florida

"Down in Florida, people were listening to Nasty Savage and Savatage as well as shredders like Randy Rhoads before the really heavy stuff started with bands like Celtic Frost, Slayer, Hellhammer and Venom."

"To make it fun and exciting, we kind of looked at it like wrestling. You know how in wrestling you've got these big guys and it's all competition and they've got something to say about this or that guy, but it's all in fun? The idea was to write songs that blew everybody else away and pull off the most wicked, fucking beats. But it was only in fun, and it was a motivational tool."

"It was more competitive in Florida than in Buffalo, which is where we were originally from. But I don't know if it was a completely negative thing because sometimes that competitive spirit helps bands better themselves. Everyone wants to be the fastest and the heaviest, and that kept the scene moving forward in a faster, heavier direction."

"I’ll never forget a party I went to in an old barn in central Florida. [...] Amon were playing and then Xecutioner (which became Obituary). I went to the party with Chuck [Schuldiner] and I remember David Vincent saying to Chuck, ‘Man, I love your vocals on ', which he had the advance cassette of. It seemed like every band that became influential from that Florida scene was there that night. It was just a room of artists interacting and there was a lot of camaraderie and respect. And you could feel it. It was like, ‘Whoa, this is a scene.’"

"I’d met Chuck in ’89 [...] We got in contact with him and hung out for a while, he introduced me to [producer and engineer] Scott [Burns] who was doing sound for a show at an airplane hangar. It was Morbid Angel, Obituary, Atheist, Amon and Nocturnus. That’s where I met every key member of every band. That was the first sign that something really cool was happening."

"The Florida technical death metal scene was huge for me. The mind-bending songs of Atheist were just so out of this world and even if I didn’t understand the songs back then they still resonated with me. I couldn’t love this more if I tried."

"is a really , , . So, it's a weird place to begin with, and then you have these kids with no place to go. So maybe death metal happened as a reaction to that or maybe it's just some energetic physics thing—a spirit that's in the air and kids tune into it if they have an artistic bone in their bodies."

"Tampa never really got the shows coming through town that New York or the West Coast got, and that created a real hunger for good music. We kind of had to create our own scene."

"Back then, we were all trying to define our own sounds and images. I don’t wanna say there was unfriendly competition, but I don’t wanna say there was friendly competition either. We were all competing for the front seat. It all started with and . You had the thing going on with and we wanted to outdo that. My goal was to be heavier, vocally especially."

"I was jamming with a few other guys in in the late 80’s, when we collectively decided to move to Florida. […] It was who actually told us about the scene in Florida before we came down. […] So we moved down in December of 1989. […] But when we first moved to South Florida, the scene was just killer for metal. That was a big reason why we moved down."

"To be honest, the early Tampa scene was very divisive, and a lot of the bands didn’t like each other or talk to each other because it was extremely competitive. No one knew that literally every single one of their bands was going to get signed."

"Back then, I really wanted to destroy everybody. I wanted people to have to work a lot harder after the fans witnessed what we had going on. I wanted to smoke people. I really believed that bands were challenging each other, trying to outdo each other and make each other quit - almost like the rivalries with East Coast and West Coast rappers. I really kind of thought people wanted to write parts that would engulf the whole world. I wanted to get onstage and have people go, "Holy shit - what the fuck is going on?" I wanted to write stuff that would make other bands run and hide. It's not really very nice, but that's what drove me."

"I didn't really see [Morbid Angel] as competition. I just saw it as someone who was shit-talking who was gonna get pounded. But after a confrontation at an airport, that came to an end. We got on a plane with them and I went, "Hey man, what the fuck is this shit about?" And there was an about-face. "Oh, we didn't say that, man." But we have some mutual friends and shit, so we know what was said. And it was like, "OK, you know what, if you want to take it to the next level, we're ready." We made peace after that and realized we were all on the same team."

"Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000–36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations. To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry. An ancient arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas could be corroborated by the presence of haplogroup X in pre-Columbian human remains. Two studies on mtDNA variation in pre-Columbian samples have reported partial CR sequences that include the 16223T-and-16278T motif (Hauswirth et al. 1994; Ribeiro-Dos-Santos et al. 1996)."

"I have also had a close look at the Windover data. Unlike the Norris Farms sequences, which are overwhelmingly drawn from the four known Native American clusters, the Windover sequences are highly variable and contain only one that is anywhere near a Native American sequence in cluster A. The rest either have no matches that I can find or they are European"

"Windover DNA testing indicates that the people of the Windover bog were of European descent, not Asian descent as had been previously thought. If this DNA testing is accurate, the Windover bog inhabitants were not descendents of people who migrated across the great land bridge. Rather they were Europeans who must have somehow managed to migrate across the Atlantis Ocean centuries before their descendants."

"The Windover Bog people, dating from 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, appear to be contemporary or slightly earlier predecessors to the Ancient Canal Builders. Their DNA and Haplogroup sequence tests indicate they are of European rather than Native American ancestry."

"While Hauswirth et al. [55] claimed to have isolated both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a number of the Windover brains, their data are suspect as the mtDNA lineages they reported are absent in all other prehistoric and contemporary Native American populations studied to date"

"Legendary was Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure ground. Here, on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built. One hundred thousand trees, twenty thousand tons of marble are the ingredients of Xanadu's mountain."

