This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show,

and we especially love stories

about our own history and today we have winter presopio an author from texas here she is talking about

the time she wrote a book called weird u.s laws strange bizarre wacky and absurd here's winter

ten years ago i took a sabbatical from bizarre, wacky, and absurd. Here's winter.

Ten years ago, I took a sabbatical from working, and I decided I really wanted to pursue writing a little bit more seriously.

So I started to look for opportunities to write because I like humor writing, and it

comes very easily to me, and a long time ago, I had also worked for something called Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse.

So I had actually worked in tort reform, talking about how small businesses were getting killed by these little frivolous lawsuits.

I reached out to an editor who was looking

for a writer to write about the weird U.S. laws. And they're a Canadian company. So they find

us incredibly amusing from that standpoint. And it was a lot of fun. I got to work with an illustrator

and another writer. And we took on the book. I know a lot of the weird laws in Texas, some of which still exist like you cannot carry

a pair of fence cutters in your back pocket.

And in all of these things, you know, whenever you come across a law like that,

and you're like, that is just dumb. When you trace its history,

that's where I think it's so interesting, because everything has a story. That's what makes

it a lot of fun. There's the story because someone used to cut the fences, and then when the

cows would get out from these areas, they were considered anybody's.

And then they would take those cows, they'd rebrand them as their own, and to say, well, you know, he was wandering loose.

So that, it was all about stopping that kind of cattle theft.

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