Dave Barry, columnist for the Miami Herald, is one of the funniest writers and for years he got a lot of mileage out of documenting the things that the people of Florida and Miami did that convinced him that it was the craziest state in the nation. He is fortunate to have retired from his weekly column because recent events suggest that my state of Ohio may well take that particular crown.

Consider the following recent stories that have garnered national attention for our state.

• The owner of over 50 dangerous exotic animals abruptly released them, resulting in 48 of them (including 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, and eight bears) having to be killed.
• We had an Amish sect led by a renegade bishop go on a rampage, cutting the beards of fellow Amish who had for whatever reason displeased him. He was improbably named Sam Mullett.
• We then had the so-called ‘Craigslist killer‘, a 52-year old who claimed to be a chaplain in a church, who is charged, along with a 16-year old associate, with luring people to a remote area with the promise of a job to oversee some land and then hunting them down and killing them.
• Then there was the case of an 8-year child who was taken away from his mother by the child protective services and put in foster care because they feared that the child was dangerously obese and the mother was not doing anything about it.
• We have people putting forward a bill in the state legislature that would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected, which could occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. This attempt has caused a deep split in the anti-abortion movement.
• We had the owner of an apartment complex put a sign up that said the swimming pool could be used by white people only.

I am not claiming that Ohio has definitely become the craziest state in the nation. But we may at last have a shot at a national championship that has long been denied us in the sports arena.