapped up.
She returned to the center of her sunny parlor and was still. I picked up a small stick and gently tickled the underside of her abdomen, very lightly. To my surprise her reaction was not one of fight or flight. She seemed to almost relax against my ministrations. Thus informed and emboldened I tossed the stick and tried an index finger. V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y and g-e-n-t-l-y. Her reaction was much the same. I have no idea what caused her behavior or what it might have been signaling; but I can truly say that my opinion and appreciation of her and her kind underwent a profound change that day. But this is about gators . . .
One diversion I discovered was what I called “gator launching.” You start out in early to mid-morning and walk parallel to a shoreline where the reeds and sawgrass grow thickly. Your field of view is nearly all vertical lines. The occasional log or branch may lie in the horizontal plane but you are not looking for them. You are looking for gators taking advantage of the warming air temps under the cover of the grasses. They haul up out of the lake, move a few yards from shore and then turn back to face the water. There they relax and take their pleasure in meditation and rising body temperature.
You learn after a while to recognize their profiles which are remarkably well camouflaged. You pause, closely ascertaining where the head begins and where the tail ends. It’s the tail your looking for. Choosing your path carefully, you stealthily advance, grasping your launching pole loosely. (What? I didn’t mention the six to eight foot stick you picked up before you entered the grasses? Well, you aught to have thought of that for yourself.) Creeping up to within range you raise the launcher high and vertical, commence a suitably short countdown and then bring the stick down authoritatively (not violently) upon the last foot or three of your gator. Whaaa-whooo!
That sucker will levitate a yard straight up and start throwing S-curves down its length like a snake on steroids! It’ll be moving forward even before it hits the ground and will crash and thrash its way through the rushes heading for the water. It passes quickly out of sight and its location is lost to you until a handful of seconds later a splash says it has gone and dove deep. If you don’t hear the splash, well, how brave you feelin’ today?
Florida, back in those days was an amazing place full of amazing life everywhere. Now, as to the people there, just search Florida news any day for more like this post. Amazing . . .
Someday I’ll tell you about the armadillo that couldn’t find me when I was less than a yard away.
My grandma’s mailman in NW Florida always carried a revolver to shoot the big rattlesnakes that often appeared on his route.
Now I’m homesick, too.
Alligators schmalligators. Here we have salt water crocodiles. The guy in the story wouldn’t have been yelling because he would have been dragged underwater and drowned. It happens in North Queensland fairly often; someone goes swimming/fishing on a secluded estuary, and disappear from sight. When their friends rush over all they can see are the tracks in the sand where the croc grabbed them.
I grew up in southern Louisiana, which has plenty of ‘gators, but we never seemed to have much of a problem with alligators trying to eat people. Probably because any alligator fool enough to stick its head out of water was likely to end up in a big pot of alligator-and-sausage jambalaya.
Someday I’ll tell you about the armadillo that couldn’t find me when I was less than a yard away.
the obvious question is, are you sure it was looking for you to begin with?