KYL Tour Rants 25

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to another episode of the Crime Page. But body
<v Speaker 1>doesn't podcast me, and I'll just switch drivers. He's driving,
<v Speaker 1>We're going through Iowa. We're going along the side of
<v Speaker 1>the road. I'm rubber neck, you know. I think it
<v Speaker 1>was a safety issue. Maybe I was making him nervous.
<v Speaker 1>I can't blame him for because I was swerving a
<v Speaker 1>little bit, trying to see all the Helianthus on the
<v Speaker 1>side of the road. You know, mono cultures of corn
<v Speaker 1>here in western i Well, we're heading towards black what's
<v Speaker 1>it called black kettle?
<v Speaker 2>What broken kettle?
<v Speaker 1>Broken kettle? The pot calling the kettle black grasslands broken
<v Speaker 1>kettle grasslands by the south of Court Dakota border, and
<v Speaker 1>there is just it is just monocultures of feed corn.
<v Speaker 1>Man you could see on a satellite image, because that's
<v Speaker 1>how I'm trying to figure out where to go. They
<v Speaker 1>really took everything when they came in here. They didn't leave.
<v Speaker 1>They didn't leave shit except some little strips along the margins. Ooh,
<v Speaker 1>they just what the Helianthus is? Really, it's either Maximilian
<v Speaker 1>I or gross the saratus. I think it's Maximilian I. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>Seeing lens of sympio trichum fighters. I can't tell if
<v Speaker 1>that's you know, an a fence. I can tell if
<v Speaker 1>that's the native win or in face, if in lots
<v Speaker 1>Andrew Pogan. But it's beautiful. You could almost get an
<v Speaker 1>idea of what it must have been like five hundred
<v Speaker 1>years ago before it was all annihilated. But uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I guess the broken kettle there's they got a book.
<v Speaker 1>They got a bison hurt when they put it back there.
<v Speaker 2>They got a bison in two thousand and eight.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, well, we were reading the paper by what Barry Shimmick,
<v Speaker 1>Jeff what's his name, Jeff Shinnick, what's his name was?
<v Speaker 2>His name was like Boomhill.
<v Speaker 1>Something German guy. I don't know. Check, Oh he's check.
<v Speaker 1>You probably wasn't that bad. Checks. You know they're over.
<v Speaker 1>They're lighting their farts on fire, playing accordion and ship.
<v Speaker 1>You know, real fun to go camping with. So uh anyway,
<v Speaker 1>shut out to the Czechoslovakian so uh yeah, but it's
<v Speaker 1>been a good show. It's been a good uh good
<v Speaker 1>uh trip, so far, good tour. We were we did
<v Speaker 1>Jimmy sit down. Oh maybe he's got a ship. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>we should pull over up here. We have We've had
<v Speaker 1>a good Yeah. I think he's got a ship. He know,
<v Speaker 1>he's just fucking with Thois. They're just playing back there.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. We can get set five minutes. Had
<v Speaker 1>a good tour and we played in Minneapolis and Saint
<v Speaker 1>Paul last night. It was the show was in Saint
<v Speaker 1>Paul at Bang Brewing. Like one hundred and seventy people
<v Speaker 1>came out. One hundred and ninety gees. Oh yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>probably about two hundred people. And it pissed rain at
<v Speaker 1>the end of it. And uh, the Bang brew the
<v Speaker 1>brewing companies right by the the one of the train yards.
<v Speaker 1>It was nice. It was fucking wonderful on Beyonce. No
<v Speaker 1>neighbors around to complain, you know, real mellow vibe, Cuddy industrial.
<v Speaker 1>You know what, there were little bunnies living in a
<v Speaker 1>train yard. I stepped into the train yard for a
<v Speaker 1>minute the piss and then took a gander around and
<v Speaker 1>all the rusting iron and then and then we uh,
<v Speaker 1>we did a two hour presentation about the prairie and
<v Speaker 1>long killing and what a native plant is and how
<v Speaker 1>it's not just some you know, some something that like
<v Speaker 1>sniveling smarmy, wealthy Caucasians say to talk down to people.
<v Speaker 1>There's actually a methodology to it. There's a point to it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, all the things I rant about in this podcast,
<v Speaker 1>the point that native plants evolved in a place. When
<v Speaker 1>you use the native plants, you're basically using the tools
<v Speaker 1>that came with the land. You're using the machinery that
<v Speaker 1>came with the land, the living machinery. So but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's good. It's I'm kind of amazed at how much
<v Speaker 1>enthusiasm there is, and I'm kind of amazed that I
<v Speaker 1>can get these motherfuckers to sit down for two hours.
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't do it. And you know, everyone's coming out,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the young, the old, different demographics. It's been
<v Speaker 1>pretty fucking wonderful. And everyone's just very excited to talk
<v Speaker 1>about embracing their own floras. So we're gonna do. I
<v Speaker 1>think we got four or five shows left I'm doing.
<v Speaker 1>I'm going back to Chicago for three days. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>take a break because I'm kind of wiped out, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, hang out with my mas. Celebrated birthday, take
<v Speaker 1>her out to dinner or something. Hold a tour. I'm
<v Speaker 1>doing a tour at Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago on Saturday.
<v Speaker 1>What is it September twenty eighth. I think the twenty
<v Speaker 1>seventh of twenty. I think it's the twenty eighth. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's twenty seventh. I don't know. It's a twenty seventh. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>And I actually reached out to him and they okayed it.
<v Speaker 1>I was gonna do it anyway even if they didn't
<v Speaker 1>okay it, but somebody at the conservatory got back to
<v Speaker 1>me and said, hey, we could do this is a
<v Speaker 1>two pm it's free. All you gotta do is pay
<v Speaker 1>admission to the conservatory if if you're a Chicago resident,
<v Speaker 1>admission is free. But it's a great fucking conservatory. They've
<v Speaker 1>got a lot of rare stuff. It's it's quite impressive,
<v Speaker 1>and they do less of like the you know, rich
<v Speaker 1>housewife style of botanical garden and more like the cool
<v Speaker 1>educational stuff. And on that note, if you're in Saint
<v Speaker 1>Paul area, be sure to check out CBS Conservatory. You
<v Speaker 1>can look it up CBS Conservatory in Saint Paul and
<v Speaker 1>Goyitner Avenue or Gore. I don't know. It's a goofy
<v Speaker 1>sounding fucking road name, but it's a really cool conservatory
<v Speaker 1>associated with the University of Minnesota Saint Paul, and they
<v Speaker 1>have an outdoor cact this garden. They leave all the
<v Speaker 1>shit outside, and they got kino series, like three different
<v Speaker 1>akino serious species Escoparia vivipara, they got, i mean, all
<v Speaker 1>the opuntias of course, but you know a lot of
<v Speaker 1>you know, those are those cantolerate negative thirty degree temperatures.
<v Speaker 1>It's a south facing garden up against the wall. That
<v Speaker 1>probably helps retain heat in the summer on those rare
<v Speaker 1>sunny days in the Minneapolis Saint Paul January or February months.
<v Speaker 1>But but it's pretty cool. They did a good job
<v Speaker 1>with it. It's a great I mean, you know, again,
<v Speaker 1>we're moving away from this idea thotanic garden is like
<v Speaker 1>a place for you know, rich old ladies, no fence
<v Speaker 1>to them, you know, to go in and plant you know,
<v Speaker 1>one hundred, one hundred, one hundred different tones of the
<v Speaker 1>same colias species. We're going away from that, the show garden,
<v Speaker 1>the display garden, more towards actually educating about people about
<v Speaker 1>the living world, you know, based on geography and that
<v Speaker 1>kind of thing. And that's what CBS Conservatory does. They
<v Speaker 1>hit me up, and then someone invited me and I
<v Speaker 1>was like, Eh, it sounds kind of cool, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I'm kind of packed and overwhelmed, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, the eighty D and if I'm not medicated,
<v Speaker 1>it's fucking hard to sit down and focus. And then
<v Speaker 1>I looked into it and I was like, holy shit.
<v Speaker 1>They got a lot of rare stuff there. They've got
<v Speaker 1>a whole ton of neotropical blueberries, you know, the epiphytic
<v Speaker 1>ones with the woody ligno tuber. They've got all kinds
<v Speaker 1>of cool desert plants. And they've got at least in
<v Speaker 1>their display gardens, they've got everything group geographically. They've got
<v Speaker 1>a Chile section, a New Caledonia section. You can go
<v Speaker 1>there and see Amberilla trichopoda, the oldest, the oldest lineage
<v Speaker 1>evangio sperm. You can go there and see all the
<v Speaker 1>cool New Zealand podacarps. They've got a remove it's like
<v Speaker 1>twenty feet tall. They got all kinds of cool erecarias
<v Speaker 1>was I was kind of blown away, like this isn't
<v Speaker 1>this is in the Twin Cities, and a nice horse. Look,
<v Speaker 1>he's got a wonderful coach. You should have seen this one.
<v Speaker 1>It didn't have bangs like the one we saw at
<v Speaker 1>the heap farm. We stopped that. We saw a horse
<v Speaker 1>with bangs. It was fucking hilarious anyway. But yeah, the
<v Speaker 1>amount of stuff that, oh, they're growing fucking ro rigular dentata.
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't believe that. The flypaper plant, right, one of
<v Speaker 1>the few carnivorous plants that grows in dry soil from
<v Speaker 1>South Africa, which I've seen in habitat rorigula. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's the gg Allen plant. Right. It doesn't eat the
<v Speaker 1>It traps insects, but it doesn't eat them directly by
<v Speaker 1>secreting enzymes. It instead relies on a species of assassin bug,
<v Speaker 1>and the two different species of Rorigula each have their
<v Speaker 1>own specific species of bug that lives on it and
<v Speaker 1>can walk on the leaves without getting its legs stuck
<v Speaker 1>and eats the insects that do get their legs stuck,
<v Speaker 1>and then shits and the plant absorbs the shit. So
<v Speaker 1>it's kind of gnarly, but it's also kind of hilarious.
<v Speaker 1>And then now you're Granny, you know, if she's watching
<v Speaker 1>the video I did on it, then she'll be looking up,
<v Speaker 1>who's gg Allen and she'll have her mind blown, but
<v Speaker 1>not for the better. So anyway, but they had ceilings
<v Speaker 1>of that, which was fucking And I think it's crazy
<v Speaker 1>because one species of Origula grows in wet soil, as
<v Speaker 1>most carnivorous plants do. You know, it's the wet soils,
<v Speaker 1>water logged anaerobic soils can become very acidic and the
<v Speaker 1>nitrogen then becomes inaccessible to plants, and that thereby is
<v Speaker 1>the selection pressure, the evolutionary pressure that then eventually selects
<v Speaker 1>for carnivory. But and then the other species were originlar.
<v Speaker 1>Then Tata grows in very dry soils with protellas and
<v Speaker 1>you know rocky quartzite soils, et cetera, including Roybos the
<v Speaker 1>tea that member of the legging family that that is
<v Speaker 1>that is used for Roybos tea, like the wild phenotype
<v Speaker 1>grows with this, at least it did when I saw
<v Speaker 1>it in in the what was it the Northern Cape,
<v Speaker 1>Western Cape? It was Western Cape. But so one grows
<v Speaker 1>in dry, one grows in wet, and I guess they
<v Speaker 1>had an adult rorigula, but they confused it with the
<v Speaker 1>wet growing ones, so they had a water logged. They're
<v Speaker 1>a little you know, their little ponds, a little like
<v Speaker 1>a wetland section with with the cape droceras in there.
<v Speaker 1>Oh they got a Western Australia section. This was fucking
<v Speaker 1>mind blowing, man, what they can do with these four
<v Speaker 1>greenhouses they got. But anyway, so I guess they killed
<v Speaker 1>the other ro regula and but they got ceilings of it.
<v Speaker 1>So they're growing those. And now someone's just got to
<v Speaker 1>smuggle the assassin bug in their ass, you know, a
<v Speaker 1>little tube or something. I don't know, just an idea
<v Speaker 1>anybody out there. But yeah, so that was really that
<v Speaker 1>was fucking wonderful. This I was haven't I was just
<v Speaker 1>I could again, I couldn't believe this is in the
<v Speaker 1>Twin Cities like such an asset. You want to study bodany,
<v Speaker 1>you're not just limited and you're living there in those
<v Speaker 1>dark winters. You get this seasonal effective disorder, right, which
<v Speaker 1>causes depression and anxiety. I'm up serious, man, am I
<v Speaker 1>You know I used to joke about this stuff, but
<v Speaker 1>I we we were up in Morris and you weren't
<v Speaker 1>feeling fummed that one you were out there, but I was.
<v Speaker 1>It was vibing me out. We were in Morris, Minnesota
<v Speaker 1>for two days, right, you know, so would have been
<v Speaker 1>under ice ten thousand years ago. I mean all of
<v Speaker 1>the area would have been under rice ten thousand years ago.
<v Speaker 1>But up in Morris, the Knights felt a little different,
<v Speaker 1>the little cooler, the sun was a little lower, and
<v Speaker 1>it was all a mono culture of corn and shit too.
<v Speaker 1>It was kind of bleak. I felt bleak, right, I
<v Speaker 1>was getting seasonal effective disorder over the weekend. But we
<v Speaker 1>were staying at that hotel. Well, you liked it, you
<v Speaker 1>liked it up there.
<v Speaker 2>I just I just walked around.
