Speaker 1: Hi, this is Tony. Welcome to Tony's House Trikes Podcast.
Today we got Freeze in the house by a Shot
Ridgey and Chris Pasco. It's a real banger. We got
it cooking up on a grill right now, coming to
you straight from west Mannheim Road out there in Elmwood
Park out there, fiddly fucking around. It's just Tony's House
Treks podcast. Wouldn't it be nice if that was a
real thing, if there was actually like a you know,
you just took like you took like a like a
fifty five's maybe sixty year old gray west side Chicago
Italian man. They moved there to the suburbs, you know,
because they're they're afraid of uh, they're afraid of the banks.
You know. It's all all the all the old Italians
are like racists and trumpers. And I'm not I'm not racist,
uh you know, but anyway, wouldn't that be funny if
they was it they let's forget about all that, forget
the social aspect of it. Wouldn't it be funny if
that was the thing, if that was like, uh, minus
the quasi racism. If there was like some old Italian
guy who just had like a he was really into
Chicago house and he had a like a Chicago House
podcast where he just played different you know, classic Chicago house.
I think it'd be funny, right, Like on the side,
he's got like an Italian deli where they sell like,
you know, one gallon jars at yard in era. Ah
God anyway, but uh, you know, my grandma was actually
she was actually a big supporter at a Black Panthers.
Remember talking to me about that because she, uh, she
saw the shit go down in the sixties and seventies
on the West side of Chicago. Wonderful woman, God rest,
God rest the saw, I said, God rest the saw,
I said, Florence. We still think about you every day
and the way that you painted the side of a
pillar in your parking garage with the colors of your
car because you probably should have had your license revoked
at age seventy, right, no offense to her. She used
to threat My grandma threatened to call the mob on
me once, right, she got mad at me. I mean
she was joking around, of course, but still she got
really mad at me. She said, I'll make a phone call.
Have you snuffed? I said, Jesus Christ would you take
it easy? When I was making fun of her, she
had was going through her freezer once I was like sixteen,
and I found a frozen Chinese duck and I was like,
the fuck is it? She had like six frozen Chinese ducks.
I was like, what is it? Chinese duck? Is just
a normal duck? She said, I guess she was. It
was she was really she was a foodie. I guess
she was, you know, duck she'd procured in Chinatown, you know,
on the south side. Said well, that's near south side China.
Time's on, like Cirmac and what is it Sirmac and
State and anyway, Welcome to another episode of crime based
by this podcast. I'm driving through. I just left Joplin,
which you know, Joplin, Joplin, Missouri. The name Joplin translated
into kickapoo means Joplin means translated kickapoo, salty cracker or
these salty crackers. So I guess they had a lot
of you know, it was a there was a you
know in terms of dried breaded goods that are you know,
meant to combat I meant to reply, meant to replenish
the electrolytes that's what Joplin was known for. Joplin it
means the salty crackers. It's this kind of a scary
area of western Missouri. Woo. Anyway, we're going down here,
We're driving to Saint Louis. We're going I'm doing a
We're doing a talk tomorrow because it's four hundred people,
three hundred and eighty these sick focks that want to
listen to me. Rant. I'm gonna shit all over modern horticulture.
I'm gonna make fun of the Craig myrtles. I'm gonna
make fun of the box woods and the home Destboo
garden section. I think something's wrong with my car. It's
making a funny noise, but it's running the transmissions otherwise
running fine. And you know it was. It was real
bleak driving up from South Texas. I mean it's it's
seventy six degrees during the day here in late February
in western Missouri, but it gets chilly at night. I
had to wear a hoodie last night. I stayed at
Gus's house, my buddy Gus in Norman, Oklahoma. You know
you know what I got it. We went to a
coffee chef they got you know, they got the kits
in there with on the tattoos, since they got the
you know, they doing all kind of stuff. You know
that real hip These kids down there, real hip jack,
you know in normany. I mean you they could say
and I said, it's Oklahoma are kind of behind the times,
but they're you know, they're really they're really hit. This
is Tony's house, stretched pod kids. We got another banger
coming up by start slinger, A real a real bang
or a real buzzer. Uh fuck yeah. Anyway, we gus
knows I bring him up because he's you know, he's
he's one of these young kids, twenty five or so.
