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Right. An added aspect is that the deliberate searching for and publication of all the weird stories means if you do something stupid in Florida everyone is going to know about it and be laughing at you. We Floridians or transplanted Floridians dont consider the stories "dirty laundry" we want to hide. They are instead precautionary tales to teach us what is what, entertain us, and use to educate our children. These days videos make it all the more graphic. Gators add to the fun. They are the ultimate reality check. They are everywhere there is a body of water anywhere nearby. Even golf course ponds, coy ponds, and sometimes little suburban backyard swimming pools can have gators. So can any of the land gators travel over while looking for new ponds. Be stupid or drunk or stoned or unobservant around gators and you may be lucky a while or the gators may be small. But sooner or later the gator is bigger or your luck runs out.I am really late to this party, but there is a reason for the mythos of "Florida Man", and it has nothing do do with any past-the-bell-curve proclivities of the residents.
The simple fact of the matter is is that Florida is basically the only state that allows their police reports and records to be openly browsed and scrapped for content. There are other states that have open access laws for police reports, but all other narrow down the access to some kind of specific proactive request. Only Florida lets you hook into a passive feed of all reports and dredge it for content.
And dredge it people do. There are several "news" companies whose sole occupation is combing through those police feeds looking for the most weird and outrageous reports to sell to various news aggregations sites for content. In other state those weird and outrageous reports would only come to light if someone with personal, firsthand knowledge of the event posted it to social media or promoted it to some news site. This does happen sometimes, as you will see those "This guy gives 'Florida Man' a run for their money!" stories out there. But in Florida you can find every such report, sort through them for the most "interesting" and then publish a whole damn catalog of events.
Florida is only know as "Florida" because they hang all their dirty laundry out for the world to see. In every other state they at least try to hide it behind a fig leaf.