Dance of the Reptiles: Rampaging Tourists, Marauding Pythons, Larcenous Legislators, Crazed Celebrities, and Tar-Balled Beaches: Selected Columns - Softcover

Hiaasen, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345807022 ISBN 13: 9780345807021

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A collection of the best Miami Herald columns from the New York Times bestselling author of Squeeze Me on burning issues like animal welfare, polluted rivers, and the broken criminal justice system.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories—large and small—that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction.

Hiaasen offers his commentary—indignant, disbelieving, sometimes righteously angry, and frequently hilarious—on issues like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Bernie Madoff's trial, and the shenanigans of the recent presidential elections. Whether or not you have read Carl Hiaasen before, you are in for a wild ride.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. He is the author of thirteen novels, including the bestsellers Bad Monkey, Star Island, Nature Girl, Skinny Dip, Sick Puppy, and Lucky You, and four bestselling children’s books, Chomp, Hoot, Flush, and Scat. He joined The Miami Herald in 1976 and worked on the newspaper’s magazine and investigations team before starting his column in 1985. In 2010, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

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Go Away
May 30, 2001

Haul the Rampaging Nitwits Off to Tourist Court

Florida needs a special prison for tourists.

Not all tourists—just the ones who trash the place, rob, shoplift, vandalize, drive drunk, assault the cops, puke in the alleys, pee in the medians, and so on.

For some reason, Memorial Day brings out these troglodytes in droves.

This year it was South Beach that got the full treatment, but outbreaks of mayhem occur all over the state.

Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about crimes committed against tourists and do something about the crimes committed by tourists.

As it stands, rampaging visitors are tossed in jail with local criminals. This plainly is cruel and unusual punishment, and it’s only a matter of time before the criminals file a class-action suit.

Nobody deserves to be locked in a cell with obnoxious, whiny, ill-clad tourists. Such sociopaths belong in an institution of their own, a mini-Raiford specializing in hard-nosed discipline and social graces.

In fact, the entire justice system should recognize and deal with the uniquely repulsive nature of tourist misbehavior.

Say you’re driving through the Keys and some dork in a neon-blue rental yells, “Yee-haw!” and hurls an empty Southern Comfort bottle off the Bahia Honda Bridge. Under current statutes, that’s good for a wimpy charge of littering. It doesn’t even rate any jail time, only a piddling $50 fine.

You want deterrence? Put fangs in the law. Let the police snatch the boor off the highway and drag his sorry butt straight to Tourist Court. Same goes for the drunks, stoners, and public urinators.

Tourist Court should be set up sort of like Drug Court, only not as lenient. The judges would come from smaller venues, such as Kissimmee, Key West, Naples; places that get a rush of visitors yet still have a vestige of hometown pride.

First-time offenders in Tourist Court would be permitted to plead guilty in exchange for a one-week hitch at Sandal Camp. This would be set up like Boot Camp, only much tougher.

Here, inmates would spend seven days and six nights being drilled on vacation etiquette. For example, they’d be taught how to read speed-limit signs; how to park within the parallel lines of a parking space; how to drink and dispose of alcohol; how to vomit inconspicuously; how to steer a Jet Ski and chew gum at the same time. . . .

The drill instructors would be selected from an elite pool of former Highway Patrol troopers, ex–­Navy SEALs, and retired tour guides from Epcot.

Defendants who don’t want to tackle Sandal Camp could instead risk a trial. However, all jurors in Tourist Court should be chosen from the hospitality industry—waiters, waitresses, bartenders, chefs, motel desk clerks, cabbies. Not easily fooled, those folks—and no tipping allowed in the courtroom!

Once convicted, it’s off to Tourist Prison. Admittedly, finding a location for such a high-risk facility won’t be easy.

In the event of an escape, you’d have renegade tourists scurrying all over the place with no cash or credit cards—a nightmare scenario for resort communities, especially during the season.

Consequently, the prison is more likely to end up someplace like Mims or Plant City than, say, Turnberry Isle.

Inevitably, the age-old debate will come to a boil: Is the goal of incarcerating lawbreaking tourists merely to punish them, or should we make a good-faith effort at rehabilitation?

Many Floridians would argue, persuasively, that the conduct of some visitors is so abominable that they are beyond redemption. Yet a humane approach compels us to consider the possibility that a few of these nitwits might actually get the message if the screws are firmly applied.

It’s even conceivable they might someday become lawful and productive vacationers who treat their holiday destinations with care and respect—no more stealing baby lobsters and flushing the heads down motel-room toilets!

Yet for the incorrigible ones, the hard-core slobs, a stretch in Tourist Prison will serve mainly to keep them off the streets, beaches, and waterways—temporarily.

Unfortunately, vigilante justice might be the only kind these outlaws understand: an angry mob in minivans and Winnebagos to chase them up the Turnpike, all the way home, and do to their backyards what they did so heedlessly to ours.

August 12, 2001

Stop Shark-Feeding Dive Expeditions

No summer would be complete without delirious shark hype, even though bumblebees and lightning bolts kill more people.

Still, in the wake of two harrowing attacks, it’s significant to note that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission recently decided that there’s no reason to ban shark-feeding dive excursions.

While of dubious scientific footing, the ruling was consistent with the state’s anything-for-a-buck approach to marine management. At least four outfits in South Florida advertise shark-feeding scuba trips. These are promoted as “interactive experiences,” meaning dive operators get to interact with your money.

Giddy explorers descend to a place where sharks are chummed in and hand-fed pieces of smelly dead fish. The sharks themselves have no interest in communing—they come strictly to eat, which is what nature so exquisitely engineered them to do. They are also engineered for hunting, not begging, like stray cats. That’s why many dive captains and marine biologists oppose the chumming expeditions.

Supporters say the practice is educational, helping to raise appreciation for a creature that’s being ignorantly slaughtered worldwide, but whose presence is vital to sustaining the bounty of our oceans.

No one can dispute that sharks are maligned and misunderstood. However, teaching them to seek snacks from humans doesn’t seem like the smartest way to save them from extinction or to prevent future maulings.

Not that most suckers care, but a commercial shark dive is hardly a natural encounter. Sharks don’t naturally behave like Central Park pigeons.

And pigeons, of course, can’t sever a human limb.

In the Bahamas, where these dives have become popular, nine injuries were documented through 1996. Usually, the bitten party was the shark handler, not a paying customer.

The Florida expeditions concentrate on nurse sharks, a relatively slow and mopey species. Granted, it’s not easy to get nailed by a nurse shark, but it does happen. Three years ago, an Illinois teenager snorkeling in the Keys decided to tug the tail of a baby nurse shark, which promptly whipped around and chomped him. It did not let go. With the fish firmly attached to his chest, the boy was rushed to a Marathon hospital. There the shark was surgically dispatched, and its jaws were pried off.

The lesson of the story is twofold: Never underestimate any shark, and never overestimate any human. These are two life-forms that were never meant to fraternize. It’s telling that the supposedly advanced species is the one initiating eye-to-eye contact.

A shark easily can be conditioned to slurp mullet from a diver’s hand. If one day that shark meets up with a diver who has no mullet, it might impulsively settle for the hand instead. They are primordially swift and opportunistic. The ones that mangled little Jessie Arbogast in Pensacola and Krishna Thompson in Freeport weren’t rogues. They were doing precisely what sharks have been doing for 420 million years—chasing what they thought was supper.

With its crowded beaches, Florida leads the nation in unplanned shark encounters. The vast majority are nonfatal nips of surfers and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345807022
• ISBN 13: 9780345807021
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Herausgeber: Stevenson Diane
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland