Adventures

One: the four Belugas we just got were chosen to travel together because of their deep bond, like Hobbits in Lord of the Rings or something

Two: "I believe I Can Fly" playing gently in the background

1) they reproduce asexually and the children are clones of each parent OR

2) Kermit and Miss Piggy are members of the same sexually dimorphic species, hence the split between their male and female children

In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies

post (YESTERDAY) it stopped at

the second Eggman

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

There's no need to feel down,

I MEAN YOUNG THEY!

Jungle Jim's International Market profiled in regional press, late October 2025

So there's this grocery store in Fairfield, Ohio, Jungle Jim's, six and a half acres under one roof, animatronic Elvis at the entrance, fake monorail that doesn't go anywhere, the whole bit, and every couple years it gets rediscovered by someone who treats it as a piece of pure American kitsch, the kind of thing you can write 800 words about without ever mentioning that the actual store is one of the largest international grocery operations in the United States and exists for reasons that go well beyond the Disneyland-on-acid frontage.

Jim Bonaminio opened the original stand in 1971, produce, that's it, the way every one of these places started, and the move from roadside fruit stand to international superstore happened because Cincinnati in the 70s and 80s was absorbing exactly the kind of population that the conventional supermarket supply chain wasn't set up to feed. Appalachian whites coming up the Hillbilly Highway, sure, but also (and this is the part nobody writes about) a substantial Indian population tied to P&G's R&D operation, a Chinese and Vietnamese wave post-1975, an Eastern European bump after the Wall came down, the Bhutanese-Nepali resettlement in the 2000s, Cincinnati for whatever reason became one of the major secondary destinations for refugee placement in the Midwest, which is its own whole infrastructure story (the role of Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services as de facto State Department contractors in the resettlement system being one of those things that nobody talks about because the people doing the talking would rather pretend the demographics happened spontaneously), and these populations all needed food, specifically food that Kroger was not stocking in 1985, and Bonaminio figured out before basically anyone in regional grocery that the play, instead of competing with Kroger on price, was to occupy the niche Kroger wouldn't touch because it required actually knowing things, like, ordering "Asian groceries" from Sysco doesn't cut it; somebody on staff has to know the difference between Thai and Vietnamese fish sauce, has to know that different South Asian communities want different specific varieties of rice and won't substitute, has to maintain relationships with importers who themselves maintain relationships with people in Guangzhou and Mumbai and Tirana, and the labor costs of knowing things are the actual moat.

The animatronic Elvis is functioning as camouflage.

And I mean it, the kitsch is camouflage that pays the rent, because the kitsch is what allows the place to be marketable to the white suburban Cincinnatians who come in to buy weird beer and Instagram the Campbell's Soup display, which generates the foot traffic that subsidizes the eight-thousand-SKU international operation that the actual immigrant communities depend on, and without the suburban tourist trade the international section would have to be priced like a specialty store rather than a grocery store, which would price out the populations it was built to serve, so the Elvis is the thing the rest of the store is hanging off of, it's the same trick as a Cracker Barrel where the front-of-house "country store" is subsidizing the restaurant by getting the bus tour to drop another forty bucks on candle holders, in inverted form: at Jungle Jim's the front-of-house tourism is subsidizing the back-of-house grocery operation that is the operative business.

And the regional press cannot see this, will not see this, every single profile of the place is "wow, what a wacky destination, look at the giant fiberglass animals, the founder rides a Harley, the bathrooms look like Porta-Potties as a joke", they cannot write the story where the joke bathrooms exist because they pull the Yelp review traffic that pays for the labor costs of stocking eleven varieties of Filipino vinegar, because to write that story you'd have to write about who actually shops there on a weekday afternoon, a demographic that sits outside the one the regional press writes for or about.

The Fairfield location, incidentally, sits not far from the old Fisher Body Fairfield plant, which closed in the early 90s, same era the international operation was scaling, so you've got the Rust Belt deindustrialization story and the immigration absorption story and the experiential-retail story all colliding in one parking lot, and the way the place gets covered is "haha, monorail."

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html