I don't know how old these he's a young kid, right,
he's not all acrid like me and he but he's
got you know, you go to his house and he's
got the fossil's got ammonites on there. He knows the region,
he knows the local geology, knows all the disjunk populations.
Did you know there's Mammalaria hidra and homelocephalae. They got
horse cripplers. They got freaking horse cripplers over there in Oklahoma. Okay,
they got a bunch of dis junks. They got little
you know, disjunk populations, this stuff. He was, you know,
he knows the You know, that's what you want. You
want friends in different states that know the fucking regions,
the geology and the plants and the rare dis junks
o their other lands. He went to school for mechanical
engineering and minored in botany. Tell me that's not a
nice setup, right, you learn a good trade. Okay, you're
not gonna be around all these you know, too many
farts sniff and academics. Right, you're gonna be around, you know,
to going to school for some pragmatic then you keep
your foot in a you know, a good natural sciences
education on the side, I think the great trade of
so much of academia, especially if you're talking like social studies, sociology,
and humanities, where people just kind of stiff each other's
farts and rant about these obscure, uh, you know, completely
soft science theories, theorists, you know, uh, you know. The
tragedy is that, you know, these kids don't know basic
fucking natural selection, natural sciences, basic biology. A lot of
them don't because they don't they don't study it. Right.
The answer lies in the living world. All right. You
can pontificate all you want about fucking this and that
and all these buzzwords that you know you hear not
fucking going off the road again, that you hear in
these books. You know, these kids they talking soft voices.
Not these kids, a lot of them are adults, but
they The point is, they sniff each other's farts and
they you know, you want to look at people. Study
the study anthropology study the human behavior is a semi sentient,
recently born into consciousness, species of ape that's heavily conformist.
And you know, the norm is conformity and requiring group validation,
and very few people stray outside of that, right and
they and I say, semi sent you it because the
self awareness really isn't there with most most of us.
It takes it takes thirty plus years to gain at least,
especially when you grow up into a society that indoctrinates
you into bullshit. Anyway, Okay, so you know we're getting distracted.
So I stayed at Gus's house. I was slept on
a couch. It was nice and Norman, you know, nice
little town. But driving up from South Texas, yes, today,
everything was fucking dry, horrible drought there. We did just
nab a two hundred and twenty pound pig in the
pig trap. We got a pig trap, So thank you
to everybody who donated to Thorn Scrub Sanctuary nonprofit to
get the pig trap. We just shot a big two
hundred and twenty pound hag. Got Benny out there. He
shot the thing in the head, one shot. It went down,
dragged it out. He's gonna cook it up. He loves it.
He's happy. And you know, because I was out there
nailing rebar around these big clumps of payoti that the
picks have been destroying. And they don't even eat it.
They like they uprooted, because that's what they do. They
snout around. They come from the side, they don't come
from the top. You got these big clumps of payoti
that are maybe a foot across eight inches off the ground.
It doesn't they paid. It doesn't behave like this in
West Texas ver very rarely. I guess it does. Actually,
you know what, there's a couple there's a couple places
I've seen it, but the pet West Texas population is
very small, and certainly if you go to San Luis
poto c you'll see large clumps of peyote like this.
You see many cac guy that do this. The cactody,
the cactoid subfamily, not the prickly pairs, not the opuntioids.
As fucking truck What are you doing? Man? What are
you doing? Huh? You got your kidneys filled with mountain boo.
All right, you're about eighty pounds overweight, and you're you're
getting into the left lane even though you got nowhere
to go. You're not. You're gonna cause an accident the
fucking trucks. So but anyway, I was in there and
Naleen rebar into the ground. Shout out to to H.
William and you know the people that hooked us up
with the rebar, and I'm drawn up lay my band
with this farc steedd I'm sorry. In San Antonio, we
got hooked us up with three foot sections of rebar
and we basically nail those into the ground around these
clumps of paoty. It doesn't look attractive, right, it's not
photo worthy, But that's not the fucking point. The point
is to protect these clumps from getting destroyed. And it works.
I was in there a month ago in the little
we call it the Elfin forest. It's like this forest
of blackbrush which is blooming right now or trying to.
