Want to revisit a bunch of the usual cretin-packed news dispatches from Florida for the Year of Oh Lord 2012?
MSN.com has thoughtfully compiled a Top 20 list for you. (I assume they would’ve done a Top 50, but the human soul can only take so much.)
I’ve never been prouder.
(Memetastic image stolen from Miami New Times blog Riptide)
After a couple of years of notoriety, sightings, joke social-media profiles and one “attack,” the infamous Tampa Bay Monkey is now in captivity. Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission officers tranquilized the TBM yesterday after a brief chase in “a wooded area in a south St. Petersburg neighborhood.”
The monkey will be tested for diseases, and monkey specialists will try to determine from whence it came.
The question of where the TBM will go from here is currently unanswered. If you would like to volunteer to adopt the monkey, please don’t, because thinking for a second it would be cool to have a monkey and actually being up to the task of wrangling, feeding, toilet training and otherwise caring for a wild monkey are two very, very different things.
Do you know about the Tampa Bay Monkey? There’s a Tampa Bay Monkey. The TBM has been a local celebrity here in St. Pete for a few years now, making public appearances in folks’ yards and such, earning its own Twitter feed, Facebook page, etc.–you know, the usual celebrity monkey stuff.
Apparently, the Tampa Bay Monkey finally went ape on a local resident. And some people seem inordinately surprised that a wild animal would do something so, well, wild. Because some people are, well, really dumb, I guess. Should really dumb people inhabit an area that’s home to not only a free-range monkey, but also alligators, venomous snakes and spiders, and possibly a skunk ape? I don’t know–how many really dumb people do you want there to be?
(Story from Tampa Bay 10 News, and includes the money quote “I don’t trust the monkey.”)
A Collier County moron lost his hand back in June when he attempted to HAND-FEED A FISH TO AN ALLIGATOR.
Yeah.
Poetic justice, right? It gets better: on Friday, 63-year-old Wallace Weatherholt was charged with the crime of feeding an alligator, a second-degree misdemeanor.
Questions, I have them:
1. What does it say about Florida (and America at large) that we need to have a law against hand-feeding alligators, and
2. How exactly did a guy who thought it would be a good idea to hand-feed an alligator manage to stay alive for 63 years?
When thieves stole half a million dollars’ worth of medical equipment from Orlando’s Florida Hospital Center for Diagnostic Pathology, they got a little something extra: “a substance that could eat away at human skin.”
Here’s the Orlando Sentinel story, via Gizmodo.