<v Speaker 1>Really yeah, he just did a bunch of walking and
<v Speaker 1>he was outside I was, you know, but anyway, could
<v Speaker 1>have just also been the hotel that the school put
<v Speaker 1>us up at. But anyway, but you get that seasonal
<v Speaker 1>effective disorder, you head down to CBS Conservatory and I
<v Speaker 1>guess they just opened it up. Yeah, really nice guy,
<v Speaker 1>Adam and then Jennifer, who studies a dry tropical forests
<v Speaker 1>tuck us in there. It was crazy the shit they have, man,
<v Speaker 1>there's so much. They got a public section and then
<v Speaker 1>a section that's not open to the public. But I guess,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you charm them. Uh, you know, disarm them,
<v Speaker 1>and we're just disarmingly nice. They let you back there
<v Speaker 1>and check out all kinds of cool orchids. Yeah, the
<v Speaker 1>tropical neotropical blueberries have gotta will leave me. And the
<v Speaker 1>billis all kinds of It's a fucking living museum. It's
<v Speaker 1>so so cool to see. And they got spherro sperm
<v Speaker 1>and bucks of folium two that pendant dependent blueberry. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>I think he's got a ship. Maybe we gotta stop.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna put the I'm gonna put this down for say,
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna let Jimmy have to take a ship. You know,
<v Speaker 1>he's a nine month old little healer puppy. Okay, I
<v Speaker 1>think he I think he shipped or pissed or something.
<v Speaker 1>I think he just had to piss. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what he was doing. We got a fly hold on.
<v Speaker 1>I think it went down by the Okay, you gotta
<v Speaker 1>roll the windows all the way down there. We go
<v Speaker 1>get a all right, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Does that sound for you? The sound for you?
<v Speaker 1>So we're getting We're getting undulations in the in the
<v Speaker 1>terrain as we burrow west through Western I towards the
<v Speaker 1>pot calling the Kettle black grasslands with no what is
<v Speaker 1>it broken kettle broken kettle grasslands, which is a nature
<v Speaker 1>conservancy property. A nature conservancy, you could almost forgive them
<v Speaker 1>for sending metric fuck tons of mailers, uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>begging for money every year because they do conserve a
<v Speaker 1>lot of land. It's just if some of this stuff
<v Speaker 1>they won't let you access, which I understand, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>the permitting process could be a real pain in the ass,
<v Speaker 1>especially in place like the Davis Mountains. So uh but regardless,
<v Speaker 1>this is not we're going. It's we're going from the
<v Speaker 1>flat plains, uh, you know, getting some undulations as we
<v Speaker 1>approach the lowest hills, and uh, I think we're hopefully
<v Speaker 1>you know, pencil them in grand To Florists has already bloomed.
<v Speaker 1>It'll probably be and see, but it'll be a good
<v Speaker 1>thing to document. I like taking money shots anyway. I've
<v Speaker 1>been having real problems with my fucking camera. Do a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of lenses broke fucking I've busted two Nikon one
<v Speaker 1>oh five millimeter macro lenses in the last god damn it,
<v Speaker 1>two months. And the Nikon people are cunts. No offense
<v Speaker 1>to them, some of them, I mean the people worked
<v Speaker 1>are some of them are very kind, but it causes
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton to get these things for It's enough
<v Speaker 1>to make me say, fuck this. I might maybe I
<v Speaker 1>also try to switch to Olympus, you know, because the
<v Speaker 1>photos are so important. I document something, take a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of money shots. It's it's like the next best thing
<v Speaker 1>to an orburium specimen for me. I use it for reference.
<v Speaker 1>I might reference it, you know, a couple of times
<v Speaker 1>a year for the next ten years if I'm you know,
<v Speaker 1>doing something on the genus or the family or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>So well, these helianthis are really nice. But but yeah, anyway.
<v Speaker 3>So.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna take a little break before we hit Omaha
<v Speaker 1>and check out what's here right on the Iowa south
<v Speaker 1>Dakota border. What is the Missouri River? Missouri River, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Missouri River.
<v Speaker 2>Hurtling towards the Missouri River valley.
<v Speaker 1>But go ahead.
<v Speaker 3>I was gonna say, we just hit all these undulations.
<v Speaker 3>Do you think it's the lost the only.
<v Speaker 1>The garlic Eolian loas So that's a you know, windblown
<v Speaker 1>sediments is the glaciers were grinding to the north and
<v Speaker 1>grinding all a rock and a stone and grind and
<v Speaker 1>then it to shipped like very fine particles in some cases.
<v Speaker 1>And then the river or the Missouri River would come
<v Speaker 1>and deposited on the banks. And during these times of
<v Speaker 1>massive glacial melt, and it's all this stuff will get
<v Speaker 1>piled up on the river banks. And then uh, and
<v Speaker 1>then you know, during the winters when glaciers would freeze
<v Speaker 1>up again and the flow would decrease, the river flow
<v Speaker 1>would decrease, then you've got these piles of sediment that
<v Speaker 1>then these you know, it gets windy as fucking the
<v Speaker 1>winter and very dry and in the in this region.
<v Speaker 1>And so then this this westerly winds would blow this
<v Speaker 1>ship to the east and deposit it in these massive
<v Speaker 1>loes hills, which it was saying it was mostly silica.
<v Speaker 1>It was mostly small, small particles. Is quite different from
<v Speaker 1>the carious glaves.
<v Speaker 2>They call it glacial flower. Glacial that's what they called it,
<v Speaker 2>glacial flower.
<v Speaker 1>Right. And you know, you look at a map of
<v Speaker 1>Eyewall and it's all been destroyed and carved up into squares,
<v Speaker 1>much like Brazil is doing with much of the Amazon today.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's a massive, fucking, uh, massively foolish maneuver,
<v Speaker 1>just pureanthropist centrist if you know, what a death cult.
<v Speaker 1>They talk about this before, But but you look at
<v Speaker 1>the western border of the Great State of i Will,
<v Speaker 1>and you can see it hasn't been fucked yet. And
<v Speaker 1>so that's why these little there's. It's actually like a
<v Speaker 1>somewhat contiguous parcel of land. It's not just nature conservatives
<v Speaker 1>like two or three other prairie preserves there. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not gonna lie. If I lived there, I might
<v Speaker 1>I might think about getting addicted the bills or something.
<v Speaker 1>It's not the most enthralling landscape. It is a monoculture
<v Speaker 1>of crops, mostly going to feed cows and pigs, of
<v Speaker 1>which the smell would indicate there is definitely fact three
<v Speaker 1>farming going on here. It does smell like shit. It
<v Speaker 1>smelled like halatosis a few miles back. I was impressed, Like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you talked like an old whino, I
<v Speaker 1>no offense to the whino. But you know, being that
<v Speaker 1>I would be out twenty years ago, paint the graffiti.
<v Speaker 1>You're just getting into trouble in whatever city I'd be in,
<v Speaker 1>and uh, the wee hours, I'd end up talking to winos,
<v Speaker 1>oftentimes for amusement. They get that smell of halatosis breadth right,
<v Speaker 1>it's a mixture of perhaps alcohol and alcoholism and the
<v Speaker 1>maybe food that's not being probably digestive, mixed with like food.
<v Speaker 1>This you know, I'm sure they're not flossing is never
<v Speaker 1>met any homeless alcoholics have been practicing good dental health.
<v Speaker 1>And so you get the halatosais smell let's go. It
<v Speaker 1>smelled like a little waist back. I think there was
<v Speaker 1>just all this shit from the animal agriculture piling up,
<v Speaker 1>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Which you think we're in the loas right now?
<v Speaker 1>It might be I don't know. I don't know. Can
<v Speaker 1>you farm on the lost? Farming on loss? Probably kind
<v Speaker 1>of shit? Oh we're close, we're close to South Dakota. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>What do they have to do to keep these this
<v Speaker 1>fucking corn going every year? Jesus christ Man?
<v Speaker 2>Brutal irrigation?
<v Speaker 1>This is when do you get the where do you
<v Speaker 1>get the cowshit with the peafest? And it wasn't that
<v Speaker 1>burning a lot of farmers here? I think that, I know,
<v Speaker 1>I saw a couple of articles about that. You get
<v Speaker 1>the forever chemicals? How does how do the forever chemicals
<v Speaker 1>get into the cowshit? And then they're using that as
<v Speaker 1>manure to what is Jimmy doing? What are you doing?
<v Speaker 3>No?
<v Speaker 1>What is he doing?
<v Speaker 4>On?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, he's in there there. Oh look it's a kiddie park.
<v Speaker 1>They got tubes in there, so uh. Anyway, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's a rough area, and you know, but at least
<v Speaker 1>if you've got these little prairie preserves, there's something to
<v Speaker 1>go to for good medicine. As a I just remember,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I wasn't into this shit as a teenager,
<v Speaker 1>and I just imagine like growing up out here, it's
<v Speaker 1>gotta be fucking rough. What do you what do you do?
<v Speaker 1>It's just nothing but corn and no native habitat left.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I would you know, if it was like
<v Speaker 1>six hundred years ago, you could like hang with the
<v Speaker 1>Lakota and be fucking, you know, galloping across the land
<v Speaker 1>doing whatever, hunting whatever, chasing a bison hertz. Now it's
<v Speaker 1>like you're stuck in a car going to Mickey D's
<v Speaker 1>and fucking coming home to play call of duty and
<v Speaker 1>add on the basement because there's nothing. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, it's my I'm sure, I'm I'm a
<v Speaker 1>pigeonholing here. It just seems like a bland landscape. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, see see these monocultures everywhere. Western Australia's got
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of monocultures of fucking wheat and whatever else.
<v Speaker 1>So shut up to Matt Berger who's in Western Australia
<v Speaker 1>right now documenting some of the some of the cool
<v Speaker 1>plants like the fire dependent Potocarpus druey enis. However you
<v Speaker 1>pronounce a d r o u e y e n s.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know anyway. I saw it when I was
<v Speaker 1>out there because it's uh, it's Australian spring right now.
<v Speaker 1>And he also saw some fucking wild psychiad sheriff woody
<v Speaker 1>on intergram. Uh, if you so feel inclined to see
<v Speaker 1>what he's observing. Oh, he's seeing a bunch of cool
<v Speaker 1>trigger plants and stylidiums do with the you know, you
<v Speaker 1>touch them and the fucking trigger moves the the column
<v Speaker 1>moves forward and dapts the pollinator in the head with
<v Speaker 1>the pollen rild fucking genus stylidiums. The trigger plants which
<v Speaker 1>have had a radiation in Western Australia. They're in the
<v Speaker 1>sunflower order as the Rayli's really cool looking, unique looking flowers.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, So, uh, we were just in a few
<v Speaker 1>days ago. We stayed in beautiful o'claire, Wisconsin, and uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, we we fucking we had done a show
<v Speaker 1>in Milwaukee that night. We stayed up for four hours,
<v Speaker 1>drove the whole I drove the whole night. We were
<v Speaker 1>listening to the Spooks podcast So Scary, which we were
<v Speaker 1>listening to, you know, getting all spoo driving through these
<v Speaker 1>Wisconsin foggy roads at night, you know, in a in
<v Speaker 1>proper Midwest Halloween ambiance. And then we got to Eclaire.
<v Speaker 1>Stayed at a friend's house and his friend has a
<v Speaker 1>hemp farm, and I've known that for a while, but
<v Speaker 1>when we woke up and saw all these different phenotypes
<v Speaker 1>of of non THHC very low THC cannabis that he had,
<v Speaker 1>it was kind of I was. I was kind of
<v Speaker 1>I thought it was kind of cool. He's growing a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of different cult of VARs what the potheads called strains.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I should do like a botany class for
<v Speaker 1>potheads and to use like the correct terminology and explanations
<v Speaker 1>of how this stuff is bread, what a phenotype is,
<v Speaker 1>what cultivars are, how seed feminization works, which is a
<v Speaker 1>really fascinate. I didn't know much about it until last week.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so these he's this is my friend is
<v Speaker 1>growing all these It's just a one man operation. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>I guess this dad helps him. His dad, who is
<v Speaker 1>not into pot at all, helps him bring this stuff
<v Speaker 1>in in the winter and dryest or in fall. When
<v Speaker 1>they what's he chewing ones, He's just oh, he's a
<v Speaker 1>bad boy. Hey, leave it alone. You're a bad boy.
<v Speaker 1>And uh so anyway, so but he's just doing it.
<v Speaker 1>He does it all himself. It's I mean, it's fucking
<v Speaker 1>cold weed for a reason. It grows very easily. He
<v Speaker 1>just plants it in rows and then he goes in
<v Speaker 1>and mows in between the rows to keep the grass down,
<v Speaker 1>and he starts. All of it is seed grown. It's
<v Speaker 1>not clones, but it's again it's a cult of var
<v Speaker 1>So those alleles that code for that specific uh uh
<v Speaker 1>if you want to call it phenotype or ecotype general
<v Speaker 1>phenotype of plant, those alleles are all reinforced within that
<v Speaker 1>population because it's just been they find this cultivar, they
<v Speaker 1>get it to produce seed. The seed is genetically different,
<v Speaker 1>but only slightly from the parent at least compared to
<v Speaker 1>another cultivar, and so so they breed those and just
<v Speaker 1>keep reinforcing back, cross breeding whatever until it's a stable enough.