It's very very drought stress. There's gonna be a lot
of tree mortality, tree and shrub mortality in South Texas
because we are in an extreme drought situation, probably exacerbated
somewhat by fucked up climate condition is due to the
elevated levels of CO two in the greenhouse, even though
in an atmosphere, even though the oil companies say it
doesn't that's that's not what's causing climate change. There is
no climate change there. CO two does not trap, it
does not absorb heat. Okay, everything modern physics has taught
you is a lie. The oil companies have your best
interest at heart. Trust them. Okay. Some ship bag that's
living on fucking cavir and Sirloin's steak every night, he's
got your best interest at heart. Do not trust the scientists.
They're fucking lying to you, Okay, Jesus Christ. That's that's
where we're at right now. Anyway. So probably exacerbated due
to a combination of factors, you know, but certainly climate
change is one of them, and I certainly I think
a large part of it, too, would be the excessive
amounts of land clearance. You know, when you can visibly
see the amount of green space from a satellite image,
it's been converted into concrete, shithole, sprawling parking lot hellscape.
You can imagine, and you keep in mind that all
those plants quote sweat, they have apple transpire moisture. You
can imagine how that might. It just might. I don't
know if it does it. I'm just saying it might.
It's possible to see how that might affect the amount
of moisture and water vapor in an area, and as
well as the heat in an area. Doesn't it seem
like that could happen. Doesn't it seem like that could
be a possibility. Huh? And it seemed like it could
be part of the reason why the immediate area is
twenty degrees hotter than the surrounding area. You know, I
don't want to go out there. I'm no scientists, but
it just seems like it, you know. And then you
scrape all that vegetative cover off and you expose the
land to the hot sun, where it loses moisture much
faster than it would otherwise. If it was topped by
a living skin of scrublands and shrubs that have a
self regulatory system that governs how slowly they let water
transpire out other stuff. Doesn't that seem like it? You
know it? Fuck? I give up? You know in reality
don't makes sense no more, you know, at least human reality.
The simulation got all fucked up a few years ago,
maybe a few decades ago, and and you see people
just getting dumber. I got a friend, I gotta messare
from a friend that works for textat today the Department
of Transportation. He said they were spreading clumps of dead
Saint Augustine on the sides of a newly built road,
not realizing that the sod was dead, and also not
realizing Saint Augustine doesn't you know, it's a native grass,
but it doesn't it doesn't grow too far away from
the coast because it needs moisture. It's it's it's certainly
it needs irrigation in a lawn. If you have, if
you have a Saint Augustine lawn. Uh, not only are
you a bastard if you live if you live in Inland, Texas,
but you're delusional and you're gonna have to. Uh, but
you're gonna have to water it as well or else
it's gonna die. So anyway, so South Texas looked to
dry as a fucking bone, very depressing, lots of extreme
drought conditions. You can look at a drought map. I
use the my Radar app. It's a free one. They
got a bunch of different layers you can put on
their recent reason accumulator, brainfall, drought conditions, et cetera. The
Windy app is good too, Windy windy. I don't like
that word. I just decided I don't like it, you know, windy.
But the my Radar app you could see that, you know,
the level of drought stress basically all around the borderlands.
So yeah, so it's it's fucking rough down there. I
got a nice message from a gentleman on face crook
on the Facebook messager. I don't normally check Facebook messenger
because Facebook's a toilet, but it does get a lot
of the boomers into the plants, so I'll say it's
good about it, you know. And uh, this man I
met with the some natives who visited Thornscrub a while ago,
and you know, some would call this guy. Other people
I've heard call him a pretending and you know, the
old Cherokee princess thing, like my great grandpa was like
one tenth Cherokee whatever. The other's the thing that people do.
I don't know if you've noticed, but anyway, you know,
the guy swear always at least like he's like blonde hair,
blue eye. And I'm not holding that against him, at
least I wasn't until he I got this message from
him yesterday where he was angrily mouthing off to me
about some political shit like sending me elon Musk tweets,
and I was like, you know, one of the messages
from was from like January fifteenth. I was an Ecuador
or no, what a fuck was I don't know where
I was. But I didn't get the message then because
I don't check face crook because it's a toilet. And
I saw it now and I think he was. I
had posted something in stories about Ice, you know, about
the Ice kidnappers, you know, a gestapo, Trump's secret police,
and you know, I was upset about it because you
see videos of these thugs with masks on manhandling people.
