On occasion, my editors have seen fit to send me to Tallahassee to cover the sillier side of our legislature in graphic montage.

There is no end of inspiration up there. I remember a special session that then-Gov. Bob Martinez called twenty years ago to reform Florida's abortion laws.

Impassioned partisans arrived from all over the country to stage demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in the streets of our sleepy capital city. The pro-life crowd, in particular, came equipped with visual aids that I won't even go into.

Anyway, I discovered that one way to get a handle on the crazy-quilt character of our state is to sit in the gallery of the House of Representatives. It's a little like witnessing a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

Over in one corner, the Miami-Dade delegation is deliberating in Spanish. In another, the Broward and Palm Beach reps are still rehashing some football game from long ago between their old high schools back in Brooklyn. One can hear the broad diphthongs of the Midwest from the Orlando/Tampa/Sarasota corridor, and cutting through it all is the twang of good ol' boys from the Panhandle across to Jacksonville, thick and tough as the crust on a chicken-fried steak.

Bearing all this in mind, it's no wonder that a statewide voice-activated highway information system would be stymied trying to understand instructions from an average Floridian. Mainly because there is no such thing as an average Floridian. We're really a loose collection of accents and idioms.

That is, when we're speaking to each other.