<v Speaker 1>Oh what is that shit down there? It is fucking cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's some sort of synisio on a base of its
<v Speaker 1>highway ramp. But they reinforce these alleles within a population
<v Speaker 1>so that it comes true to seed and doesn't need
<v Speaker 1>to be cloned. It comes relatively true to seed. You'll
<v Speaker 1>still get phenotypic diversity. There might be some recessive alleles that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, every one out of one hundred plants brings
<v Speaker 1>out a different kind of or ends up with a
<v Speaker 1>you know, morphologically a little bit inconsistent, But for the
<v Speaker 1>most part, that's what they do. And then they get it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, since weed is dioecious, since cannabis is one
<v Speaker 1>of the you know, few angiosperms that produces only male
<v Speaker 1>or female plants, then they use that they feminize the seed. Basically,
<v Speaker 1>what that means is they get a female plant to
<v Speaker 1>produce male sex organs, but because it's a female plant
<v Speaker 1>producing male sex organs, it's only producing x X pollen
<v Speaker 1>chromosome or pollen with XX chromosomes. No X y chromosomes,
<v Speaker 1>and so that most of that pollen when it fertilizes
<v Speaker 1>an ovule and another female plant is going to produce
<v Speaker 1>mostly female female seedlings. There might be one, and he
<v Speaker 1>says he's got to go in and pull one out
<v Speaker 1>of every you know, one out of one hundred, one
<v Speaker 1>out of five hundred. I think he's only grown four
<v Speaker 1>hundred plants, but you know it's but you still gotta
<v Speaker 1>go and you gotta pull a male out every once
<v Speaker 1>in a while, but for the most part, you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's a they're all female. And the benefit to that
<v Speaker 1>over cloning, at least, I think, is like, yeah, you'll
<v Speaker 1>get some phenotypic diversity. They're not your get some slight inconsistencies,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, you're you're there's still enough diversity, genetic
<v Speaker 1>diversity between each plant so that some might be somewhat
<v Speaker 1>more resistant to a disease or an insect if they
<v Speaker 1>come out. And it was cool seeing seeing what they
<v Speaker 1>the different cult of varsiy had. What was the one
<v Speaker 1>he hit buck Nasty with the Purple Nasty. It had
<v Speaker 1>purple buds. So what that means is that there's more
<v Speaker 1>anthocyanin pigments, more protective anto scion in pigments in the
<v Speaker 1>purple buds in those buds, which I think confers adaptation
<v Speaker 1>to things like fungal pathogens i et. Mold and insects,
<v Speaker 1>and also to cold. I know there was a study
<v Speaker 1>done on tomatoes where the more the leaves with more anthocyanins,
<v Speaker 1>and I believe the the flowers with more anthocyin and
<v Speaker 1>pigments were more resistant to fungal attacks because remember anthocyanins
<v Speaker 1>or beta lanes in the case of any plant from
<v Speaker 1>the carryophylelees, because carriphylelles doesn't produce antho syonince it produces
<v Speaker 1>betlanes all but the two families to those are protective pigments.
<v Speaker 1>They're stressed pigments, right, That's why you know, like right
<v Speaker 1>now we're looking at the leaves changing. The chlorophyll's gone,
<v Speaker 1>the anthosyonins where they're all along, but since the chlorophyll
<v Speaker 1>is being degraded due to lower light levels and cold temperatures,
<v Speaker 1>mostly what's coming out of the carotenoids and the anthocyanin pigments.
<v Speaker 1>So and then a lot of evergreen trees like junipers
<v Speaker 1>Virginiana eastern red cedar will turn red in the winter
<v Speaker 1>and response to cold temperatures because those anthocyanin pigments, again
<v Speaker 1>are protective. And it's the same thing that you know,
<v Speaker 1>very cold tolerant cac dieci put the humu fusit. Do
<v Speaker 1>you know they flush pink? You see those things in January.
<v Speaker 1>They're all shriveled in pink. They don't, you know, shriveled
<v Speaker 1>in pink, A big, tiny pink cac. Well there's kind
<v Speaker 1>of an obviously moren I guess, like good dan, but anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but it was It's cool because you know, my friend
<v Speaker 1>is not a bondanist, and he's not in He doesn't
<v Speaker 1>know well, he doesn't even I think, know the terminology
<v Speaker 1>for a lot of this stuff. He just likes growing.
<v Speaker 1>He just likes growing plants. And that's what I like seeing,
<v Speaker 1>is just seeing the human bond, the primate bond with
<v Speaker 1>with the living world in any form, right, whether it's
<v Speaker 1>some fucking old daego growing tomatoes or someone growing you
<v Speaker 1>know the weed rows that the few weed rows that
<v Speaker 1>are humble and kind of well, there's a lot of
<v Speaker 1>them are kind, but there a lot of them don't
<v Speaker 1>tend to be humble, you know, bonding with the with
<v Speaker 1>their pot plants whatever, you know, And of course that's
<v Speaker 1>the gateway to getting a broader lens in a living
<v Speaker 1>world as well, you know, use that as a hook
<v Speaker 1>to get people in and get him in the door
<v Speaker 1>and then start start telling them about evolution and ecology
<v Speaker 1>and a whole fucking living world, the living web. So
<v Speaker 1>but it was great, man from an evolutionary perspective, studying
<v Speaker 1>things like phenotypic diversity and how that phenotypic diversity and
<v Speaker 1>phenotypic variation as a result of genetic recombination aka sex,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then seeing using that as a precursor
<v Speaker 1>to how basically the raw material that natural selection then
<v Speaker 1>selects from. You know, that is what I'm interested in,
<v Speaker 1>like seeing, you know, Like I did that video on
<v Speaker 1>my friend Jerrel Jirel. I always fuck up her name.
<v Speaker 1>She's Filipino. She's grown a whole bunch of astrophytem mysterious.
<v Speaker 1>She's just in love with them, doesn't know why, she
<v Speaker 1>just thinks they're beautiful. And so she grows a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of different cultivars, things that were bred by humans in
<v Speaker 1>a greenhouse, a bunch of different basically phenotypes that were
<v Speaker 1>bred by humans in a greenhouse, and she she's got
<v Speaker 1>all kinds. I mean, they're so different. They're all the
<v Speaker 1>same species, but they look like different plants, like different
<v Speaker 1>species of plants. It's fucking a while, and you could
<v Speaker 1>see within one lineage, one species, how much diversity is possible,
<v Speaker 1>And then that gives you an idea of Okay, I
<v Speaker 1>can see how how new species evolve, new ecotypes evolve, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And I bet if you could show this
<v Speaker 1>to some of the creationists, maybe you could. Maybe you
<v Speaker 1>could turn them, you know, from being strict science denilists.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe then they could, you know, put their energy into
<v Speaker 1>trying to make science work with their religion or something
<v Speaker 1>instead of doing all this goofy mental gymnastics bullshit. Though
<v Speaker 1>I do have to admit I had a great time
<v Speaker 1>at the Creationist Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. It was
<v Speaker 1>fucking hilarious. You know, someone actually took the time to
<v Speaker 1>encase a hammer and rock, you know, and say that
<v Speaker 1>it was a fossil hammer and showed I don't really
<v Speaker 1>know the angle there, but it was amusing. And they
<v Speaker 1>got some creepy paintings that looked like they'd be on
<v Speaker 1>a fucking swingers club, you know, mural on the bar
<v Speaker 1>of inside a swingers club of Adam and Eve. It
<v Speaker 1>was very, very u discomforting to stand in front of
<v Speaker 1>him look at but that made it all the more hilarious.
<v Speaker 1>And then there was like a ninety year old woman
<v Speaker 1>behind the desk taking admission. Needless to say, we didn't
<v Speaker 1>pay no offense. Sorry, we'll get you next thing. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>was that four or five years ago? I went to
<v Speaker 1>the Creationist Museum if you get a chance, go in
<v Speaker 1>right beautiful Glen Rose, Texas. And it's right near the
<v Speaker 1>Dinosaur Footprint State Park, which I think is part of
<v Speaker 1>why they did that. I think, yeah, well they did
<v Speaker 1>it on purpose. I think because the so, you know,
<v Speaker 1>a state park, a government funded institution talking about the
<v Speaker 1>existants of dinosaurs, somehow they took as an affront of
<v Speaker 1>their religion. So that's why they they're like, well, fuck you,
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna do this. You know, it's like when you
<v Speaker 1>put a pregnancy information center next to an abortion click,
<v Speaker 1>you know, same angle as Wiley fucks. So oh look
<v Speaker 1>there's the lowestells. Fuck. What's that up there on the
<v Speaker 1>top that said Yukka. We got two hundred foot walk.
<v Speaker 1>We're in a river valley. This ship must flood. Oh
<v Speaker 1>you get a flood through here. This is a floodplaine.
<v Speaker 1>Can you see that? Yeah, the lowest hills. We gotta
<v Speaker 1>get up there somehow. Oh, i wa Iwa, Iowa. But
<v Speaker 1>uh yeah, some of it. We're in a small portion
<v Speaker 1>of the Iowa landscape that was never destroyed for a
<v Speaker 1>monocrop corn agriculture. Yeah, we are in a straight We're
<v Speaker 1>in a straight floodplaine. Now on what highway is this?
<v Speaker 1>This is Highway twenty nine, sou Falls, Iowa. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>look at that. These road cuts are fucking nice. It's
<v Speaker 1>a beige Sioux City. It's a beige. Looks like a
<v Speaker 1>very fine particle.
<v Speaker 3>Though.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta some statue up there already statue and it
<v Speaker 1>didn't look like some creepy religious shit that's oppressive. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so we hanging on a hemp farm and all this
<v Speaker 1>ship's legal. He's got to get some guy that comes
<v Speaker 1>by who's USDA licensed, takes a branch off one of
<v Speaker 1>his plants and gets it tested for total THHC compliance.
<v Speaker 1>Make sure it's, you know, below the point five percent.
<v Speaker 1>They're point three percent you know, by weight or by
<v Speaker 1>volume or whatever the hell they measure. And I think
<v Speaker 1>that's all a product of the USDA Farm Bill in
<v Speaker 1>twenty eighteen. But he's legally growing up, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>this is all It's just for smoking. It's like smokable flour.
<v Speaker 1>And I posted again, I always got to talk about
<v Speaker 1>this because this is just the anthropology of today is
<v Speaker 1>viewed through the toilet of social media. But I posted
<v Speaker 1>a photo a video on this because I thought it
<v Speaker 1>was fascinating and I knew it was going to be
<v Speaker 1>like this because all the weed videos are like this.
<v Speaker 1>You get all the weed bro lords commenting. There are
<v Speaker 1>a couple of people that comment that know their shit
<v Speaker 1>and know what they're talking on. There's a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>people who are angry that it doesn't have THHC in
<v Speaker 1>it and then talking shit in it for that or there.
<v Speaker 1>They're they've got some you know, quack science nonsense and
<v Speaker 1>start muttering about strains whatever. It's kind of funny. It's
<v Speaker 1>kind of a music. I don't I don't take offense
<v Speaker 1>to what I kind of enjoy reading it, but but yeah, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>it was. It was a fascinating thing to see and
<v Speaker 1>I would love to get some seed. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>that's the thing. It's like the you know, the cops
<v Speaker 1>don't know. I mean, I guess it's been decriminalized in
<v Speaker 1>enough places, including Texas. Texas just had their third failure
<v Speaker 1>on banning or regulating any THHC product, which again I
<v Speaker 1>don't really I don't use THHC, but I certainly like it,
<v Speaker 1>like being around people at are stone more than I
<v Speaker 1>like being around people that are drunk. Yeah, we're getting
<v Speaker 1>reports that the redneck energy here in Sioux City I
<v Speaker 1>was intense. It definitely definitely saw We saw some you know,
<v Speaker 1>primate mail displays of chest pounding and ship at the
<v Speaker 1>fucking Casey's General Store gas station. We just thought that
<v Speaker 1>right now.
<v Speaker 5>Whole giant, like f fours trailer. I don't know how
<v Speaker 5>it was like a clown car of testosteroned up redneckt.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but all those dudes would be out of shape
<v Speaker 1>walking up a you know, fucking hundred hundred hundred flight
<v Speaker 1>of stairs, you know, hundreds hundred stairs set.
<v Speaker 3>They did come out of there with a great number
<v Speaker 3>of roller grill items.
<v Speaker 1>That's fucking.
<v Speaker 2>Chicken sandwiches.
<v Speaker 1>God damn, what's the life expectancy there on that and
<v Speaker 1>a diet like that Jesus Christ and then what Jimmy
<v Speaker 1>just dated some nasty ship too. Yet I saw him
<v Speaker 1>get into something. I went and looked at it and
<v Speaker 1>it was, you know, whatever it was, it was gone,
<v Speaker 1>but the maggots that had also been eating it were
<v Speaker 1>still there in the grass with all the other dogs. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he's gonna puke in the car, so we're gonna It's okay,
<v Speaker 1>we'll be there. But anyway, so but there was I
<v Speaker 1>had a nice time at the hemp farm and seeing
<v Speaker 1>you know, Luke and all his you know, he grew
<v Speaker 1>like forty individuals of every different cultivar. Some didn't do
<v Speaker 1>so well. The ones that had the purple buds the
<v Speaker 1>anthosis really seem to do well. It was I was
<v Speaker 1>astonished at how many people commented on the video what
<v Speaker 1>about mold, Like what do you do about rain? It's like,
<v Speaker 1>what I mean, it's a plant that rain's good for it.
<v Speaker 1>When you think, why would you protect it from rain?
<v Speaker 1>And then I realized, oh, they've been growing. You know,
<v Speaker 1>these dudes are used to growing indoor pot which is
<v Speaker 1>basically like a poodle. It's like in all these in
<v Speaker 1>some of these indoor strains of pot they've got far
<v Speaker 1>too much THHC in them. They just put you into
<v Speaker 1>a fucking coma and make it, make it half mentally retarded.
<v Speaker 1>That's not for anyone that gets traded by at arword.
