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Old September 21st, 2012 #9
Alex Linder
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 45,756
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nice thumbnail of florida:

Won't the real… 3 days ago

In short: Florida, seriously, WTF?
In long: Florida, a swampy no-man's-land for most of history, nearly ceded to the Spanish due to its lack of usefulness, containing their first big fortress within oldest city in North America, ultimately capitalized upon by industrialists like Henry Flagler who built railroads under questionable working conditions and convinced wealthy Northerners that riding two days into a malaria-infested jungle was a great alternative to traveling overseas by ship for the same conditions, which later became a repository for thousands of eccentric roadside attractions as cars took over from trains, ultimately bringing an endless stream of developers hoping to ride Flagler's coattails, from condo developers to Walt Disney to every meth-addled divorcee in the eastern US, resulting in a melting pot within a melting pot, a mostly southern state with mostly northern culture, these cultures endlessly intermingling into a lowest common denominator of culture, with civilization clustered in a handful of metro areas, but still retaining a mostly rural life of cattle ranching and orange groves, much of which was overtaken by a housing boom that was derailed--like one of Flagler's trains--by a series of hurricanes and poor insurance and tax changes, sucks.