"Tourists and settlers very often regret not to find their favorite flowers of the North, missing especially the , the , the , the perennial , the , and the . As a matter of fact the gardens of Florida are far excelling those of the North in beauty, variety, and splendor. The many evergreen trees and shrubs, the s and bamboos, the s, and s, the s and imbue every cottage and villa garden with a decidedly tropical appearance. In place of the lilac we have the , one of the most beautiful and shapely shade trees in existence."

"Where the hell's Fiji? Near Florida?"

"Virginia: Oh god no. He's a birthmark on his head that looks like a big old... Jimmy: Florida. Shaped like Florida... Florida with balls."

"California, Florida, whatever. Either way, your pale ass is getting a tan."

"There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green."

"In God We Trust."

"A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover."

"One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

"Just not being senile is considered great down here."

"There was a guy down in Florida who said that, at the age of 53 years old, he was in good enough physical condition to withstand the wind, rain and hail of a force-3 hurricane. Now, let me explain somethin' to ya: it isn't that the wind is blowin', it's what the wind is blowin'. If you get hit by a Volvo, it doesn't matter how many sit-ups you did that morning."

"There’s high awareness of the ballot measure. People understand Amendment 4 is on the ballot. But they don’t necessarily connect that there’s a six-week abortion ban."

"Man, you must love this fucking guy, 'cause he's the biggest pussy I ever met, the dude who lives his life according to everyone else's standards. "I have to go down to Florida and get married because that what's expected of me." And the fucking insane part is, he ain't even crazy about the chick he's marrying or Florida, never mind the fact that he's got a perfectly good chick right here in Jersey who he's nuts about and even Anne-fucking-Frank can see that she's nuts about him — God knows why. And she likes you for who you are, man. She ain't trying to stuff you into a box you'll never fit into, not to mention that she's carrying your hideous fucking C.H.U.D. of a kid. Jesus, if you had any sense whatsoever, you'd fucking stop trying to bray it up with the rest of the sheep and live your life the way it makes sense to you, you fucking ass."

"I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humourous, and continued from there. I turned my home state of Florida into the Land of Xanth."

"It is my hope that we're moving beyond racial appeals here in Florida and in the rest of the South as well. I say it's time we told the rest of the nation that we aren't caught up in the mania to stop busing at any cost, that we're trying to mature politically down here, that we know know the real issues when we see them and that we no longer will be fooled, frightened and divided against ourselves. That is how the South can lead other regions to a better understanding of what this country's all about."

"Southern states in general have seen more rapid growth in recent decades as people, especially retirees, have migrated to warm-weather states. Florida, which has a minimum wage that is 70 cents higher than the national minimum, has seen job growth of 110 percent since 1981."

"• Florida’s government is divided into three branches: the executive, the judicial and the criminal."

"• Under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground."

"Key West, the end of the road, the most flamboyant, decadent, debauched and pungent place in the Florida. Key West is Florida’s Florida—the place way down at the bottom where the weirdest of the weird end up; the place where the abnormal is normal."

"Florida’s a great place for folks in their old age…an’ it helps them get there faster, too. You go down for a change and a rest; the bellboy gets the change, an' the hotel gets the rest. The day I checked out they gave me a bill which looked like the distance to the farthest star computed in inches, an’ if I hadn't been able to leave behind me a suitcase containin’ ten thousand shares in a copper mine which may be discovered in Colorado some day, I would o’ felt mighty guilty slidin’ down that rainspout."

"From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”. First, a little overlooked history: the initial encounter between Europeans in the future United States came with the establishment of a Huguenot (French Protestant) colony in 1564 at Fort Caroline (near modern Jacksonville, Florida). More than half a century before the Mayflower set sail, French pilgrims had come to America in search of religious freedom. The Spanish had other ideas. In 1565, they established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and proceeded to wipe out the Fort Caroline colony. The Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because...they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” When hundreds of survivors of a shipwrecked French fleet washed up on the beaches of Florida, they were put to the sword, beside a river the Spanish called Matanzas (“slaughters”). In other words, the first encounter between European Christians in America ended in a blood bath."

"Here in Florida … we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland — the blessing of size. There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine."

"The most exciting and by far the most important part of our Florida Project — in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing in Disney World — will be our Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow! We call it EPCOT. … EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."

"Being a child in Florida when my parents moved there in 1948 and witnessing the changes in the coastline, the marshes that I first discovered - finding horseshoe crab eggs, these tiny little creatures prospering in really clear water and going out on a dock at night and seeing these bioluminescent creatures just flashing and glowing - and witnessing the change, that the waters became not beautiful, clear and blue but muddy - that was powerful incentive to say, why are we doing this?"

"When I was twelve, I helped my Daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement, because some damn fool parked a dozen warheads ninety miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a coupla' hundred warheads off Washington or New York and no-one would know anything about it until it was all over."

"Significantly, Floridians could not vote for Republican Abraham Lincoln, who was not on the ballot in any of the Deep South slave states. The hated 'Black Republican' Party was believed by most southerners to advocate abolition and black equality, although Lincoln and his party were primarily interested in restricting the expansion of slavery in the territories."

"I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste."

"The three States of Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, comprising the military department of the south, having deliberately declared themselves no longer under the protection of the United States of America, and having taken up arms against the said United States, it becomes a military necessity to declare them under martial law. This was accordingly done on the 25th day of April, 1862. Slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible; the persons in these three States — Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina— heretofore held as slaves, are therefore declared forever free."

"Pensacola, I'm a rep it to death, 'cause I'm a Florida boy. Nothing more, nothing less. You disrespect or test what I say, it's body to the head, 'til shit go my way!"

"Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as "the America of America," but to a Brit like me, it's more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there."