<v Speaker 1>I'm using it in the proper terminology. Also, we have
<v Speaker 1>bigger fucking issues now to worry about than someone using
<v Speaker 1>the arword. It's a fucking move past it for credit.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, Uh, you know, these these these cultivars that
<v Speaker 1>have been developed that are so thhc rice that they
<v Speaker 1>just make you comatose. A lot of them are just
<v Speaker 1>they're so sticky, and they've got such an excess of
<v Speaker 1>those glandular trichombs. Uh that Yeah, they mold super easily.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's exactly, it's like breeding a poodle from a wolf,
<v Speaker 1>this thing that would never exist in nature. Oh that
<v Speaker 1>was a nice rock cut we just went by. Was
<v Speaker 1>like lows mixed with limestone talus. But anyways, yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>these some of these ridiculous strengths, you know, they can
<v Speaker 1>only be grown indoors or cult of ars. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>that's the better terminology for them. These these high THHC
<v Speaker 1>super sticky, dense bud cultivars can only be grown indoors
<v Speaker 1>because they're so susceptible to mold with how glandular and
<v Speaker 1>sticky they are that they would just rot if they
<v Speaker 1>got rained on, which I mean, if you've got a
<v Speaker 1>plant that can't get rained on, that kind of gives
<v Speaker 1>you an indication. You know, you're working with a very
<v Speaker 1>special It's you know, it wasn't meant to exist. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. And that's the thing. I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>I don't I can't understand wanting the highest you know,
<v Speaker 1>bud with that much THHC in it to cannabis with
<v Speaker 1>that much thccen and it just seems got no idea anyone.
<v Speaker 1>But it seems that you do a lot of pot.
<v Speaker 1>You like the but do you like the high thhd pat.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I use it for like adhd mets.
<v Speaker 3>So the speedier it is, the more paranoia it induced,
<v Speaker 3>the better it is for me.
<v Speaker 1>The more that somethful. But to each their own, it's good.
<v Speaker 1>You know, some people have a place for that. But
<v Speaker 1>I would I would like you know, I think I
<v Speaker 1>would want to lower amount. And some people do want
<v Speaker 1>a lower amount, you know, they want, and that's what
<v Speaker 1>this hemp flower is for. I guess. I guess it's
<v Speaker 1>like the the NA equivalent of pat. You know. It's
<v Speaker 1>like some people want to like the taste of an
<v Speaker 1>i pa, but they don't want to get hammered, and
<v Speaker 1>so that's why they might drink an athletic or something.
<v Speaker 1>What is that the Nature Center? It's so this is
<v Speaker 1>all this river looks good. Well that's low man. That
<v Speaker 1>thing must yeah, it must fud occasionally. That's like thirty
<v Speaker 1>forty feet below the surface, you know, blow to blow
<v Speaker 1>to Roda level. All this stuff here is Stone State Park.
<v Speaker 1>This is actual limestone bedrock. That's not even lows. It's
<v Speaker 1>kind of cool. I wonder what that's how old? That is?
<v Speaker 2>Some kind of floodplain over here? Kind of laugh.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's a wide that's a broad expanse. It's nice
<v Speaker 1>to see the little crumbs of the landscape. They weren't destroyed.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so I thought it was a funny common
<v Speaker 1>It was like, you know, uh, what do you do
<v Speaker 1>when it rains? Well, it's you know, it's a plant.
<v Speaker 1>It needs rain. So you know, I don't know who
<v Speaker 1>you think it evolved. I mean it wasn't the irrigation,
<v Speaker 1>you know, over the twelve million year however, old cannabis
<v Speaker 1>is since it last yeared a common ancestor with hops.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's they weren't getting tub irrigation out there.
<v Speaker 1>They weren't growing it hydroponically in a warehouse in East Oakland, buddies.
<v Speaker 1>So but also that's what the anto signs so for,
<v Speaker 1>so those anto sign and pegment, so that was kind
<v Speaker 1>of cool to see. You know, it's definitely some of
<v Speaker 1>these plants, these different cultivars, all the same species, different cultivars,
<v Speaker 1>different phenotypes, same way you might encounter an ecotype or
<v Speaker 1>a population of of something like a sorgastrum. The tans
<v Speaker 1>which Indian grass is the common name, some goofy name,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. You know, that looks different morphologically different
<v Speaker 1>from the population you're used to because it grows five
<v Speaker 1>hundred miles away in a slightly different climate. You could
<v Speaker 1>tell it's the same species, but it just looks kind
<v Speaker 1>of different. That's what's going on here. These cultivars have
<v Speaker 1>just been all the traits have been reinforced through sustained
<v Speaker 1>breeding and also back cross breeding, et cetera. But you
<v Speaker 1>know it was cool to see these different cultivars. Some
<v Speaker 1>were not doing that well. They weren't very robust plants,
<v Speaker 1>they were kind of weak, and then others were doing
<v Speaker 1>great in the warmth and humidity of Wisconsin. And then
<v Speaker 1>of course, you know they all have different harvest times too, right,
<v Speaker 1>that are generally spread out over six weeks. So you know,
<v Speaker 1>like Luke, he lives in Mexico, in San Luis Poto
<v Speaker 1>c But he's got to come back to do to
<v Speaker 1>do harvest. He's going to be there for the whole
<v Speaker 1>time too, because different cultivars are you know, becoming maturing
<v Speaker 1>at different times, becoming ready at different times. But I
<v Speaker 1>think I think he's still in the initial processes. I
<v Speaker 1>think he's been doing this for five to ten years,
<v Speaker 1>so he's in the you know, I'm sure some cultivars
<v Speaker 1>that he's growing now, after testing them out, he's going
<v Speaker 1>to see that he doesn't want them next year. They're
<v Speaker 1>not as robust there. Maybe they might do better in
<v Speaker 1>a more arid climate, because that's where cannabis evolved. That
<v Speaker 1>evolved on the step the steppe of Southeast Asia and
<v Speaker 1>relatively dry climates. I was going to have this guy,
<v Speaker 1>I forget his name on he's on to social media,
<v Speaker 1>but he's in Pakistan and Thailand and works with the
<v Speaker 1>quote land race the wild ancestors of cannabis that are
<v Speaker 1>still being actively cultivated outdoors. Much different, you know, much
<v Speaker 1>different from their American counterparts, you know, where due to
<v Speaker 1>the drug war, things were grown inside and they've been
<v Speaker 1>you know, hybridized in bread for different characteristics. So but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's some of those plants are just beautiful too. I
<v Speaker 1>mean I'm not even a pont guy, but just the
<v Speaker 1>coloration on some of these plants as gorgeous. And they're monsters.
<v Speaker 1>They're like six eight feet tall. I'd be curious to
<v Speaker 1>see what a hemp farm that grows for fiber looks like.
<v Speaker 1>And I wish that was more normalized, because hemp fiber
<v Speaker 1>is some of the most comfortable natural fiber you can wear.
<v Speaker 1>I had a Hemp shirt once I got in a
<v Speaker 1>thrift store in Vancouver, like twenty years ago, and you
<v Speaker 1>can't get a Hemp shirt now for anything less than
<v Speaker 1>like forty bucks. Right, it's some Gucci shit. It's I'm
<v Speaker 1>not gonna pay forty bucks for a fucking T shirt,
<v Speaker 1>but god damn, it's a wonderful material, just more durable,
<v Speaker 1>and it breathes much better than cotton. If I had it,
<v Speaker 1>I wouldn't make all my clothes out of help. But
<v Speaker 1>it's so fucking comfortable if I had the choice. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>And it's you know, I think you definitely, you know,
<v Speaker 1>per acre, you probably get much more fiber out of
<v Speaker 1>an acre of Hampton you do out of an acre
<v Speaker 1>of cotton, because cotton you're just using basically the fruit
<v Speaker 1>of the cotton plant. The uh, the material that is
<v Speaker 1>that the seed is in Wisconsin, within the fruit, the dry
<v Speaker 1>capsule fruit. So but you know William Randolph first, the
<v Speaker 1>whole all the shit that went down one hundred years ago,
<v Speaker 1>you know, that fucking pig. It's it's why, it's why
<v Speaker 1>you can't get a nice hemp shirt at the thrift
<v Speaker 1>store here. Right. Maybe one day, maybe in forty years,
<v Speaker 1>if we're all still around, all just got a you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're doing an anal RV game. You just got an
<v Speaker 1>anal singer. He kind of you know, you see an RV.
<v Speaker 1>Put the word anal in front of it, because every
<v Speaker 1>RV's got its own. Oh, there's a new dent in
<v Speaker 1>the windshield. Every RV's got its own nickname. So you
<v Speaker 1>put you put anal in front of it. What are
<v Speaker 1>some other ones? Aintal? What anal adventurer at the Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there you go, anal adventure.
<v Speaker 2>What else anal backcountry?
<v Speaker 1>Anal? Oh, there's an RV model called the back country. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the Zinger anal Zinger is pretty good, though I didn't
<v Speaker 1>know that. When you know, when you see d r
<v Speaker 1>v's and you gotta play the uh, the anal r V. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>we just left the Lowest Hills loss, he kept saying, loss.
<v Speaker 1>And now we're back in the mono cultures of corn,
<v Speaker 1>of fucking toxic corn, toxic nze. But uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I was impressed with the Lost Hills. We've seen a
<v Speaker 1>bison herd. You can't actually get on the land there.
<v Speaker 1>It's maintained for the bison and surrounded by an electric fence,
<v Speaker 1>but it's funny for you. It's cool to see him.
<v Speaker 1>And I guess some prairie rattlesnakes there, which I was
<v Speaker 1>hoping we would see, but last we did not. Some
<v Speaker 1>beautiful specimens of a morphicinesssis though the lead plant and
<v Speaker 1>uh and then just you know, dominated by grass. It's
<v Speaker 1>just Andrew Pogon Garardier, A big blue stem and sore
<v Speaker 1>gas from the tans Indian grass, but some wonderful waves
<v Speaker 1>and ocean of of those grass species. And then you
<v Speaker 1>know a Morphaknissan's popping up here and there I went
<v Speaker 1>out a long a morpha canissants could live for it.
<v Speaker 1>I bet it's long lived since the fucking deep road down.
<v Speaker 1>I bet it's long lift. What a great plant, and
<v Speaker 1>more dominant here where it's drier and further west than
<v Speaker 1>it is in the prairies of say, eastern Illinois or
<v Speaker 1>northern Illinois. There's a couple only a few places where
<v Speaker 1>I see it, and it's not super dominant there. And
<v Speaker 1>those prairies are super you know, super wet compared to here.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you're growing on top of the lost hills,
<v Speaker 1>and you know it's gonna be it's gonna be. Only
<v Speaker 1>a few things can There was fucking yucca growing there,
<v Speaker 1>so that gives you an indication of how dry and
<v Speaker 1>hot and exposed it was. And then after that we
<v Speaker 1>broke for a road cut, a nice road, well, it
<v Speaker 1>was a river cut. The road was at the base
<v Speaker 1>of it. It's where the big Sioux River just north
<v Speaker 1>with the big Sioux River and the Missouri River heaving
<v Speaker 1>their confluence, and it was wonderful pieces of shale. I
<v Speaker 1>could see the darker gray pieces of shale. And then
<v Speaker 1>on top of that was the younger stratum was like
<v Speaker 1>a beige color. And that was where a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>cool ninety million year old bivelve fossils were homage to
<v Speaker 1>the western interior seaway. What's going on, We're back here.
<v Speaker 1>It took a little break. Now we're driving past the
<v Speaker 1>hordes of helianthis, maximil and I I think there's like
<v Speaker 1>six species of Helianthus in the area as I observed
<v Speaker 1>on Ainan. We're back driving south, say, hi, ol we
<v Speaker 1>you know, we had a nice show in fucking Lincoln
<v Speaker 1>last night, very wonderful venue, witch is Brew. Yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>felt like someplace you'd go to see a punk show
<v Speaker 1>in the late nineties. You know, they had the black
<v Speaker 1>lights and stuff. They had a disco ball, a large room,
<v Speaker 1>one hundred people packed in there. It was a fucking
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was a great great spot. It was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the beautiful view from the back of the
<v Speaker 1>building by the fires, a beautiful view of like a
<v Speaker 1>scrap metal pile with like the Nebraska State Capitol, you know,
<v Speaker 1>backed right up to Salt Creek. It was a you know,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you play, you do a show in a
<v Speaker 1>place like that, you're not gonna get like a cunty
<v Speaker 1>email from some uh some wealthy woman from the suburbs afterwards,
<v Speaker 1>who's gonna write you and say, I mean literally starting
<v Speaker 1>off the email saying well, I don't even really think you.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even really like you that much, but my
<v Speaker 1>husband seems to think you've got things that are worth
<v Speaker 1>listening to. A great way to start an email, lady,
<v Speaker 1>Oh shit, when I'm supposed to say that, there's tons
<v Speaker 1>of different men. It wasn't Meredith. It was Melanie. No, no, no,
<v Speaker 1>it could have been. It was Brittany Becky. I think
<v Speaker 1>she her name was Becky at heart, but no offense
<v Speaker 1>to anybody named beck use cool but uh anyway, so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was Uh that was a first for me. I
<v Speaker 1>guess she think somebody went to the Saint Paul show
<v Speaker 1>and she was really upset that I don't know, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know she's she had to wait in the rain
<v Speaker 1>for ten minutes or something. It was like, I didn't
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's not my fucking venue. I don't know, Ada,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry. I apologize, and then called me an eco
<v Speaker 1>fascist and told me that I'm just doing this. It's
<v Speaker 1>a scam. I'm just, I just, I just I'm just
<v Speaker 1>doing it so I can get a free ticket to
<v Speaker 1>travel around, drive around the Midwest, or some ship. He's
<v Speaker 1>got these, you know, he had a We went to
<v Speaker 1>this late night burrito spot last night. He's really gashing.
<v Speaker 1>It's a considerate thing to do. But anyway, so we're
<v Speaker 1>We're headed to Indian Cave State Park, which I'm rather
<v Speaker 1>excited to check out. You know, the the the fucking
<v Speaker 1>what's left of the flora here in the natural landscape
<v Speaker 1>is pretty amazing. It's been. Nebraska's really nice. I want
<v Speaker 1>to go to the sand Bunch of great people came
<v Speaker 1>out to the show last night. I met a couple
<v Speaker 1>who turned what what had you know, formerly been two
<v Speaker 1>thousand acres of monocrop agriculture, turned it back into prairie.
