This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

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 Prasapio, 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 working and I decided I really wanted to pursue writing a little bit more seriously. So I

started to look for opportunities to write in 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. And you, 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,

...