No one who voted for HOLE on Top Web Comics every day has ever been thrown into a live volcano. I’m just sayin’.

I live in Florida — Jacksonville Florida specifically. So it is with a wearily familiar eye that I observe that with around six percent of the nation’s population, something like fifty percent of the truly stupid and bizarre behavior of this country occurs here. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s the mix of people from all over the United States, (most people who live here are not from here) maybe it’s the fact that even with water on all sides and our very own species of lobster that tastes delicious and is easy to trap, restaurants like Red Lobster who ship all their seafood frozen from somewhere else continue to thrive.

I just don’t know. (But Red Lobster has the worst seafood available in Florida… in case you were wondering.)

In any case, this was probably not what was going through the heads of the two victims walking home from Popeye’s Chicken here in Jacksonville one early morning just after midnight on April the tenth. The young woman and her boyfriend watched four men in a new Pontiac drive by them several times, shouting “Give us the chicken!” before the car finally pulled up in front of them with it’s lights out.

One of the men jumped out of the car and shoved a pistol in the frightened couple’s faces, as a man still in the car shouted “Blast him! Blast him!”

“You know what time it is.” intoned the gun wielder ominously, “Give it up.”

Deciding to save their heroics for a time when something more than fried chicken was on the line, they gave it up.

This made me think back to the time when a pack of 15-20 rednecks, having just vacated a bar, came across me and three of my friends drinking beer after having just closed up the Pizza Hut where we all worked. They wanted beer and pizza, and I considered myself extremely lucky to have come away merely having be en knocked senseless when punched in the back of the skull. (I never even knew the guy was behind me.)

What is it about Florida? What makes us more crazy, stupid, violent, deluded, perverted, hypocritical, and willfully ignorant than other Americans? Ah… wait. I know what it is.

It’s the chicken.

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