<v Speaker 1>They were in the drier part of the state, near
<v Speaker 1>the sand Hills. Yeah, a bunch of fun people, you know,
<v Speaker 1>young people that were super stoked, old people that were
<v Speaker 1>just you know, some of them knew their shits. Some
<v Speaker 1>of them didn't, but they were all equally enthusiastic and
<v Speaker 1>friendly as shit and and just excited to be there.
<v Speaker 1>And then, you know, the fucking presentation runs almost two hours,
<v Speaker 1>which I ended up feeling like a punisher for. But
<v Speaker 1>it's you try to like make it a dialogue and
<v Speaker 1>get people loose and so they're not just sitting there
<v Speaker 1>listening to some poor bastard ramp and punish them. But
<v Speaker 1>it's it's a good show. I mean, it seems like
<v Speaker 1>it's a good crowd. At least the most people are
<v Speaker 1>pretty into it, you know. So, but I always feel
<v Speaker 1>bad because I can't sit still. I feel, you know,
<v Speaker 1>apologizing profusely. I'm fucking punishing you, guys. I'm sorry. No, no,
<v Speaker 1>we like it. It's okay. And then the amount of people
<v Speaker 1>that stay for Q and A after there's always kind
<v Speaker 1>of mind blowing too. It's like, fuck, don't you guys
<v Speaker 1>want to get up? I feel like I should break
<v Speaker 1>it up with like a stretch, you know, let's through
<v Speaker 1>three minutes of stretches, guys, everybody stand up, get your
<v Speaker 1>circulation flowing. Whatever. But but yeah, anyway, so yeah, we
<v Speaker 1>also got to stay. You know, our original spot to
<v Speaker 1>stay fell through. So I just put out an open call,
<v Speaker 1>which you know on on on inter sham. You know,
<v Speaker 1>does anyone in the Omaha Lincoln area have the ability
<v Speaker 1>to put us up? You know, Me and Alan two dogs,
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, this is this is a fucking
<v Speaker 1>tall order. It's probably not gonna happen. But someone came
<v Speaker 1>through who turned out to be a monarch, a monarch
<v Speaker 1>biologist and an entomologist that spent ten years living in Correctro,
<v Speaker 1>Mexico studying the monarch migration down there. She was fucking
<v Speaker 1>she was a really cool lad, like really dope post
<v Speaker 1>we you know. She had all these beautiful like Wahakan
<v Speaker 1>style uh block prints on her on her wall, like framed, framed,
<v Speaker 1>all this cool art, you know, like twenty four thirty
<v Speaker 1>six inches, like big pieces of stuff. I don't even
<v Speaker 1>ever looked at a lot of that, the block printing
<v Speaker 1>and lithography coming out of Mexico, but it's fucking beautiful
<v Speaker 1>some of it. It's it's really gorgeous. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you ever go to Wahaka City or something, you'll
<v Speaker 1>see a lot of that. There's some wonderful artists coming
<v Speaker 1>out coming out of uh Wahaka especially, I mean all
<v Speaker 1>throughout Mexicos. Some great art, but it's you know, they
<v Speaker 1>they're it's basically like relief relief carving, so like they
<v Speaker 1>you know, most of like they take a block and
<v Speaker 1>most of it prints black and then they're cutting out
<v Speaker 1>the negative space is the white areas. But it it's
<v Speaker 1>really most of it is really fucking beautiful. We had
<v Speaker 1>a lot of good art, so that was it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was a very just inviting home, you know, very
<v Speaker 1>nice and she was cool, good conversation. We've talked about
<v Speaker 1>different uh you know, she knows the plants, they're really well.
<v Speaker 1>We talked about different different elements of the monarch migration,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the whole four generations thing, which I didn't
<v Speaker 1>know about. And then you know, just talking about the
<v Speaker 1>forest that they go to at Michia Khan, those ABIs
<v Speaker 1>religiosa forests, the fir forests up in nine thousand feet.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, it was we lucked out with that one.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you never know who you're gonna get. Sometimes
<v Speaker 1>it's cool people. Maybe it's you know, someone who's a
<v Speaker 1>little you know, has their ticks or whatever. You know,
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, the nervous ticks you never know. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that that that ended up being great. So now we're
<v Speaker 1>headed to Kansas City, just following the path the floodplain
<v Speaker 1>of the Missouri River as it is. You got to
<v Speaker 1>look at it. I mean this, this happened to me
<v Speaker 1>when I was studying, not studying, but when I was
<v Speaker 1>doing videos and Cape Girardo, uh last right on the
<v Speaker 1>banks of the Mississippi, Cape Girardo, Missouri last the last year,
<v Speaker 1>and just looking at a relief map, a topographic map
<v Speaker 1>of the Missouri River floodplain, and just seeing how it's
<v Speaker 1>carved out. You know, the river is only so big,
<v Speaker 1>but it's carved out this channel that's ten times as
<v Speaker 1>wide over the last however, many millions of years. And
<v Speaker 1>then seeing just you know, you can see you can
<v Speaker 1>literally see old channels that may have been used by
<v Speaker 1>the river, you know, five six million years ago and
<v Speaker 1>carved out the relief you know, because you see like
<v Speaker 1>this hilly terrain that suddenly got a flat spot on it.
<v Speaker 1>But meanwhile the river is like six or seven miles
<v Speaker 1>to the east. Now the present channel is you know,
<v Speaker 1>all that the fluvial geology really cool. Get to see.
<v Speaker 1>And so that's kind of what I was looking at
<v Speaker 1>in the area that we're headed through today. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you've got these remnant grasslands on the sides of the road,
<v Speaker 1>all the andropoga and the big blue stem, the sorgastrum,
<v Speaker 1>the Indian grass and uh and then just you know,
<v Speaker 1>monocrop agriculture beyond that on the private property, private property,
<v Speaker 1>soybeams and corn all the bullshit. But you know, next
<v Speaker 1>to the between the private property and the road, you've
<v Speaker 1>got these these margins of remnant prairie. You know, Baptisia,
<v Speaker 1>all the heli antis of course everywhere, Sylphium lesciniatum, really
<v Speaker 1>interesting stuff, the morphic kanescence and the dryer, more sun
<v Speaker 1>exposed sites. And then I think lots of corner stramundi eye,
<v Speaker 1>lots of the dagwoods. You know, the dogwoods only get
<v Speaker 1>I guess they how tall can they get? The ones
<v Speaker 1>I see are only like five or six feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>But they do form a thicket if they're not checked
<v Speaker 1>by fire or you know, by alternatively, by grazing bison.
<v Speaker 1>I supposed to where the bison keeping the dogwoods in check.
<v Speaker 1>I assume that bison heard we saw it. Broken kettle
<v Speaker 1>was fucking great too. I found out they were pure.
<v Speaker 1>There was no cattle mixed in. So if you get
<v Speaker 1>a chance to see that. The broken kettle grasslands on
<v Speaker 1>the Iowa South Dakota border, just no north of Sioux
<v Speaker 1>Falls or was it Sioux City, it's Seouex City, sue
<v Speaker 1>something right where right where the Little Sioux River and
<v Speaker 1>the Missouri River come together, just just north of there.
<v Speaker 1>The whole area is fucking cool, at least on the
<v Speaker 1>Iowa side, probably on the South Dakota side too. Greetings
<v Speaker 1>from scenic Osceola, Iowa. As we departed the Lakeside Casino Motel,
<v Speaker 1>was that the name that was? Yeah, we were. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you go in there at midnight. You're checked in by
<v Speaker 1>this like chubby gamer guy and it's kind of endearing.
<v Speaker 1>And he got mad when I asked what the extra
<v Speaker 1>thirteen dollars charge was about, but he was still Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I felt safe with him.
<v Speaker 2>He had a beautiful ponytail.
<v Speaker 1>And then leaving today, you know I was out walking Jimmy.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't have a leash on him, and uh, you
<v Speaker 1>know they had the dog policy get one in. I
<v Speaker 1>actually sneaked two in I've got the all of papers,
<v Speaker 1>so it's they can't fuck with you. And then I
<v Speaker 1>seen this lady. I walked five inches into the lobby
<v Speaker 1>and I saw the lady that was working, and I
<v Speaker 1>I got scared. I turned around an owl. You had
<v Speaker 1>a similar You had a similar I mean, what was
<v Speaker 1>it for you? You had a similar reaction that was
<v Speaker 1>just a haircut or what exactly?
<v Speaker 2>I walked in and I was like, how bad could
<v Speaker 2>this be? Was Jolly talking about?
<v Speaker 3>I walked in and I just see I just see
<v Speaker 3>like the floating Texas perm above the computer monitor, and
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, oh.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's terrifying. You see that and you're just you know,
<v Speaker 1>you're in for trouble. It's like, it's what did you
<v Speaker 1>compare it to smuff the dragon? Smogg What was it?
<v Speaker 2>It said?
<v Speaker 3>She's like smugged the dragon from the hobbit where we
<v Speaker 3>just have to get out quietly.
<v Speaker 1>She was sleeping, but she wish she can sense your
<v Speaker 1>presence again.
<v Speaker 3>You must you mustn't take a towel, pillow or moist towel.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't even I didn't even interact with that. I
<v Speaker 1>just left the key cards on the fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>for mica table or the particle board table and so anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but they had nice accommodations. It was now we're in
<v Speaker 1>the tender Midwest.
<v Speaker 3>What I liked is that the room didn't smell like
<v Speaker 3>the lobby that was the That was what I was.
<v Speaker 3>It had that depressing casino smell of like old fried
<v Speaker 3>food and cigarettes, but like they hadn't smoked inside in
<v Speaker 3>ten years.
<v Speaker 2>But they didn't clean anything.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's a fucking that carpet. Really, it's like a
<v Speaker 1>packet that you could just like seal the the scent
<v Speaker 1>in there. But uh, you know, now we're in the
<v Speaker 1>tender part of the Midwest, the the the Iowa corridor
<v Speaker 1>where we're going, well, we're going with the Rock Island tonight.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know bermuda grass can survive the temperatures of
<v Speaker 1>Kansas City, which is when we played. Well we did
<v Speaker 1>last night. We did Kansas City last night. It was
<v Speaker 1>a really nice time. Fucking two hundred and thirty people
<v Speaker 1>came out or something like that.
<v Speaker 2>It was like two fifty almost.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was a nice pack It was a nice setup.
<v Speaker 1>It was a big room and they had a nice
<v Speaker 1>led screen for the presentation. I don't think anybody left
<v Speaker 1>pouting in the middle either I'm not gonna We're not
<v Speaker 1>gonna get another another email like we did from Meredith
<v Speaker 1>from shout out to Meredith from Saint Paul predisposed to
<v Speaker 1>not like you. It was like she shpit on a
<v Speaker 1>paper plate and handed it to me. It was very kind.
<v Speaker 3>We did do our best to accommodate everyone at the
<v Speaker 3>slightly oversold the venue wheel.
<v Speaker 2>They said it could accommodate everyone. You know, we asked,
<v Speaker 2>I asked, I said the email. I got a paper trail.
<v Speaker 2>I said, is.
<v Speaker 3>It gonna be okay if we do capacity in your
<v Speaker 3>in your place?
<v Speaker 2>And they said it's fine. They said it's fine. I said, okay.
<v Speaker 1>Meredith wrote me though, and it was not fine.
<v Speaker 3>I was trying to head everybody off with the basket
<v Speaker 3>benches for everybody, gets seats for everybody, make sure people
<v Speaker 3>were accommodated. But did it for her? I think it
<v Speaker 3>was a smattering of rain. It was an indoor outdoor show.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I think she told me she didn't like
<v Speaker 1>me to begin.
<v Speaker 2>With her husband along, that's right, and she did.
<v Speaker 3>She didn't tell you to go fuck yourself fuck, which
<v Speaker 3>I mean is cas She's kind of engaging in.
<v Speaker 2>A crime pas discourse, which is it's interesting.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I didn't take it as an insult. I
<v Speaker 1>was flattered. I was a lady. You put a lot
<v Speaker 1>of energy into writing me this nasty email. Thank you.
<v Speaker 1>I'm flattered.
<v Speaker 2>And the response, you know, your response was right in line.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's what she was looking for, right.
<v Speaker 1>It was a It was a It was a gentle
<v Speaker 1>response compared to what it could have been. We just
<v Speaker 1>but we just collected a bunch of thismanthis scene which
<v Speaker 1>you know, leaving the Lakeside casino. It was cool because
<v Speaker 1>you know there's they've got those. You know, it's the
<v Speaker 1>whole landscapes fucking bleak. It's just an impermeable, massive surface
<v Speaker 1>of asphalt that I'm sure acts like a funnel when
<v Speaker 1>it rains, and you know, probably causes some flooding. They've
<v Speaker 1>probably had that. I can't imagine how that pans out
<v Speaker 1>because it's all slopes towards towards the building. You've got
<v Speaker 1>like a football field size coating of impermeable asphalt. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then just all the car infrastructure and bullshit,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, the lifestyle of metabolic diseases but then,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and they had this like retention pond ravine thing,
<v Speaker 1>and instead of mowing the whole thing, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>was probably one hundred feet two hundred feet across. Instead
<v Speaker 1>of mowing the whole thing, they left strips of what
<v Speaker 1>was native prairie plants like the Sylphium porfoliate and the
<v Speaker 1>cup plant and milkweeds. Does manthis heliopsis, all that shit
<v Speaker 1>and it's all going to seed right now, being that
<v Speaker 1>it's late September. So I was out there collecting shit
<v Speaker 1>for the thing we're doing in Rock Island. Then I
<v Speaker 1>collecting seeds in a little bay. But you know, that's
<v Speaker 1>like something you'd see in Texas, and they would fucking
<v Speaker 1>mow the whole thing and there they left that. I
<v Speaker 1>was kind of impressed. I guess maybe they realized the
<v Speaker 1>pragmatism of it. If you mow that shit now, it's
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna get a lot more sloped fucking land, subsidence
<v Speaker 1>and flooding. And you know, all those roots help hold
<v Speaker 1>the soil together and also make it more porous so
<v Speaker 1>it can absorb water. But uh, you know, down in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>we don't think like that. It's it's that's asking too
<v Speaker 1>much to fucking use a little bit of intellect to
<v Speaker 1>think how the keeping the native vegetation might keep the
<v Speaker 1>land together. They just then they just fucking left the mow.