You know, these just chubby thugs manhandling people and dragging
them out of their cars and shit, you know us citizens,
and it's upset and you don't like to see that
in a place that you know, you know, and I
know most of the country because I've been there and
I've travel all over and I've lived everywhere, and so
it upset me. So I posted in my stories and
this guy was responding, and I guess he was upset.
So I guess he's like a right winger, which whatever,
you know, that's fine. I worked with a couple of
right wingers that I was friends with and we didn't
talk about politics and we still got along, and you
know what, it worked. You'd say, hey, man, I don't
want to talk about this shit, right, but this gentleman
and he's like sixty five, he should fucking know better.
And I don't know how he rolls with a bunch
of natives and wraps his head around being a fucking
right winger. That seems kind of I'm a little bit
confused by that too. You know, I'm not saying you
can't do it right. People are really good at mental
gym now sticks and telling themselves all kinds of stories
and bullshit, and nobody bullshits you better than yourself. But
I'm just saying I'm confused by it because knowing what
I know, that seems like that would be fucking counter counterproductive.
But there's all kinds of stupid in this country these days.
So to each their own, right what Thompson hit some quote?
You know, I don't argue with stupid people or Jesus freaks,
because if they found a way to be happy in
this fucked up round world, you know, then they've at
least found you know, there's no point there or it
was less the meaning the way he put it, But
she looked at quote up. So that's kind of my
policy too. Like I don't care. Like, there's a guy
in a valley. He's a plant person. He got a
big mustard, he's like a super we got a super
Mario mustache. He's a nice guy, but he believes some
fucking unhinged shit. I mean, the guy's a real monster
on Facebook. The shit he posts. I don't know if
he lets someone else get ahold of his social media,
but he posts really ain't as shit like right, you know,
just really like nazisque shit, And you know, all interact
with the dudeicle sometimes guy have to go get plants
or whatever, right, drive out to where he lives. I've
only done like once in the last couple of years.
And he's not a bad guy. He's just maybe he's
the loud or I don't know. You know, we disagree
and I'm not gonna I'm not trying to convince him
because I don't give a shit. Let him believe what
he believed. I don't give a fuck. Right, still be
nice totim. I'll treat him with respect. I think he's
a little weird on at him, but whatever, you know,
it's none of my fucking business as long as he's
not coming at me with it. Right, Why couldn't this
sixty five year old man who wrote me of Cherokee
princess guy, why couldn't Why couldn't he have just done
that with me? And that's what I said to him,
I said, what are you gonna bring? You really gonna imply?
Because he was like, oh, you don't like guys. I
thought you were smarter than that, And I think, really,
you're gonna you're gonna fucking argue that like I'm I'm
not intelligent because we disagree politically, You're fucking sixteen years old.
You got the life skills of a sixteen year old.
U you cunt. I didn't call him a cunt. I
wouldn't do that, and I was I kept it real.
I even call him up, pretending it kept it real.
I was. I was cordial. You know, someone got upside
did a podcast interview the other day and the guy was,
you know, he was West Coast, really nice guy, but
he was asking me I said the word cunt, and
he got really you know I was. I was like,
I hope you don't throw n of that out, leave
it in, and he's like, you know, I was like,
it's not a gender specific thing. The biggest cunts I've
ever met in my life are always men, so don't
you know? And I was like, you ever, And then
he mentioned he had been to Australia, where of course
everybody used to word cunt. You know, Hey, you're a
good cunty. You're a good cunt, you know. But uh
and so he's like, I know that, but you know,
my wife she's a feminist. I said, so am I
everyone's I mean, everybody should be a feminist, don't you know.
It's it's the kind of nothing to do with that.
Sometimes people are cunts. The biggest cunts are always men,
So don't worry about it. But he's gonna think he's
gonna go back and at anyway anyway, no, you know,
no offense to the nice guy. But uh, anyway, So
this guy, uh, the guy that wrote me all angry
on Facebook. I was like, you know, I said this
to him. I was like, you haven't figured out a
way to just agree to disagree with people? Really, Like,
it's my fucking story, it's my platform I'm gonna talk
to about. I don't like seeing you know, thugs kidnapping people,
you know, in my fucking country. I'm sorry, you know,
you're gonna really argue with me about this, You fucking bonehead.
