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Comments
I kinda feel that some of south Florida is real estate is meant to sell people on wishful thinking rather than what life is really like.
Videos and other advertising trying to sell me property (particularly condos) here in south Florida have done things like the following:
Advertising "resort-style living". Pools (inevitably with women in swimwear)! Spa treatments! Shopping! Dining! Entertainment! I mean, there are some things like pools and tennis courts and such that are genuinely good to have for maintaining a healthy lifestyle that involves adequate exercise, but the shopping and dining is...definitely not part of that.
One video said that a property near Sawgrass Mills Mall, in Sunrise, Florida, was "5 minutes from Everglades National Park". From the Everglades as an ecosystem, the vast region of sawgrass-dominated wetland in the southern half of the state, perhaps (and part of the Everglades ecosystem is actually visible from this high-rise condominium). However, as you may be able to see in the Wikipedia article I linked, the actual Everglades National Park is only the southernmost end of the extent of the Everglades, and it'll take over an hour to drive down there.
BTW, you can check this yourself. Go to Google Maps and tell it to route you from Sawgrass Mills Mall to Everglades National Park. (If you want it to be even more accurate, set the destination to be the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center, because you can't drive through sawgrass wetlands, but you can drive to the visitor center at the edge of it.)
That same property featured a picture of kayaking on a small river lined with trees. It's located near no such geographical feature (switch to satellite view on Google Maps and check around Sawgrass Mills Mall -- to do kayaking, you'd have to drive across town, over to Fort Lauderdale or other points out east, where there are some places (like a few parks) where you can do this amidst all the urban/suburban development, but if you really want a ton of this kind of activity you'll want to look for mangrove forests at the coasts.
And you'll also see stuff like shots people jogging near the beach. Note that it takes basically the better part of an hour to drive to the beach from Sawgrass Mills Mall, maybe as little as half an hour if you really speed down I-595 and there's no traffic in the way and assuming you can park your car immediately once you get to A1A. Bottom line is, the western edge of development in Broward County (or Palm Beach County or Miami-Dade County, for that matter) is nowhere near the beach.
To be fair, one could say similar things about real estate anywhere, especially those clean model homes with nothing but a few pieces of decorative furniture in them. But it just feels particularly disingenuous in a place where people are basically selling a vacation as a permanent lifestyle.
Doubly so when most of the land is not next to the beach but everyone uses the beach to sell things.
I wonder how many horny old men end up disenchanted each year upon discovering that their retirement home does not come with a Hugh Hefner impersonator playset.
Isn't Everglades, like, a swamp? Because unless you tell me otherwise, I will maintain that "5 minutes from Everglades" isn't where you want your home to be unless your life already revolves around Shrek. (And if you do, I will do that anyway because the mental picture is too amusing.)
There is a wetland area to the west with a lot more trees, the Big Cypress swamp, which you might guess is dominated by cypress trees. So that part is swamp.
"5 minutes from the Everglades" is honestly more just because it's at the western edge of the built-up parts of the southeastern Florida counties. Look up Broward County on Google Maps and you'll see how there's sort of a hard line, west of which is the Everglades, and east of which is where people live.
The property in question just happened to be near that western edge of development. That doesn't mean it's actually easy to physically get onto the Everglades; you'd need to find some park or other place where you could get off your car and actually go to the actual marshlands, and as you might notice, there are a bunch of major highways, with high-speed traffic, lining the edge of this.
(If you were curious, the eastern edge of development is called the Atlantic Ocean.)
It's hard to visualize what the Everglades looks like from the satellite view, but here's a picture of what it's like if you see it from land level:
I got that photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades
That looks like a grassy field, but now imagine that they're all water grasses growing in knee- or waist-high water. It actually looks rather boring, if you're not interested in nature. And even if you are, it's not like there's trails out there; you can't build trails into this except by dumping dirt on something, and there's no shade either. Tourism on the Everglades is pretty much restricted to people going to specific places where locals have set up businesses that drive people out onto the marsh on airboats, which are basically just boats with giant fans behind them.
(Meanwhile, this also happens to be where all our drinking water comes from.)
I haven't watched Shrek, but you could probably get more mileage out of making fun of southwest Florida folks (around such cities as Naples, Ft. Myers, etc.) for living like Shrek. They don't; they basically just built boring suburbs there too. But at least it's a bit closer geographically since they're out west.
