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Florida

  1. Entertainment

    Mad Men Writers Reportedly Pitching New Show About NASA in the 60s

    The Golden Age of space exploration could get a lot sexier if the minds behind Mad Men have anything to say about it. Reports surfaced this week that writers from the acclaimed AMC drama are scouting locations along Florida's Space Coast for a show centered around NASA during the 1960s, the glory days of the Apollo program.

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  2. Weird

    Florida Mayoral Candidate Plagued by Voodoo Curse, Because Florida

    I grew up near Chicago, and thus have an abiding respect for dirty, low-down, mudslinging politics. Every once in a while, though, the rest of the world proves that they can still teach the City of Broad Shoulders a thing or two about really ugly politics This week, it's Florida, where North Miami mayoral candidate Anna Pierre thinks that one of her opponents -- or their supporters -- is using voodoo rituals to try and sink her campaign.

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  3. Weird

    DJs Suspended Indefinitely Over Chemistry Joke Florida Didn’t Understand

    We probably don't have to tell Geekosystem readers this, but water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. It can be written as H2O, or as dihydrogen monoxide which means literally "Two hydrogen one oxygen." When two Florida radio DJs announced that dihydrogen monoxide was coming out of their faucets, the Fort Myers area went bananas. The DJs have been suspended indefinitely and could face felony charges.

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  4. Weird

    Tweets From the Worst Place in the World: Our 15 Favorite Florida Man Tweets

    Florida Man has quickly become one of my very favorite Twitter feeds, representing a peculiar blend of stupidity, crassness, and mind-boggling lack of common sense that is a genre unto itself. If you aren't following Florida Man, I don't know what you're doing with your time on Twitter, but I am prepared to say that you're spending it poorly. Don't take our word for it, though. Check out our fifteen favorite examples of behavior peculiar to Florida Man.

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  5. Weird

    Python Challenged: Massive Florida Snake Hunt Nets Just 50 Snakes in One Month

    It's starting to look like it's possible that Florida's much-ballyhooed invasion by ravening hordes of Burmese pythons may have been a bit overblown. While officials cry out that hundreds of thousand the animals are invading the state, turning places like the Everglades into nothing more than enormous python spas, a month long python hunt in the state just came to a close telling a different story. 30 days of hunting by as many as 1,500 people registered snake hunters out to bag the most pythons netted an unexpectedly low total catch -- just 50 snakes.

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  6. Science

    Florida Luxury Condos Test Doggie DNA to Identify Who’s Not Scooping the Poop

    Need proof that the rich really aren't that different from you and me? How's this -- they don't pick up their dog's poop when they think no one is looking, either. No, not even when they're only walking their dog on the turf at their luxury condo. That's why a condo community in Florida is making residents enter their dog's DNA into a new genetic database that will be used to match a poop to a pooch and identify which owners aren't cleaning up after their pets. Which is really nice to hear, because you know once resources start being devoted to things like this, we've clearly solved the big problems like world hunger, and can now put science to work on the really important issues of our age.

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  7. Uncategorized

    Unrepentant Florida Donkey Diddler Accepts Plea Deal, Will Continue To Fight For His Right To Donkey Sex

    Last week, we brought you the latest developments in the case of Carlos Romero, a Florida farmhand allegedly caught in a sexually compromising position with a miniature donkey named Doodle. It would appear that the judge in the case, Steven Rogers, did not grant the argument made by Romero's lawyers that laws on the books in Florida prohibiting sexual contact with animals violated the U.S. Constitution, a fact which is to Florida's credit. Today, we bring you news that should bring some kind of merciful closure to this sordid affair -- but probably won't -- as Romero has accepted a plea bargain.

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  8. Uncategorized

    Man Starts Fire In Yard, Clobbers Firefighter With Shovel For Trying To Put It Out

    If you're most people, when a firefighter shows up to extinguish a blaze on your property, your first instinct would be to thanks them -- not to hit them with a shovel. It just goes to show that 44-year-old Floridian Gregory Sean Turner is not most people. Turner was arrested earlier this week on charges of Aggravated Battery on a Firefighter with a Deadly Weapon (Shovel) and Preventing or Obstructing Extinguishment of a Fire. That's a rap sheet we'd really like to think is unique, but being that this is Florida...we just can't assume that's the case.

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  9. Uncategorized

    Man Accused Of Donkey Sex Rejects Plea Bargain, Doesn’t See What’s Wrong With Donkey Sex

    A Florida man accused of a sex act with a miniature donkey named Doodle has rejected a plea deal, choosing instead to take his case to a jury. Considering that when he was arrested last month, 31-year-old Carlos R. Romero offered a vigorous defense of the right to have sex with animals, telling detectives that "Florida is a backwards state and people frown on zoophilia here," we don't exactly love his odds in an open court.

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  10. Uncategorized

    Huge Lego Albert Einstein

    This huge bust of Albert Einstein, made out of LEGO, lives in Florida's Legoland, located just outside of Orlando in Winter Haven. The park, which opened this past October, features around fifty million LEGO bricks used. The bust of Einstein took around four months to build and employed a team of around six to seven builders, and measures in at twenty feet tall and ten feet wide. Check out another picture after the jump.

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  11. Uncategorized

    Man Sues WikiLeaks for $150 Million Worth of Emotional Distress

    A Florida man named David Pitchford is suing WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange for causing him some serious emotional distress. Pitchford's reasoning is as follows: He says that WikiLeaks' release of thousands of sensitive documents endangered him and every person in the United States "and the entire planet," and that this constitutes the intentional and negligent affliction of emotional distress. Per Pitchford, this has caused him five forms of personal injury:

    A. A worsening of Plantiffs hyper tention; B. A worsening of Plaintiffs depression; C. A Worsenig of Plaintiff's Stress; D. Living in constant fear of being stricken by another heart attack and or stroke  as a result of the foregoing; E. In fear of being on the brink of Nucliar WAR
    For his pains, Pitchford wants $150 million. Full legal papers below:

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  12. Uncategorized

    Student Googles Himself, Finds He’s Accused of Murder

    I can't possibly improve upon Tampa Bay news station WTSP's headline on this story, so I'm not even going to try: A University of Florida student and Publix employee named Zachary Garcia idly Googled himself only to discover that his photo had been circulated by the Polk County Sheriff's Office in connection with a murder. But the suspect in the felony murder case in question was Zachery Garcia -- that's Zachery with an "e." Zachary Garcia, the one who's not a murder suspect:

    "I was just very shocked to find my picture and the article saying that I was convicted of a felony murder charge," he said, "and I was just very shocked and angry that someone put my name up there and said I did something I didn't do." "Everybody makes mistakes," Garcia added. "I work at Publix and I might get somebody's sub (order) wrong. But for somebody to get (the photo of a suspect) wrong...it's not a sandwich, it's somebody's life you're playing with."
    And now as this story spreads, non-murder suspect Zachary Garcia is going to see his name pop up in all of these murder-related stories about how Googling his name used to erroneously cause his photo to turn up in connection with a murder case. D'oh! (WTSP via Fark)

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  13. Uncategorized

    Bank Forecloses on Man’s House Even Though He Didn’t Have a Mortgage

    Scary sign-of-the-times: A Florida man's home, which he paid for in cash last December, was foreclosed upon by Bank of America, despite the fact that he hadn't taken out a mortgage. From the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

    [Jason] Grodensky knew nothing about the foreclosure until July, when he learned that the title to his home had been transferred to a government-backed lender. "I feel like I'm hanging in the wind and I'm scared to death," said Grodensky. "How did some attorney put through a foreclosure illegally?"
    To its credit, Bank of America did acknowledge its mistake and said it would "correct it at its own expense," but had Grodensky not conducted the newspaper and brought media attention to his case, who knows how things would have played out? One foreclosure attorney contacted by the paper summed up the situation as follows: "The evidence doesn't matter, the proof doesn't matter, due process doesn't matter ... the only thing that matters is that they get rid of these cases." Meanwhile, some of the nation's largest mortgage companies are suspending foreclosures because it turns out that one single guy, whose job it was to approve 10,000 foreclosures per month by signing them by hand, wasn't reading the paperwork. (Sun Sentinel via Reddit; h/t Boing Boing. title pic via Sun-Sentinel.)

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  14. Uncategorized

    Juror Uses iPhone to Look Up a Dictionary Definition in Court, Sparks Mistrial

    Florida's Court of Appeals recently overturned a manslaughter conviction because one of the jurors on the case had used his iPhone to look up the definition of "prudence" during the trial. (Tech geeks may snicker to hear that he did so using Encarta.)

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