I didn't call him a bonehead, but he's a fucking bonehead, right,
I'm not saying he's a bad person. He's a fucking bonehead. Well,
he might be a little bit, but I don't know,
I don't know, I don't know. I don't know too
much about the guy. He annoyed me when I first
met him, though, I will say that me and Hovier
both met this guy at the same time I met
the fuck. You know, he said see he said something.
It was like a Larry David moment. We were an actor
interacting with him. He said something and it's like you
don't catch it at the first time he says it,
and you're like what, and then you think about it
later and you're like, well that was kind of fucked
up anyway, Okay, So yeah, I was just surprised. I
was surprised, you know. But that's my that when I
say that, you know, you got you've got you know,
someone who U rolls with with the natives. It rolls
with a native trap who's who's evidently a Trump supporter,
and that's you know, it's confusing. It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't have to make sense anymore. You know, there's
a uh, there was a trans person with an SS
tattoo who shot up a fucking uh. That doesn't make
sense either. How are you? How are you trans? And
you got an SS tattoo? I don't fucking know. Nothing
makes sense. Everything's everything's just the simulations all fucked up, right,
whoever's running it, it doesn't make sense anymore. Right, everything's
probably a syop. Everybody's nuts. That's the way it goes, right,
Just stop trying fuck the human world is only gonna
get crazier. Tarres McKennis said that he was he talking
about it's gonna get so weird. People have to start
to start talking about how weird it is. It's been
like that for a while anyway. So we got this pig.
We finally trapped a pig in this uh trap. I
was worried it wasn't gonna work. We got the trap.
Willy brought it down. Thank you to Willy. Really did
a lot for us, really brought it down a month ago.
I baited it with some corn. I was in there
hammering rebar around the payote to protect it. And it
worked because I went back two weeks later and you
could see where one of the pigs was rooting around
in the ground hit the payote bar or the rebars,
the pieces of rebar, and then stopped and didn't destroy
this massive clump of payote, of old growth payote, which
is you know, sacred to myself and many others. I
don't use it. I'm just saying it's a sacred to
stand in front of one of these things and realize
how slow it grows and how long it's taken to
get that large, and then you know, it's just it's
fucking mind blowing. It's like standing in front of the
old growth redwoods, you know, or an old growth monozuma
Cyprus or something. It's so impressive, and I just I
want to make sure because there's so little of that
left in South Texas due to both the payote trade,
the legal payote trade for natives as well as you know,
especially land clearance. I want to make sure that that's
impact for decades and centuries to come, which I realize
is an uphill battle, especially with drought and habitat destruction.
But you know, we don't have to worry about habitat destruction,
but drought and feral animals especially. I mean these pigs,
you know we have native have alinas. They're like a
third the size of these fucking pigs, a fourth the size,
you know, these have Alina's probably thirty forty pounds, like
the size of my dogs. Right. This pig that we
shot that Benny got went and got today because I'm
I'm driving to Saint Louis two hundred and twenty pounds,
A two hundred and twenty pound pig with nuts the
size of grapefruits, super aggressive. He sent me a video
of himself shooting it. You know, these plants have never
this habitat has never encountered something like that before, right,
especially when there's no predators to take it out. There
used to be jaguars in South Texas health supposedly, I mean,
we know for a fact there used to be jaguars
in South Texas up until the mid nineteen thirties. But
they're supposedly used to be jaguars up into Oklahoma, even
in the seventeen hundreds. All we're hitting traffic here, right, so,
but they're all gone now, all right, So you got
maybe mountain lions, you've got bobcats. A podcast's not gonna
do a fucking thing for a two hundred and twenty
pound hog. And they get they get bigger than that too.