<v Speaker 1>It gives it in thousands with a sense of purpose.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, now we're continuing to barrel north towards beautiful
<v Speaker 1>Des Moines, and we're gonna we decided we're gonna stop
<v Speaker 1>at the hitching post bar and grill, what the fuck
<v Speaker 1>is the name of this town?
<v Speaker 2>Beautiful?
<v Speaker 1>I ow Bevington. We vote against their own interests in Bevington,
<v Speaker 1>and so we made that choice. Can I help you
<v Speaker 1>boas it might be one of those plays. I remember
<v Speaker 1>I got off a freight train in East Saint Louis
<v Speaker 1>annoy once when it was fucking two thousand and one
<v Speaker 1>or something. I was with her two friends and uh,
<v Speaker 1>we walked into uh, this cuddy ass podunk town in Ashley, Illinois.
<v Speaker 1>It was I think it was Ashley. It was Ashley,
<v Speaker 1>east of East Saint Louis, like a probably what was
<v Speaker 1>a very racist town east of East Saint Louis, And
<v Speaker 1>we walked into this, uh I think it was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Knights of Columbus or one of those you know, you
<v Speaker 1>got all these VFW you know where all these old
<v Speaker 1>guys got one foot in the grave, and they're sitting
<v Speaker 1>around the bar drinking on a Sunday afternoon. And we
<v Speaker 1>walked in. And the minute we walked in, every fucking head,
<v Speaker 1>every pasty head and that that joint turned around and
<v Speaker 1>looked at us, and one of them goes gonna hilp
<v Speaker 1>you boas like kind of a fucking movie, like you know,
<v Speaker 1>you could like hear the banjo TwinGo bound and then
<v Speaker 1>and then the bartender told us that the law doesn't
<v Speaker 1>take kindly to drifters around here. She asked us where
<v Speaker 1>we were. It was like, yeah, it was like, what
<v Speaker 1>the fuck is it? Did you guys write this? Did
<v Speaker 1>you know we were coming and you got it? You
<v Speaker 1>all got together and wrote a script here?
<v Speaker 2>Or what was she plas with a bart She was yeah.
<v Speaker 1>She was actually yeah. It was like she was the
<v Speaker 1>only woman in the joint and it was all these
<v Speaker 1>old bastards. I'm sure they're all that now, this fucking
<v Speaker 1>twenty four years ago.
<v Speaker 2>You know, we don't take Kylie.
<v Speaker 1>We vote against their own interests in Ashley, Illinois. But
<v Speaker 1>last night at the show somebody. I didn't catch her name,
<v Speaker 1>but somebody came up and brought us a paw pop
<v Speaker 1>pie which which was delicious. And yeah, we saw her
<v Speaker 1>al saw her boyfriend eating it, dude, so we knew
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't poison.
<v Speaker 3>I said, I don't know if she did it subconsciously,
<v Speaker 3>but she had two slices.
<v Speaker 2>She gave one to me, sick. Could you give this
<v Speaker 2>to Choi at the merch table? And then she gave
<v Speaker 2>she had another one.
<v Speaker 3>She gave it to her boyfriend who she met there,
<v Speaker 3>and he ate it in front of me. I don't
<v Speaker 3>know if they arranged it that way so I could
<v Speaker 3>see that it was indikee sick.
<v Speaker 1>But that's a good you know what, That would be appreciated.
<v Speaker 1>That would be a good strategy if you did want
<v Speaker 1>to poison someone, make two slices that looked identical. One's
<v Speaker 1>got tomain or some ship in it and the other
<v Speaker 1>is you know, merit. That's what Meredith is gonna do
<v Speaker 1>to me. Now, She's just gonna show up with a
<v Speaker 1>fucking pie with a bunch of rat poison, a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of decon.
<v Speaker 3>Joey is sweating a lot back in the back. The
<v Speaker 3>other delicious item. The other delicious item was a precimons.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, crazy Diosporos Virginiana. And they were no longer
<v Speaker 1>astronchint either. They were. They were very sweet. We kept
<v Speaker 1>the seeds and.
<v Speaker 3>We were drying out here on the dash and get
<v Speaker 3>some of these gold through food forests.
<v Speaker 1>Had a little food forests. When's the last time did
<v Speaker 1>you hear the words food forest at any any point?
<v Speaker 1>I didn't hear him at any point in the last
<v Speaker 1>They very nice food forest. Food forest. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>face like a forest, but he's like he's made out
<v Speaker 1>of food. Dude, He's like, you got friends with a
<v Speaker 1>food forest?
<v Speaker 2>I got I got some friends with what kind of food?
<v Speaker 6>You know?
<v Speaker 2>It's just like a orchard with other plants?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah yeah, what's they're like empty lot downtown or something.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, it's nice and er they just have they
<v Speaker 1>just have fruit trees.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they have fruit trees in a garden.
<v Speaker 1>You know, do they call it? I do they self
<v Speaker 1>identify as a food forest.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean that's essentially what.
<v Speaker 1>But they're not self identifying as a food forest. That
<v Speaker 1>doesn't make me want to gag, Like if it's it's
<v Speaker 1>just the fucking fruit trees in their backyard. It's nice.
<v Speaker 1>That's just a pragmatic thing, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're
<v Speaker 1>not like going on rants about how they're planting edible
<v Speaker 1>food forests of like you know, half invasive bullshit around
<v Speaker 1>you know what I mean. It's it's different, you know,
<v Speaker 1>so it's different. It's that's not as a pry. But
<v Speaker 1>and after eighty four hours of grueling work over three weeks,
<v Speaker 1>I have one half pound of a corn flower. Sorry,
<v Speaker 1>oh the corcus I got. I collected a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>corcous mule and bergie acorns yesterday. That's a fast growing
<v Speaker 1>fucking possibility. Place sells them. They grow fast as fuck.
<v Speaker 1>And I realized that I don't know mulen Bergie. I
<v Speaker 1>would take Chicago. That'd be because you don't really see
<v Speaker 1>it too much around the Chicago, or at least I haven't.
<v Speaker 1>But that'd be a nice you know, you want to
<v Speaker 1>do like a prairie oak savannah recreation somewhere in a
<v Speaker 1>fucking park or you know, empty lots somewhere in it.
<v Speaker 1>So you got to get some quirks mula burgie ice seedlings. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that was the one we saw at the Ares yesterday. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the Ioway Reservation. We had a friend that lives on
<v Speaker 1>the Ioway Reservation, so we stopped and kicked it with
<v Speaker 1>him for an hour and then and then blazed further stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, we had an Indian cave spot was real
<v Speaker 1>nice too, was cool.
<v Speaker 6>Yeah, depressing story, like historic human inhabited cave and it
<v Speaker 6>was on private land and the state was trying to
<v Speaker 6>imminent was trying to buy it for years.
<v Speaker 3>Finally imminent domain that like in the forties or fifties,
<v Speaker 3>and then out of spite, the owner fucking dynamited a bulldozed.
<v Speaker 2>It's like the ancient human sight.
<v Speaker 1>That fucking bitter honky. He's like, well, I got damn
<v Speaker 1>stitch not getting this. I'm not gonna get I'm not
<v Speaker 1>gonna hand it over in nass. Condition got to ruin
<v Speaker 1>it first.
<v Speaker 2>You're gonna take You're gonna take my land away. I'm
<v Speaker 2>gonna take away human heritage sat for.
<v Speaker 1>You, right. Yeah. It's like it's like kind of like
<v Speaker 1>when you know, as you're rent in a house from
<v Speaker 1>someone and a landlord burns, you see you knock holes
<v Speaker 1>in the drywall and stuff meeting there or something, you know,
<v Speaker 1>seal it up. Oh god, yeah, but and all the yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I was hoping we would see it timber rattlesnake because
<v Speaker 1>there's you know, there there's little pockets of them left
<v Speaker 1>where the the the death cult hasn't exterminated all of them,
<v Speaker 1>but that sadly had gone on there too. I guess
<v Speaker 1>there was a quarry at one point and they they
<v Speaker 1>came upon a rattlesnake. Then that was just had you know,
<v Speaker 1>tons of them in there, and they they murked all
<v Speaker 1>of them. And then you know, they're so rare now
<v Speaker 1>that they put tracking devices on them and and uh
<v Speaker 1>and monitor where they go. But they're they're seeing like
<v Speaker 1>once a year, so who the fuck knows. But it
<v Speaker 1>was cool. It was like a sandstone, nice sandstone bag
<v Speaker 1>of Pelea Atropapuria was growing there, a member of the
<v Speaker 1>kylanthoid subfamily. Cool, little the coffee fern they call it.
<v Speaker 1>So I collected some spores of that. Try to get
<v Speaker 1>those going on a little in a topper. And oh,
<v Speaker 1>we're here at the hitching post. We'll get back to
<v Speaker 1>you after we after we get out of this place,
<v Speaker 1>probably with some gastro intestinal distress. Here we go. Ah shit,
<v Speaker 1>I'm losing my voice. So the hitching post turned out
<v Speaker 1>not to be too bad. They had it listed on
<v Speaker 1>a on the receipt as a fountain Pop. I got
<v Speaker 1>a fountain soda. They called it fountain pop. We're back
<v Speaker 1>in the Midwest. What'd you think of that? There wasn't
<v Speaker 1>it was like a bar slash, like a comfortably grimy
<v Speaker 1>vibe to it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>It was a very small town Bevington or Bevington, very
<v Speaker 3>small Yeah, small town diner bar.
<v Speaker 2>It was great there. Maybe with three people.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, you know, maybe one of them was drunk. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. Maybe you've been in there for quite a while.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. But anyway, now we're barreling towards Neil
<v Speaker 1>Smith Prairie. What is this? But they got bison there,
<v Speaker 1>they got bison.
<v Speaker 3>They got Elk's the largest prairie restoration.
<v Speaker 2>In the state Iowa.
<v Speaker 1>I want I need to create a directory on a
<v Speaker 1>crime pays website that lists you know, I got the
<v Speaker 1>Native Plant nursery director. I need to create like a
<v Speaker 1>plant list for each region, you know, like ten species
<v Speaker 1>to put in a fucking native plant yard or to
<v Speaker 1>you know, seeds to spread your shit that gets established
<v Speaker 1>relatively easily, and then I need like a natural spaces
<v Speaker 1>list as well. You know, so if you live somewhere
<v Speaker 1>and you want to know where to go to look
<v Speaker 1>for what's growing, what's native little what fragments of the forgotten,
<v Speaker 1>remnant ecology looks like, you can go go check it out,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just putting stuff on a map for people,
<v Speaker 1>like a state by state listing. Oh, really is beautiful
<v Speaker 1>here at Neil Smith Wildlife Refuge. They said the visitor
<v Speaker 1>center was shut down due to storm damage. I'm guessing
<v Speaker 1>the real reasons budget cuts. But it's just an ocean
<v Speaker 1>of tall grass prairie here, very wonderful, all the you know,
<v Speaker 1>or sore gas from the tans Andrew Pogan gerardi i, Vernonia, Mazurka,
<v Speaker 1>Heliopsis Helianthus grossus seratus, all the morphakanessans. There was a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of Baptisia. It's a very soothing landscape, very pleasant
<v Speaker 1>to just come out here and just walk around. Ooh,
<v Speaker 1>Camba Christ. You don't see too much of that in
<v Speaker 1>the Chicago area. But you know, this is good medicine.
<v Speaker 1>Being out here is good medicine. So that when you're
<v Speaker 1>out in the fucking brutal, bleak suburban strip mall. Hell
<v Speaker 1>you got you got an antidote partially, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>thinking about that, that's part of the presentation that I
<v Speaker 1>give talking about how ugly the uh, the American consumer
<v Speaker 1>landscape is, and it occupies so much of the surface area. Now,
<v Speaker 1>if it's not mono if it's not monocrop agriculture or
<v Speaker 1>or cities, it's it's that suburban sprawl garbage. And can
<v Speaker 1>you imagine what it's like to have that be all?
<v Speaker 1>You know, that's your world. Your entire world has been
<v Speaker 1>spent in that that setting, with that scenery, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the mode turf grass around the retention ponds of the
<v Speaker 1>strip mall and all the bleak plastic signs in consumer
<v Speaker 1>businesses and being trapped in a fucking car everywhere you go,
<v Speaker 1>and the only alternative you have to that, especially if
<v Speaker 1>you're you know, a young man for instance, Uh, I
<v Speaker 1>mean anyone really, but this applies to the young man.
<v Speaker 1>You'll see. My angle here is fucking video games off
<v Speaker 1>in first person shooter shit. And so you see that
<v Speaker 1>all the mass shootings that we're getting, and of course
<v Speaker 1>this is a very nuanced topic. It's very complicated it
<v Speaker 1>can't be summed up by the results of my little
<v Speaker 1>sachet around a fucking prairie in the middle of Iowa.