Speaking of that, here's Wikipedia's page on the Big Cypress National Preserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Cypress_National_Preserve
Note that bald cypress and pond cypress trees are deciduous so they look
deadbald during the dry season. Incidentally, the dry season is also the less-hot season, which means it's when tourists and snowbirds tend to show up.The more you know.
You know, actually I'm not surprised that much. Turns out CSI: Miami didn't lie to me. I remember there even were these fanned skid-boats, although I think I rather associated them with Mississippian bayou, because that's where fiction I consumed placed them before they began to air CSI on television. Not that it matters; I get where the design comes from.
Meanwhile, now I'm wondering how much I know about Poland. And not as a joke. Like, I really don't know much. Obviously, temperate climate, industry, forests, and I can name maybe a few major cities. Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, and Zelazola Wola which Wikipedia helpfully reminds me is actually spelled Zelazowa Wola and is not a major city at all but actually just a town of population 65 but where Chopin happened to be born.
I'm an American; of course I suck at geography outside the United States.Depends what passes for "enough". But yeah, having some 90% of your media feed made and set in the US does give at least some basic awareness of American conditions of life. (At least some of that amount must be passably faithful, one figures.)
--edit--
Oh, and talking about Storm: I guess the same would hold on the topic of Latin America if I was an avid watcher of soap operas. They're known by the Latin term here, "telenowela". Alas, I am not.
--edit--
damn, man, you edit your post as I edit mine to give you a reply, and now I have to edit it again to give you a reply to the edit you made.
also are you trying to compare yourself to a cockroach? =p
Every time someone starts up an airboat, they get to move a counter from one permanent to another.
Are you affected by summoning sickness?
I was expecting something about Flat Marsh.
Ooooh, I see I missed a link. I thought it was going to be a pun between air rafts and Graft.
bonus find: https://www.wfla.com/news/polk-county/tegu-lizard-terrorizing-polk-county-neighborhood/
I was recently reading about news story title grammar. It's a weird thing where you don't always use complete sentences/independent clauses but they're also not just noun phrases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headline#Headlinese
How do they do it in Polish?
Also, amusingly, there are two different headlines -- the page title "Tiger missing in Houston found safe, police say" and "Tiger missing in Houston turned in to authorities, police say".
So, "turned in" as in "turned [himself?] in". As far as I can see it at the moment, a headline in a Polish newspaper could make it sound like the tiger was treated same way as a human criminal, but there seems to be enough of a lexical and grammatic difference that I can't quite picture it sounding as if the tiger reached out to the police by own decision.
Also, last time there was a tiger hunt in Poland, a veterinarian was shot to death. You seem to have done better.
Also also, are you familiar with the phantom cats urban legend? Wikipedia acts as if it's predominantly Anglophonic belief, but we had "the puma" too. (It was presumably a bobcat.)
As for the other meaning of "turn in", it's never used with an object noun in the middle. "I'm done with everything, and I'm ready to turn in for the night." "My shift is over, so I'm going to turn in and head home." I think it has to do with the idea of hourly wage punch cards that you'd stick in a machine, or other stuff you'd give to your employer, in order to leave. But I'm not actually sure of the derivation. If I'm right, this would be related to the use of the phrase "turn in" to refer to relinquishing one's temporary possession of an object.
You'd think since they don't have to worry about newsprint space, internet articles would stop using that shortened headline language.
And I think many internet articles use that headline style since everyone kinda expects it and because it's more succinct in many cases.
But wait, that's not all. To begin with, she was buried in a cave, instead of, you know, a cemetery or any other kind of grave that you'd expect. Second, a finch's skull was found between her jaws, and another one next to her head. So far the team, despite consulting with ethnographers, found no burial custom that maps to this. Closest is that the Christianization of Finland was in many ways superficial, and birds used to be seen as messengers from the other world or otherwise a symbol of the soul, but there were no confirmed cases of such practice from the region the girl is believed to have come from.
The best part: the team had a Doc Frog and a Doc Cat.
(Well, there was a Finnish scholar with the name Frog that they consulted, and the team included one miss Kot, Ph.D., "kot" being Polish for "cat", who was also their spokesperson, but you can imagine the scene as a funny animals animation at your leisure.)