And there was another one that we hidn't that we
weren't able to catch on the video as well. So anyway,
I was out there hammer and rebar into the ground
around these payotes to protect it. These old growth payotes
in the blackbrush forest. Again, such a wonderful smell when
the black brush blooms, but chillier, rigid doula for BASI,
I mean's some memozoid. It's the memosoid subfamily of the
pea family Fabasi. And so I was hammering in and
then we had this old feeder. I think the pigs
like the corn when it's rotten, like they like it
more when it's rotten. And so we had this corn
and this old feeder and the feeder motor had busted
and been sitting there for like a year, and the
corn had been all infected with or infested with weavils,
some insect which I would have loved to know the
species of, because I've been really getting a lot more
at that tomology lately. I said, wow. And and so
I noticed the corn of this fucky smell. It probably
molded a little bit too, because it does get very
foggy there in the morning due to all the plant covered.
I had the plants sweat. There's lichen on everything, beautiful
clumps of lichen, which I assume the lichen's probably unaffected
by the drought because it can just go dorman. You know,
we got beard lichen on all the black brush, really
wild habitat now your typical desert. Okay, A kin with
the subtropical dryland and anyway, and so I took that corn.
I said, what the fuck, so I gotta fight, you know,
why not use this and bait the trap with it?
Because something had been going in the trap and not
setting it off. At one point we trapped the buck.
We had to get our neighbor to come let the
buck out of this trap. I don't know how it
got in a pig trap. It barely fit. And so
so I baited it with this rotten, false smelling corn
that had holes in it, and apparently that worked. So
the more foul it smells, the better. And I'm just
happy we got this thing. You know, we got this thing.
We got it. We got you know this our ninth
pig who only got about nine hundred more to go.
We fenced off another area that only costs six grand.
We got to fence off another air, I mean, defence
the whole property would probably cost like fifty grand or something,
and it's not really feasible, and they would have to
clear a lot of trees that have grown up alongside
the fences, which I don't really want to do because
I like that. I like the trees, and they take
forever to fucking regrow, right unless you get stable rains.
And we're in the middle of a drought. So yeah,
I mean driving up from South Texas yesterday. How about
I did like ten hours yesterday, fucking brutal, you know,
driving up? Oh these lime these limestone road cuts in
Missouri or gorgeous. Look at that, ah, very old limestone,
not like the younger Cretaceous limestone we get in Texas.
You know, Cretaceous? Do you know how you know? You
know when a Cretaceous was from? Huh? If you don't,
I'm disappointed in you, and you should pay attention. You
should learn download one of these fucking geologic timescale apps.
Cretaceous was one hundred and twenty five million years ago,
the roughly uh sixty six million years and now roughly
it was very very distinct point that ended with a
mass extinction, the one that took out the dinosaurs. And
before that was the Jurassic, and before that was the Triassic.
The Triassic, the Jurassic and the Gretaceous compose the Musa
sloic Era, and now we're in the Sceneozoic. H God,
damn it. He's having trouble staying on the road. I said,
would you stay on the road. Look, you see the lines.
It's not that hard stand but playing the lines. So yeah,
so we anyway, I was out of thorn scrub, it
was I didn't go over to fucking lie is it?
Why is it beeping at me? Are you getting turned up?
Just listening? Am I making you nervous? I can't handle
people that can't handle that. You know, if you meet
someone who's real soft and they can't handle someone who's
kind of turned up and straight, you know, they're just real,
they're real sense that if they don't like it when
people raise there, Boy, I can't handle that because then
those people met they make me nervous. They make me
feel bad like I'm gonna set them off or upset
them just by being myself. You know what that happens.
I understand that it's an acquired taste, but you know,
why don't you go find someone else to hang out? Anyway?
So God, if you know, I was just thinking if
I lived in Western Missouri, I'd probably be on opis too,
or what do they do at here? Opiates are me?
It really is? It's you know, there's some beautiful areas,
but then there's some really ugly areas too. You know,
it's uh, there's not a lot of there's some beautiful prairies,
but a lot of it is just you know, destroyed
habitat and rolling hills. The amount of mowers that it
must take to keep all of this clear. And I
guess you had, you know, twenty two million bison doing
it before. God, you know what I you know what
I'd do to used to go back in time like
six hundred years and see the setup in North America? Oh,
can you imagine? Fucking a. It must have been incredible,
must have been incredible, you know, before Bucky's and billboards
and walmarts and I mean, you know some of those
modern conveniences, of course are nice, we need them, But
do we need to just every thank you for Okay,
we don't need to get this. How is Vermont the
only state that's outlawed billboards? Billboards are fucking idious? I think,
I mean it is allowing them? Really that good for
the economy with the billboard company? Then who's who's making
money off this? Right? Like a couple of schmucks that
have what do they do with them money? They do?
