Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

It’s been cold and incredibly wet in Cape Town this week, which has once again taken born-and-bred Capetonian Dominique by surprise (“Can you believe this rain?!”). Not as surprised as one family in Mitchell’s Plain though, who returned home to find a large wild otter in their driveway.
For those who are unfamiliar with the geography of Cape Town, the southern parts of Mitchell’s Plain aren't far from the beach, but it's not exactly a sea view either. For those who are unfamiliar with otters: they have very short legs.
According to SPCA wildlife supervisor Jon Friedman, it's quite common for otters to navigate the metro using underground stormwater drains. This mode of transportation also means they sometimes pop up in places like Mitchells Plain, especially when heavy storms disrupt the flow of drainage systems.
If this rain carries on, we might be putting the Otter in Ottery.
In this week's column, Dominique explains that there is no such thing as a completely original idea. Stigler's Law tells us that no scientific discovery is ever named after the original discoverer. In a wonderful piece of irony, Stigler didn't even come up with this concept! If you need a reminder that innovation is really just a tweak of an existing idea, then this piece is for you.
Read on the sheer joy of Florida Man, proof that South Africa isn't the only place in the world that sometimes feels like a movie. And in today's Fast Facts, Dominique takes you through strange things that animals do. It gets way weirder than otters going in search of a gatsby for lunch.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

Florida Man: your next braai game

TL;DR: Is he a superhero? Is he a public menace? Or is he the spirit of chaos that lives in all of us? The origins of the eponymous Florida Man, revealed.
If you haven’t participated in the viral Florida Man game yet, then you’re about to discover something really fun. You can play it right now, as you’re sitting with your phone in your hand or your browser open. Simply open a new tab and type “Florida man” followed by your birthday into Google search. The first news headline that comes up is your very own Florida Man spirit animal.
When I do mine, the result is “Florida man hit dad in face with pizza after learning he helped deliver him, police say.”
For our resident ghost's birthday, the winner is "I'm not going to lie, it's cocaine: Florida man tries to eat stolen debit card, deputies say."
Pro tip: play this with guests at your next braai. It’s a guaranteed laugh and a great conversation starter.
Of course, Florida Man isn’t actually a single person but rather a trope of all the Florida men who’ve made headlines for doing something… unusual. Since these headlines almost always start with the words “Florida man”, the trope has since evolved into an almost mythical personality, a meme that captures the spirit of the bizarre.
Here are a few of my favourite Florida Man headlines from this year:

Florida man sneezes his intestines out of his body at restaurant

Florida man asks officers if he can drink another beer during arrest

Florida man uses alligator to open beer can

Shirtless Florida man accused of running up to woman riding bike and punching her twice

Florida man arrested after taking off with $30K in Pokémon cards

Which begs the question: what on earth is going on in Florida? Is it something in the water?
Not really, actually - Florida just happens to exist at the centre of a very odd Venn diagram. One contributor is the sheer size of the state and its equally massive population. Florida’s population stands at more than 21 million people, most of which are concentrated along the coastline or near the big theme parks. It stands to reason that when you put more people in a place (especially a hot, humid place), you’re going to end up with more crazy interactions between them.
Another contributor is something called the Sunshine Laws. Thanks to these, Florida is the state with the strongest public records laws. That makes it very easy for journalists in Florida to get their hands on police incident reports and churn out attention-grabbing stories practically in real time. It might well be that Florida experiences the same amount of shenanigans as any other state; we just read about them more frequently.
The final contributor is mental health. This is a huge issue in Florida, which ranks at the bottom of all states for mental health funding, according to the Florida Policy Institute. I guess that point speaks for itself.
I wish I could tell you that there was some more exciting answer, like mind-altering gasses rising off the Everglades or the government secretly testing drugs on the Floridian population by spiking their tap water.
Regardless of its somewhat ordinary origins, the legend of Florida Man lives on to spread chaos another day.

Stigler's Law: Whose idea is it anyway?

Dominique's fast facts: Strange things that animals do

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

A sea lion is the only nonhuman mammal with a proven ability to keep a beat. Scientists trained a female sea lion named Ronan to do it, and she then showed she could transfer that skill to a song with a different beat that she had not heard before.

Young goats pick up accents from each other, joining humans, bats, and whales in the category of mammals known to adjust their vocal sounds to fit into a new social group.

African buffalo herds display voting behaviour, in which individuals register their travel preference by standing up, looking in one direction, and then lying back down. Only adult females can vote.

A supercolony of invasive Argentine ants, known as the "California large," covers an area spanning 901 kilometres of the U.S. West Coast. The colony is currently engaged in a turf war with a nearby supercolony in Mexico.

Sharks kill fewer than 10 people per year. Conversely, humans kill about 100 million sharks per year.