• Weird Florida: Roads Less Traveled, 10-11 p.m. Monday, WLRN-PBS 17

Call the Chamber of Commerce Police. Weird Florida: Roads Less Traveled is an egregious insult to our community, a vicious slight of our importance to the state and our role in making Florida a source of national dumbfoundment.

How can you make a documentary about the state's weirdest places and not include the Miami site of the World's Tallest Bankrupt Christmas Tree? Or the dorm at Johnson & Wales University that stands on the location of a motel where Deep Throat was shot? (If that place is haunted, I shudder to think what the ghosts might do in place of rattling chains.) Or the motel out by the airport where an indignant tourist summoned housekeeping to complain about the room's odor, only to discover there was a corpse under her bed? (I don't know what she was whining about; it's not like they charged her extra.) Or even one little teeny-tiny hanging chad?

Grudgingly, however, I will admit that whatever Weird Florida producer Mia Laurenzo is lacking in civic spirit, she makes up in keen appreciation for the bizarre, stupid and appalling. Weird Florida is a hilarious celebration of the state's nonsensical side, which is to say, just about all of it.

SCI-FI CREDENTIALS

Hosted by folk historian Charlie Carlson (there isn't exactly a certification process for that title, but he played a folk historian in the Sci-Fi Channel's Curse of the Blair Witch, which is about as official as you're going to get), whose book of the same name inspired the show, Weird Florida pinballs madly from the eccentric to the perverse to the inscrutable.

From the world's smallest police station in Carrabelle up on the north Gulf Coast (about the size of a phone booth, it would be instantly over capacity if the local cops had to arrest even a belligerent circus midget) to tragically deserted Bat House on Sugarloaf Key (a lunatic developer built and stocked it with imported New Jersey bats in a daffy green experiment in mosquito control, but the bats, imbued with even less community spirit than Laurenzo, beat it north the minute they were released), Weird Florida moves like -- well, a bat out of Sugarloaf Key.

TALLAHASSEE WITCH

The affable Carlson seeks out a variety of addle-brained Floridians -- he even pays a visit to a witch in Tallahassee who, amazingly enough, is not serving in the Legislature -- and interviews them with what might be termed anti-panache. Talking to Howard Solomon, who built a 12,000-square-foot castle in DeSoto County entirely from trash, Carlson introduces him as ``the DaVinci of Debris.'' Corrects the snappish Solomon: ``The Rembrandt of Reclamation! The Wizard of Odds and Ends! The Savior of Salvage!'' This is why I don't work for a newspaper in DeSoto County.

Better yet was Carlson's encounter with a tour guide at Homestead's Coral Castle, built by a heartbroken Latvian immigrant in honor of a 16-year-old fiancée who dumped him. Made entirely of coral stone and even filled with furniture made of the stuff, it nonetheless failed to bring Ed Leedskalnin's wayward love back to him. (He apparently lived under the unfortunate misimpression that, like Wilma Flintstone, Latvian girls longed to consummate their weddings on a bed made of rock.)

The 1,100-ton castle was originally built in Florida City, but the irritated builder moved it to Homestead because there were just too many prying eyes in Florida City. Carlson: ``Do you have any idea why he kept this secret?'' Guide: ``No.''

VAMPIRE KIT

In a documentary full of nutball artifacts, my favorite was the Genuine Vampire Killing Kit, a small case that contains a sharpened wooden stake, silver bullets and -- in a hidden compartment where meddling Transylvanian custom inspectors wouldn't spot it -- a Bible.

Now reposing in warehouse near Orlando where the Ripley's Believe It Or Not folks store their spare stuff, the Genuine Vampire Killing Kit was a real product marketed to American tourists in the mid-19th century. Tourists headed for Eastern Europe, not Florida.

Because that would be weird.

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