<v Speaker 1>But you start seeing this repetition of these personalities. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they're not even political, they're like a a political they're
<v Speaker 1>poking fun at politics. They're edged lords. They spend their
<v Speaker 1>lives in basements playing video games or in chat rooms
<v Speaker 1>or whatever. And you can't blame them their products of
<v Speaker 1>their environment. There's no reason to go outside when it
<v Speaker 1>looks like much of them, when it looks like what
<v Speaker 1>much of America looks like, fucking hideous landscapes. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>in this presentation that I've been given the last few days,
<v Speaker 1>I'm literally just showing drone shots of bleak parking centers
<v Speaker 1>and strip malls throughout America. Could be anywhere, could be
<v Speaker 1>anywhere in the United States, it's hard to tell. The
<v Speaker 1>biggest thing that kind of give away where you might
<v Speaker 1>be are the plants they're using, or maybe mountains in
<v Speaker 1>the background. And there's no plants in much of these
<v Speaker 1>landscapes anyway, except for some you know, sporadic street trees
<v Speaker 1>between the parking lots and the thoroughfares, And so you
<v Speaker 1>think about that. That's a landscape, and then that's one
<v Speaker 1>landscape you live in. You got no connection to the
<v Speaker 1>living world outside of you, no connection to quote nature,
<v Speaker 1>the real world, anything to fill that void. Okay, the
<v Speaker 1>things that we've been relating to for most of our
<v Speaker 1>three hundred thousand years as a species. You suddenly have
<v Speaker 1>no access to all those wild lands, the living in
<v Speaker 1>the connected web. All you know is the bleak consumer farm.
<v Speaker 1>And that's all it is. It's a farm. They're fucking
<v Speaker 1>farming people, the bleak consumer farm. And then the world
<v Speaker 1>of screens, and you see why a lot of people
<v Speaker 1>are going fucking nuts. Okay, it's just like taking a
<v Speaker 1>you know, when they take a chimp out of the
<v Speaker 1>forest and they throw it in a fucking cage in
<v Speaker 1>the zoo. You know, it's a little diorama. It's a
<v Speaker 1>little you know, they got some paint the African savannah
<v Speaker 1>or the jungle on the wall, and then it's a
<v Speaker 1>glass window for spectators to come look at you, and
<v Speaker 1>they give you some toys and some ropes to cling
<v Speaker 1>on and climb around on. And it's it. And you
<v Speaker 1>can see the fucking mental health that even an animal
<v Speaker 1>gets put into when that's all it knows. And then
<v Speaker 1>it starts to click. While a lot of these guys
<v Speaker 1>are just in horrible fucking shape, these young men. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's no mystery if you think it's if you think
<v Speaker 1>it's not tied to how bleak so much of America looks.
<v Speaker 1>And then the only antroo the only, the only answer
<v Speaker 1>to that, The only other option is the world of
<v Speaker 1>screens and being an edge lord and talking shit and
<v Speaker 1>chat rooms and filling your head with whatever garbage culture
<v Speaker 1>the screen in front of you throws out at you,
<v Speaker 1>garbage in, garbage out, and then just perpetual video games,
<v Speaker 1>because these video games are set up where you spend
<v Speaker 1>hours of your life. It's not just like play for
<v Speaker 1>half an hour, put it down, It's fucking hours of
<v Speaker 1>your day. Does all that seem like a recipe for
<v Speaker 1>a healthy psychological state, a healthy emotional state? I would
<v Speaker 1>I wouldn't think so. It doesn't sound like it. You
<v Speaker 1>gotta be you gotta be a fucking dummy to think that's, oh,
<v Speaker 1>let's bediza, to think that that's that's good for your
<v Speaker 1>mental health. It's just humanity has never lived like this.
<v Speaker 1>This is totally new to us, and it's it's freaking
<v Speaker 1>many of us out, it's driving many of us off
<v Speaker 1>the fucking wall. And then you add, you know, any
<v Speaker 1>of these nut jobs can And then I say that
<v Speaker 1>with compassion for many of them. Obviously not the people
<v Speaker 1>that shot up a fucking school, but even them, they're victims, right.
<v Speaker 1>But you see many of these people, these young men
<v Speaker 1>who are in horrible psychological, emotional mental states, have ready
<v Speaker 1>access to firearms. You could see it. Just you're just
<v Speaker 1>setting yourself up, you know. I don't suggest even we
<v Speaker 1>take guns away because people are gonna get gun There's
<v Speaker 1>so many fucking guns in this country. There's you're never
<v Speaker 1>gonna they're everywhere. Okay, there's more, there's how many, how
<v Speaker 1>many times as many guns as people. It would seem
<v Speaker 1>much more appropriate if the mental state wasn't as fucking
<v Speaker 1>nuts like this. I mean, you can argue about gun
<v Speaker 1>control all you want. The fact is society's still riding
<v Speaker 1>from the inside out, and it's directly tied to how
<v Speaker 1>much we've alienated and isolated ourselves from the living world
<v Speaker 1>around us. It's a recipe for a lot of brutal shit,
<v Speaker 1>and so here we are. So for me, that's man
<v Speaker 1>that seems like my biggest reason, or the most compelling
<v Speaker 1>reason to get out of this fucking to get out
<v Speaker 1>of this place, more than any It's not you know,
<v Speaker 1>the creeping fascism and the political dystopia of the government.
<v Speaker 1>It's what's happening to the populace. They're just gonna go nuts.
<v Speaker 1>There's no stopping it. However, the fucking mental health in
<v Speaker 1>this country is insane, and everybody seems clueless as to why, right,
<v Speaker 1>I mean not everybody, but uh, who's this caterpillar on
<v Speaker 1>this big bluestem. That's fucking interesting? What is it? Oh? Shit,
<v Speaker 1>got to get a photo of that. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>people talk about mental health. We gotta we gotta improve
<v Speaker 1>mental health access. Yeah, you could just try to address
<v Speaker 1>the problem that's causing it, alienation from the living world,
<v Speaker 1>Living in one of the bleakest landscapes, the most bleak
<v Speaker 1>landscape of any First world country, this shopping landscape. Being
<v Speaker 1>trapped in a car driving from parking lot to parking lot,
<v Speaker 1>two or three hours, sometimes a lot more spent in
<v Speaker 1>the car every day. What do you think that does
<v Speaker 1>to you? And then the only alternative is to if
<v Speaker 1>you want physical activity, go sit go go go to
<v Speaker 1>the gym for an hour, smell off, gassing plastic, listen
<v Speaker 1>to terrible music and the sound of meatheads grunting and
<v Speaker 1>people trying to cruise and check each other out. Whatever, Right,
<v Speaker 1>Don't go outside on an outdoor run. Don't go for
<v Speaker 1>a fucking bike ride. There's nowhere safe to do it.
<v Speaker 1>Don't go for a hike anywhere, because there's no public
<v Speaker 1>land for you to go hiking at. What little land
<v Speaker 1>there might be that's publicly accessible at least in place
<v Speaker 1>like Texas, you have to pay to get into. Don't
<v Speaker 1>change any of that. Just, you know, just fucking medicate people.
<v Speaker 1>It's a dark prescription. There's you know, there's gonna be
<v Speaker 1>a lot more mass shootings. There's gonna be a lot
<v Speaker 1>more people freaking out. No, not even no political motives
<v Speaker 1>at all except nihilism and just being an edgelord. And
<v Speaker 1>you see where it comes from. I mean, to me,
<v Speaker 1>it stick clicks. That makes sense. If I didn't have
<v Speaker 1>this shit, maybe maybe I'd be losing my mind to
<v Speaker 1>who knows. But I don't see the problem being addressed
<v Speaker 1>anytime soon. And I don't see the optics or the
<v Speaker 1>layout of the American landscape changing anytime soon. Either it's
<v Speaker 1>just gonna be more sprawl, more shopping centers, more parking lots,
<v Speaker 1>more mega highways, less walkable communities, just spending your life
<v Speaker 1>staring at screens or trapped in a car in a
<v Speaker 1>parking lot, or going to your job, working your ass
<v Speaker 1>off and still not being able to afford healthcare or education.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna get a lot of I think you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>probably start seeing a lot of American refugees, people dipping out,
<v Speaker 1>people leaving, and who could blame them? There's just this,
<v Speaker 1>what's this country got to offer anymore? You know, you
<v Speaker 1>work a shit job for two little money, you still
<v Speaker 1>can't have healthcare, education, and the landscape has been turned
<v Speaker 1>into a massive shopping mall, just endless suburban sprawl, which
<v Speaker 1>is not only bad for your physical health because it's
<v Speaker 1>just made walking obsolete, but it's bad for your mental
<v Speaker 1>and emotional health too. And it's the same landscape that's
<v Speaker 1>creating a lot of these fucking walking loose cannons that
<v Speaker 1>are shooting up public places. They're victims of the shit too.
<v Speaker 1>Oh right, it's a couple of days later, I took
<v Speaker 1>a break, and I'm getting backed. You know. We just
<v Speaker 1>finished the tour two days ago and the last day
<v Speaker 1>we were in Rock Island. We were at this spot
<v Speaker 1>called Rostocks, which is like a I think they have
<v Speaker 1>punk shows there. Maybe I don't know, but we were
<v Speaker 1>it's like a little cafe. It's in Rock Island, Beautiful
<v Speaker 1>Rock Island, the quad Cities right there on the Mississippi River.
<v Speaker 1>It's so nice being on these fucking, these fucking rivers,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and be sure to look at the map
<v Speaker 1>in terrain view every once in a while to be
<v Speaker 1>reminded of where the floodplain is and where the river
<v Speaker 1>has flowed as it's meandered and changed course over the
<v Speaker 1>last few million years, both the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers.
<v Speaker 1>It's that fluvial geology. There's like that spot in Cape Girardo,
<v Speaker 1>Missouri where you can you know, you're looking at you know,
<v Speaker 1>you can look at a satellite map and there's farming
<v Speaker 1>and agriculture all in the floodplains that where the actual
<v Speaker 1>river channel is, and the river channel is much wider
<v Speaker 1>than where the river is now. But you could see
<v Speaker 1>the river channel when you put it into terrain view,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you could see the topography, and you realize, wow,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this whole channel has been basically carved out
<v Speaker 1>as the river wiggles back and forth to and fro,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and has done so, you know, over the
<v Speaker 1>course of yeah, the last few million years. The Mississippi
<v Speaker 1>River is really fucking old. I think. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>the exact age, but I remember when I was in
<v Speaker 1>Cape Girardo and I was looking all this stuff up
<v Speaker 1>and I saw what looked like a mesa kind of
<v Speaker 1>where it was, I think it was south of town.
<v Speaker 1>And then it turned out not to be a mesa.
<v Speaker 1>It was it was the old land mass that had
<v Speaker 1>been carved out on either side by the river, and
<v Speaker 1>what was on the river was now on the east
<v Speaker 1>side of this meysa, but on the west side was
<v Speaker 1>as I zoomed out and looked further south, I could
<v Speaker 1>see that wasn't I could see that was basically the floodplain,
<v Speaker 1>like the former channel of the river. And so because
<v Speaker 1>that river had once run there, it had deposited all
<v Speaker 1>the sediments that led to the cool uh those sand
<v Speaker 1>prairies where you get a totally different cast of species
<v Speaker 1>then the prairies like twenty five miles to the west
<v Speaker 1>where there is no there is no uh river floodplain.
<v Speaker 1>So it's it's it's new to me. It's fucking nice.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's cool. It's more zooming out the scope of
<v Speaker 1>you know, looking at things with the in thinking of
<v Speaker 1>the context of time that it took for those channels
<v Speaker 1>to be carved out, because the river right now is
<v Speaker 1>like a tenth of the width of that channel. But
<v Speaker 1>during flood events that would cause the river to overflow
<v Speaker 1>its peaks and change course, shift course, and uh, and
<v Speaker 1>it's been doing that for a long fucking time. So
<v Speaker 1>and then of course, you know, you get the change
<v Speaker 1>up in the geology or change up in the substrate,
<v Speaker 1>which causes things like sand prairies where you get a
<v Speaker 1>totally different cast of species than you we get on
<v Speaker 1>a more music prairie. It's where that uh what was
<v Speaker 1>it polygonum? Fuck, I forget the name of it. Let
<v Speaker 1>me look this one up. Hold on, not polygonum, it
<v Speaker 1>was it was polygonum at one point. Polygonella americana. God,
<v Speaker 1>what a weird fucking plant. What a cool plant with
<v Speaker 1>those tiny white flowers and juniper like leaves. But it's
<v Speaker 1>a relative of buckwheats and polygonece. So so anyway, so
<v Speaker 1>you know, we had a nice time looking at the
<v Speaker 1>uh the geology in any area, like in Rock Island,
<v Speaker 1>and what's the what are the Iowa cities? I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I forget fucking trains coming. Why's he doing it? That's
<v Speaker 1>a little excessive. It's a little extra honkage of the
<v Speaker 1>horn anyway. So uh, but then we you know the
<v Speaker 1>funny thing about the venue in Rock Island. God, all
<v Speaker 1>those Mississippi river towns have such a great such a
<v Speaker 1>great uh the stings come by such a great vibe
<v Speaker 1>to them. I remember, you know, when I was like
<v Speaker 1>twenty five, I would just for ships and giggles, ride
<v Speaker 1>trains to Fort Madison, Iowa, and just hang out there
<v Speaker 1>for a day or two and come back right there
<v Speaker 1>on the Mississippi, right off that Burlington Northern line. It
<v Speaker 1>was a fucking one. It was just a wonderful place.
<v Speaker 1>They had like a little movie theater there. It's probably
<v Speaker 1>closed now, maybe they still got it. But I would
<v Speaker 1>just go just for ships and giggles. Want to get
<v Speaker 1>out of Chicago, Go ride a train, uh illegally a
<v Speaker 1>freight train to Fort Madison, hang out for a day
<v Speaker 1>or two, sleep in the bushes and come back and
<v Speaker 1>just going through those those fucking river bottom lands and
<v Speaker 1>the woodlands in the Midwest and smelling all that fucking
<v Speaker 1>all the volatile compounds coming out out of the leaves
<v Speaker 1>and the smell the humid air. Oh was so nice.
