Sun Sentinel: Child Molesters are Hilarious

Poor Barbara Hijek! She's been toiling away on her FloriDUH blog over at the Sun Sentinel for what, by her reckoning, is over 4,100 entries. That takes a lot out of a gal. So you ought to be nicer to her about the minor (yet boneheaded) flub she committed two...

By Brandon K. Thorp

March 17, 2011

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Poor Barbara Hijek! She's been toiling away on her FloriDUH blog over at the Sun Sentinel for what, by her reckoning, is over 4,100 entries. That takes a lot out of a gal. So you ought to be nicer to her about the minor (yet boneheaded) flub she committed two days ago by reporting the perplexing case of the Jacksonville couple who allowed a convicted child molester to sleep with their nine-year-old daughter.

See, "FloriDUH" is supposed to be a humorous column, as may be ascertained from the blog's motto ("Weird, wacky, strange, funny, crazy, off news from Florida"), or by taking a look at Ms. Hijek's bio over on the right of the page, which reads:

BARBARA HIJEK has spent the best years of her life doing news research in Florida, the most news-warpy place in the universe. She's still passed all her drug tests and remains Prozac free. Barbara graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in her hometown. Talk about culture shock! She is single and has lived in Fort Lauderdale for the past decade. Prior to that Barbara lived in Clearwater for a dozen years. Truly a bicoastal Floridian. And she still can't figure out which coast is wackier...

Not really an appropriate venue in which to discuss the systematic exposure to extreme risk of a nine-year-old girl by her parents, or of the many potential rapes which may have resulted. Sure, Hijek tried to play it straight in the reportage, but she also tried to keep things light and fun. She began:

This is FloriDUH post #1,435.

That's a lot of lame-brained Floridians for FloriDUH fodder.

We had thought we had heard it all -- until now.

Brace yourself.

This is a hard one to comprehend.

You can kind of gauge the Sentinel's respect for its readers' attention spans from the length of the above paragraphs, don't you think? Well, they've underestimated 'em this time. "FloriDUH? Seriously?!" wrote one commenter: "This is a barbaric crime, not a 'duh' misstep." Another: "why is this under floriduh and wacky news? ... sun-sentinel, you have a way with words...sorry excuse for a newspaper."

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