Pride in Weirdness

Everyone out here in California knows that New Yorkers need a place to focus their preconceived notions on, a place to make fun of. Well, congratulations, Mom, because it looks like you guys in Florida are finally going to overtake us in the "only in" stories category. Well deserved, I might add.

After the tug of war over Elián González and the presidential recount of 2000, the anthrax scare after the 2001 terrorist attacks, four consecutive hurricanes in 2004 and now the Schiavo case, the rest of the world moves on. But for Florida there is a curious psychic toll, a sense of emerging from an alternate universe where gripping sagas blot out the beloved sun.

It was not always this way. California used to be the capital of cultural, political and environmental crises, the place that baffled and mesmerized with its vivid goings-on.

"California looks like a staid old New England state at this point," said James Kane, chief pollster for Florida Voter, a nonpartisan polling group. "In some respects people here get embarrassed, but there is a certain amount of pride that we are not like any other state."

Oh well. We still have Michael Jackson.