Is it good? Does it go towards the people. I
doubt it. Yeah, so I'm excited. I'm gonna lurk at mobile.
I'm gonna lurk pretty hard. I'm only gonna be I'm
driving seventeen hours one way to go lurk in Saint
Louis for two or three days, you know, in the winter,
and then and then come back. But I'm excited for
her to talk tomorrow. It should be it should be fun.
I'm of course getting paid, so this is work, but
I like doing it. And then I got a bunch
of specimens to drop off in Missouri Botanical Garden as well,
which again is like the American queue, and uh, you know,
and then uh, I guess I'm just gonna Yeah, there's
see normally there's like there's ship to see along the way,
there's a botany to do, but it's you know, it's
still a dormant season, so there's not a lot of
stuff out. You know, there's a lot of there's a
lot of stuff to see. There's not a lot of
stuff right now. There's not a lot of hold, not
a whole lot of stuff to see. Yesterday I was
I was where the hell was I was in Flugerville.
I didn't make it that far from out of Texas
up only like five hours away. I was in Flugerville, Texas,
and uh I went pulled out behind a hobby lobby
to find a little spot to you know, I got
a little stove. I go go make some tea. Gonna go,
uh do one hundred and fifty you know, just pop
out one hundred and fifty kettle bell swings, you know,
to compensate for all the ass time I'm gonna be spending,
you know, slowly getting heart diseases. I sit in the
truck without moving for seventeen hours, so it was nice.
The sun was going down. I was in the edge
of oblique shopping center and there's so many in Texas,
and I was just you know, doing sets the thirty
wait for the heart to catch up, give yourself a rest,
wait twenty twenty five seconds to pop out thirty more,
make some green tea. Nice time. And then I drove,
you know into the night, and I remember, I forget
where I saw this, but I saw some stupid quote
by someone, and this is something I hear at the
redneckt thing all the time. And no offense to the rednecks.
They could be fun to hang out with. Right, depending
on the nature of the red neck, the particular redneck
doesn't always imply any kind of a political affiliation. And
even if it does, you just find a way to
just not talk about that. We're not gonna talk about this.
Doesn't fucking matter. Stop no politics or religion on the railroad.
That's what you used to say. But there's this this
piece of redneck lore, and I've heard it many times
that the trees, the native trees, like the junipers, then
the stars, they shuck out out the water. They'll suck
out the water. Shuck out the water, you get bit
bashed heater, or you gotta shuck out the parson suck
it out. They don't suck the first off. And you
hear this in Nevada. You hear it in Texas, right,
you get june a porous monosperma and oxidenttalis, and Nevada
get the juniperous ash ei and texts as many different
juniper species. You always hear the trees are gonna suck
out the water, first off, you know. And it's just
a great Rednecks are great for a lot of things.
They're not great on fucking uh land land management or
an awareness of plant physiology or even basic ecology all
the time, sometimes but not always, most of the time.
Not trees don't actively suck out water. There's no energy
required to suck the water out. They don't pump it.
They don't suck it, they don't actively move it. Right,
They actively move sugars and sap through their flow them right,
which are the tubes that carry sugars and other nutrients
you know, produced in the leaves via photosynthesis. Whereas the
xylum carries the water. But they don't suck anything. They
don't pump anything. It's a passive process. The only thing
pulling water into the roots is the transpirational pull right,
the negative pressure created by water evaporating out of the
leaf stomata. And it turns out many of the native plants,
like the cedars, are really good at regulating how quickly
water transpires out of their leaf stomata. They can close
and open their leaf stomata using the guard cells depending
on how hot, dry, or windy it is, okay, And
so that if they're able to slow down the rate
at which water evaporates out of the stomata, they're then
able to slow down the rate at which water's pulled
up from the roots through the soil, or from the
soil through the roots through the xylum up to the leaves.
And since they're good at moderating this, at regulating this, right,
it's much more efficient and more efficient use of water
and a slower evaporation of water than it otherwise would be.
