For Florida, odd and sometimes grievous news just seems to be part of daily life.
Just last week there was a story about peacocks going on "the pill," one about police unsuccessfully attempting to tase a 450-pound boar into submission and another about a mother and son who allegedly tried to put a "hit" on two men and offered to pay the would-be killer in anti-anxiety pills.
"Florida is messed up," Drew Curtis wrote in his 2007 book "It's Not News, It's Fark." "Whatever the reason, Florida is without a doubt the No. 1 state for weird news."
Though there is hardly a way to quantify the "weirdness" of a state, the fact that the oddities of the Florida news have inspired multiple books, at least one daily blog and the only state-related tag on Fark -- a site dedicated to absurd news -- seems to support Curtis' claim.
When Tom Scherburger, Metro editor and 16-year employee of the St. Petersburg Times, decided to take all the weird news he had seen over the years and begin a blog called "Bizarre Florida," he knew it would be quite an undertaking.
"We knew when we started Bizarre Florida near the end of November [in 2007] that the challenge wouldn't be finding strange stories," the blog states. "Rather, it simply would be keeping up with all the bizarre events -- large and small -- that occur daily in the Sunshine State."
"We're a content provider for the rest of the country, if not the world," the 28-year Florida resident told ABC News. "The material's there."
That material is sometimes a sort of oddball humor -- like when a Tampa man was arrested for riding his bike in a batman costume -- and other times intensely grotesque -- like when a man from Winter Haven allegedly beat his baby daughter to death for not being a boy.
For Scherberger, knowing the difference between the comic and tragic can be difficult.
"There's a fine line there," he said. "Some tragedies are funny, to anyone it's not happening to. It's on a case-by-case basis. It's a gut feeling."
By walking that fine line, a gaggle of comedy writers who make their home in Florida have become successful by looking to the day's headlines for inspiration.
Do you have more information about this topic? If so, please click here to contact the editors of ABC News.