<v Speaker 1>But uh anyway, but so yeah, So the venue was
<v Speaker 1>this little coffee shop slash restaurant. Would have moved. They
<v Speaker 1>used to have punk shows and movie nights and stuff
<v Speaker 1>like that, but it was right around the corner for
<v Speaker 1>a halfway house. So we kept getting, you know, people
<v Speaker 1>that were kind of down on their luck coming out.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, maybe he's a rehab center. But we
<v Speaker 1>got this one guy. He was like a nice old whino.
<v Speaker 1>Well he might have been a little mentally ill, but
<v Speaker 1>he came up and he tried to sell us a
<v Speaker 1>granola bar. And when I declined, he spitefully looked at me.
<v Speaker 1>He spitefully looked at me, you want to buy this
<v Speaker 1>granola bar? Brother, And it was like one of those
<v Speaker 1>Nature's Nature's Valley, you know, the ones' a little high fruit,
<v Speaker 1>those corn syrup like ticket to diabetes. And uh anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So and then he just I said no, and then
<v Speaker 1>he's like what SI shoot you were And you know,
<v Speaker 1>I know where this goes. I know it's fuck. He's
<v Speaker 1>gonna he's gonna pull out like a pair of uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, half worn tennis shoes and try to sell us. Yes,
<v Speaker 1>So I was just like, nah, man, I just I'm
<v Speaker 1>not you know, I'm not wucking in through it. Good luck,
<v Speaker 1>you know, all due respect. I just I just want
<v Speaker 1>to be alone right now. And uh and then he
<v Speaker 1>just spitefully looked at me again, and then he started
<v Speaker 1>eating the granola bar that he was trying to sell me.
<v Speaker 1>And then we had like four or five more instances
<v Speaker 1>like that, you know, just just normal like street urchins.
<v Speaker 1>It was literally harmless. Maybe a little annoy maybe a
<v Speaker 1>little annoying, maybe a little sketchy, but with the two bad,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I just mightbe get some property crime or something.
<v Speaker 1>But uh but yeah, but then the show went good.
<v Speaker 1>Like this little small town, like fifty people came out.
<v Speaker 1>I forget how many. Maybe it was forty, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but uh but yeah, I mean fuck the two hundred
<v Speaker 1>and fifty people came out to the Kansas City show.
<v Speaker 1>We were like two hundred for Saint Paul's when you know,
<v Speaker 1>good old Meredith throw me a spiteful letter, bless her heart,
<v Speaker 1>and uh yeah, it's just a good fucking show. So
<v Speaker 1>maybe we'll plan one in the Southwest. I'll probably be
<v Speaker 1>doing this again once the once Concrete Botany comes out
<v Speaker 1>in April, if we're all still alive, you know, notock
<v Speaker 1>on wood h And then today it was cool too.
<v Speaker 1>I was I was at Garfield Park with my daughter
<v Speaker 1>like two weeks ago, and we were walking going around
<v Speaker 1>that I was just I was realizing that this is
<v Speaker 1>such a great fucking spot. They've got so much rare
<v Speaker 1>material there, both in the cactus House and the fern House,
<v Speaker 1>and just a lot of cool plants with a really unique,
<v Speaker 1>you know, ecological story like something that pollinates them or
<v Speaker 1>or an evolutionary stories. You know there are they're this
<v Speaker 1>weird relative that like they have a need them there
<v Speaker 1>g n E t U M you know, relative of
<v Speaker 1>Wellwitchia and Federa. And it's a healthy fucking need them too,
<v Speaker 1>Like you can't really see I can't think of many
<v Speaker 1>other places in the US, like conservatories or glasshouses where
<v Speaker 1>you can see a need them they're from like the
<v Speaker 1>Old World tropics and they're not cool until you see
<v Speaker 1>the reproductive structures and you realize, yeah, man, this is
<v Speaker 1>like a really weird evolutionary outlier that's not related to
<v Speaker 1>a whole lot of other things that currently exist on
<v Speaker 1>planet Earth except yeah, feder and they got they have
<v Speaker 1>a couple well Witchi is too, only one is in
<v Speaker 1>the ground. They've got a bunch of other rare cac die.
<v Speaker 1>They got a boojump tree, Fukiria columnaris, and everything's labeled.
<v Speaker 1>Most stuff is labeled, you know, with the family too.
<v Speaker 1>So that was so it was cool. So I wrote,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I was gonna do it anyway, but I figured,
<v Speaker 1>if I can get the backing of the organization, maybe
<v Speaker 1>you know, the institution, why not. And so I wrote
<v Speaker 1>one of the heads of the Botanic Garden or the
<v Speaker 1>Garfield Park Conservatory and ask them if I can, you know,
<v Speaker 1>how would you be all right with me holding a
<v Speaker 1>tour here, because I just I want people to get
<v Speaker 1>excited about this stuff. And my angle is the more
<v Speaker 1>people know about the stuff that grows here, the more
<v Speaker 1>they can appreciate it, and the more they can advocate
<v Speaker 1>for it. If you know some whoever knows man. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the administratorship at these places turns over, you know, more
<v Speaker 1>often than you'd think, and maybe you get some guy who, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, has a fucking business degree and not much
<v Speaker 1>horticultural knowledge, and he's in charge and he wants to
<v Speaker 1>put in you know, annual begonias and fucking coly whatever
<v Speaker 1>corny shit, you know, fill the beds with impatience and
<v Speaker 1>horticultural garbage that has no educational value. And so you
<v Speaker 1>get people to know that this stuff is there and
<v Speaker 1>appreciate it, and they will come and they'll protect it.
<v Speaker 1>And it was cool. I was talking to Ray, one
<v Speaker 1>of the guys who runs the Desert I think he's
<v Speaker 1>the dude that runs the Desert House. He's been there
<v Speaker 1>like twenty five years, and he was telling me what
<v Speaker 1>it was like when he started in ninety nine when
<v Speaker 1>Garfield Park, like they used to get like twenty people
<v Speaker 1>a week coming through there, and at one point they
<v Speaker 1>almost got rid of that main indoor section, like the
<v Speaker 1>main glasshouse, almost got rid of it and turned it
<v Speaker 1>into tennis court or some shit, you know that kind
<v Speaker 1>of shit because like, oh, you know, visitorship is down.
<v Speaker 1>You get some fucking pencil neck in there, and he's like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, visitorship is down. We gotta go.
<v Speaker 4>We gotta figure out a way to get people interested.
<v Speaker 4>Why don't we turn it into a mini golf? What
<v Speaker 4>this is too many golf, These plants are boring. Let's
<v Speaker 4>do mini golf. It's a great opportunity. Even if it's rainy. God,
<v Speaker 4>we could have a bitty golf course. You know, some
<v Speaker 4>stupid shit, who knows. I've seen it happen all the way.
<v Speaker 1>Shit like this especially happens in Texas, especially in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of bleak shit happens. They're not surprising that
<v Speaker 1>it happens in Texas, Texas and many other other states
<v Speaker 1>in the south southeast, So you never know. So but
<v Speaker 1>maybe now you get people interested in and they're like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>they got a fucking well witchia and it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>a plant that's by lame ass mainstream horticulture standards. It's
<v Speaker 1>not pretty whatever the fuck that means. It's not pretty.
<v Speaker 1>Eight that's pretty. Eighth doesn't have pretty flowers. It's just
<v Speaker 1>it's a wild ass plant with a cool evolutionary story.
<v Speaker 1>There's fossils in Brazil and on the western coast of
<v Speaker 1>southern Africa. You know, it's a remnant from a time
<v Speaker 1>before the Atlantic Ocean opened up. So it's more related
<v Speaker 1>to fucking redwoods than it is to any you know,
<v Speaker 1>broad leaved die cat udicod right, and so people know
<v Speaker 1>that they gotta fucking well witchy there. They got to
<v Speaker 1>need them. They got all this cool stuff they got.
<v Speaker 1>What is it, calum? I forget the name. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>it's one of those. It's a cacta. It's a cactus
<v Speaker 1>that produces flowers, uh, right out of the tissue. What
<v Speaker 1>is it, sub SESSI list what's the species name? Hold on,
<v Speaker 1>let me look this up. That was a mouthful even
<v Speaker 1>for me. C A L y m m antheum. What
<v Speaker 1>the fuck was I see? I'm already sucking it up.
<v Speaker 1>Calum antheum c A L y m M A n
<v Speaker 1>t h I U M substerile. And I think there's
<v Speaker 1>how many? How many species are in here? I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what's the c It's like there's four of I
<v Speaker 1>don't know either. But the cool thing is that the
<v Speaker 1>flowers emerge looking like new stem segments, and then you know,
<v Speaker 1>the suddenly a flower emerges out of the time. It's
<v Speaker 1>a really weird. It's a really morphologically unique practice species.
<v Speaker 1>And I actually don't know more about it beyond that,
<v Speaker 1>I've never encountered where is it Native Bolivia or some shit,
<v Speaker 1>I forget, no Peru so but anyway, but it's a
<v Speaker 1>weird one, and it's you know, there's I remember reading
<v Speaker 1>about it before and encountering it in the literature and
<v Speaker 1>it being in there. You know, how unique and bizarre
<v Speaker 1>this genus is. And they fucking got one. You can
<v Speaker 1>go see it at Garfield Park right in an otherwise
<v Speaker 1>you know, somewhat botanically boring city except for the prairies,
<v Speaker 1>but there's no prairies downtown. Well actually they're doing a
<v Speaker 1>lot more of it, a lot more native plant things
<v Speaker 1>in the city, you know, but in the temporal latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>you know. So it is like a living museum. It's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking living museum. That's what a botanic garden should be.
<v Speaker 1>Instead of a show garden. It's a show garden. It's
<v Speaker 1>just pretty. It's just good for the wedding backdrop in
<v Speaker 1>the corporate you've heard me rant about this. We don't
<v Speaker 1>need to get into it. It's part of the presentation
<v Speaker 1>I was giving. And you know, shitting on traditional horticulture.
<v Speaker 1>I need them, I need the I need to really
<v Speaker 1>up the verbal attacks on it, because I think the whole,
<v Speaker 1>the whole paradigm of American horticulture needs to change. There's
<v Speaker 1>a place for all that corny shit, you know, the rich,
<v Speaker 1>the rich board housewife stuff. You know, her husband's an
<v Speaker 1>orthodontist or a you know, or a neurosurgeon or a
<v Speaker 1>fucking lawyer or something, and she needs something to do
<v Speaker 1>and she's at home, and you know, this is like,
<v Speaker 1>that's like the typical I mean, that is very nineteen fifties,
<v Speaker 1>but that is like the typical thing you would encounter.
<v Speaker 1>I think for so long it had a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these botanic gardens. It was just like just the whole
<v Speaker 1>framework of and it was a total turnoff to anyone
<v Speaker 1>that wasn't affluent and from that that class. Whereas if
<v Speaker 1>you if you view plants and you've you view what's
<v Speaker 1>interesting and beautiful from the context of evolution and ecology,
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's such a deeper philosophical and and also
<v Speaker 1>scientific understanding of the world you live in. It ties
<v Speaker 1>into everything versus just some fucking you know, annual pogonia
<v Speaker 1>species that doesn't even exist in nature. It was just
<v Speaker 1>bread in a greenhouse by hybridizing two species that would
<v Speaker 1>otherwise never encounter each other in the wild, and then uh,
<v Speaker 1>and then back crossing them. And you know, it's got
<v Speaker 1>it's got leaves that stay red throughout its whole life cycle.
<v Speaker 1>So and that's attractive because plants. Plants are boring otherwise
<v Speaker 1>and we need a gimmick to make them interesting. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>all right, well that's that's that. Uh, that ends it
<v Speaker 1>for the rant for now. But I'll be in h
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to Oklahoma City October first, at Native Plants
<v Speaker 1>Nursery in Oklahoma City. And then I'm walking the dogs
<v Speaker 1>right now. Actually we're just all walking like a pack.
<v Speaker 1>Louis not even wearing a fucking leash. She never does.
<v Speaker 1>You know. The coyotes come out at night. You could
<v Speaker 1>see them lurking around the neighborhood. So Oklahoma City, October first,
<v Speaker 1>October second, I'll be in McKinney, Texas. Whereas it it's
<v Speaker 1>there Fort Worth or Dallas or I don't know, it's somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>It's up there. And uh, and then I think I'm
<v Speaker 1>done with the presentations for a while. And then uh oh,
<v Speaker 1>and then I'll be at my friend Willie's nursery in
<v Speaker 1>Austin on the twenty sixth or twenty seventh, and uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then I'm going. I think I'm going to Florida
<v Speaker 1>for a week two to film Lake Wales Ridge in
<v Speaker 1>mid October. I don't know where the fuck I'm going.
<v Speaker 1>I have to check. I don't know. I want to.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to think about this right now. I
<v Speaker 1>want to. I want to fucking lay down. I want
<v Speaker 1>to lay down. I want to rest and relax and
<v Speaker 1>not think about any of this stuff. And uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>light my fart's on fire and chuckle and fucking zip
<v Speaker 1>of seltzer, smoke a cigar, drinking na beer, you know,
<v Speaker 1>through some exercises, you know, maybe make a fucking juice.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Anyway, if you came out the tour,
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot. If you want to download that Google
<v Speaker 1>drive folder uh full of books, you can find it
<v Speaker 1>on the Crime Paced website. Click on Midwest Tour and
<v Speaker 1>then the Midwest Tour page and it'll be the link
<v Speaker 1>will be at the bottom of the page right there,
<v Speaker 1>and there's a link to the Angio sprim phylogeny poster
<v Speaker 1>and some other goodies, some other relevant goodies for you. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>all right, well, enjoy the enjoy the dystopia and disconnect
<v Speaker 1>from it and look at the living world every once
<v Speaker 1>in a while. Okay, it's fucking good for you, all right,
<v Speaker 1>that's all. I gotta have a go. Digo fox It
<v Speaker 1>by