Alas, it’s not Vladimir Putin, Russia’s Thug-in-Chief and Donald Trump’s buddy, but Vladimir Putin, the West Palm Beach guy who yells at grocery store employees for reasons yet to be determined.
Here’s the arrest record, which shows that for all legal intents and purposes, his name is Vladimir Putin:
Click to see at full size.
For those of you not from Florida, Publix is a chain of great supermarkets that operates in the southeast US, a number of which are dressed up more nicely than your typical grocery store. The Publix where Putin had his little meltdown is in West Palm Beach’s CityPlace mall, and it’s a nice-looking one:
If you think that’s a pretty grocery store, check out the Publix in Surfside:
Many of the news stories I’ve seen make mention of the fact that Florida’s Vladimir Putin is not the “real” Vladimir Putin — as if one can be more “real” than the other, especially when the “real” Putin has become a caricature of himself. None of them seem to have made any attempt to figure out how someone without any apparent Russian heritage gets the name “Vladimir Putin”, or how it’s official enough to use in an arrest report.
Here’s a sentence you never expected to see: Vladimir Putin has dreads!
You may suggest that the West Palm Beach Vladimir Putin simply adopted the name as a way of appearing to be more bad-ass, but who’s to say it wasn’t the other way around? After all, if the Russian St. Petersburg — where Russian Putin was born — can steal its name from the lovely Florida city, why can’t the Russian President steal his name from a Florida Man?
One reply on “Florida of the day: Vladimir Putin arrested in Florida!”
[…] In addition to the charges you might expect, she was also charged with resisting arrest and providing a false name to a law enforcement official. After all, this is Florida, and we have a tradition of providing not-quite-believable names to the cops. […]