If you were to say, I don't know, take a
giant you know, anchor chain of a ship and stringing
it between two giant bulldozers, drag it across the landscape
and denude that landscape of all vegetation, leaving it barren
and open and exposed to the sun, to the hot sun. Right,
it is what I see happen. I mean, this is
just basic, you know. It just takes a little bit
of thinking about a basic awareness of plant physiology, like
shit they teach you and you know, general botany and
uh and and a little bit of time to think
about it logically, like really, what's gonna be hotter, what's
gonna lose moisture faster? Right? This? This? And I saw
I think when I saw it was, you know, one
of these fucking Trump cronies that got put into like
the BLM. It's some position that they don't deserve, but
they're just there for, you know, to act as a
whrror to sell these lands off the private companies who've
probably paid off the Trump administration. You know, you know
it works. It's just totally corrupt politics. And so this
guy was saying, you know that, no, I forget what
it was. It was some you know, what are these
twats that just is living on sirloin's steak. He's got
the three chins, pasty, pink turkey neck and you know,
and a very well fed man. And he was saying that,
you know, when you remove the tree cover, it actually
conserves water. It's not the data centers. It's not the
over extraction of the aquifer, which is technically a non
renewable resource. It's not trying to grow crops or graze
cattle in a desert that gets ten inches sixteen inches
of rain a year. It's the trees. The trees are
the enemy. Fucking idiots. Unbelievable again, it just it's only
getting dumber from here on out. Okay, I have hope,
just not with humanity. We're not going to change your
behavior till we're forced to by running into a brick wall,
just like an alcoholic doesn't. The alcoholics don't start going
to meetings and working the steps. And I got a
lot of friends working the steps right now, just just
trying to get sober. We're actually going to meat. They
don't do that until they've hit rock bottom, until they're
confronted with the reality that their own behavior is shooting
them in the foot right, that they're fucking themselves. So anyway,
but yeah, that was what it was. He was saying,
you know, no, we need to clear the trees because
we're gonna conserve water. He wasn't talking about clearing you know.
He wasn't talking about eliminating fire suppression and reducing woody
encroachment so that you can have grasslands. He was talking
about just destroying habit That just bulldozing, right, fucking nuts,
I mean, just crazy, the shit they can get people
to believe. And this is you can do this when
you have an uneducated populace, which we certainly do in America.
We're doing really good at the uneducation thing. You know,
is that a thing instead of or education? And I
think that's a new word, this education. The word of
the day is this education when you have a greedy,
sleazy political class that is well connected to all local
business interests and global business interests, and any barriers separating
the two have been removed by you know, personally installed
the court appointees. You you have a benefit from defunding education,
making everybody dumber, and telling them that all they need
to do to be good people is get God. They
just got to get God. They don't have to educate themselves.
They don't have to learn about anything around them that.
You know, we all use technology. Nobody knows how it works.
We all exist within this living fabric of ecosystems, whether
we like it or not. But nobody knows how it works.
Most people don't. Ninety nine percent of people don't. Ninety
nine percent of people can't name three native plants around them. Okay,
ninety nine percent of people don't even know. Well, I'd
say it's primate. Ninety percent don't even know what native means.
That something evolved there and was selected for by the
specific sort of set of circumstances, the geology, the climate,
the presence of certain herbivores in that place. Okay, ninety
people don't know that. They just think that well, the
grass is always the land has always been mote grass
on the sides of the highway, and the empty lots
and the billboards have always been there. And the water
always comes out of the faucet whenever you turn this spigot.
So so it's good, it's good. Good for the economy. Right,
never mind, we're going to burn everything out. It's a
series of decades. But but you know, it's good for
the economy. Keeps the machine moving. It's stupid fucking economy, right,
that doesn't place any value on living things? Is this will?
He was so abrasive, he's said. I tried to listen
to him, but he's just so abrasive. So so yeah,
So anyway, so the tree, The point is the trees.
The trees don't suck the water. Okay, it's actually a
very well regulated and controlled system. If you're using native
plants that evolve, their junipers are very very good at
controlling how quickly moisture transpires out of those stomates, those stomata,
those gas pores that look like little coin purses that
have two guard cells on either side that can regulate
when they open it when they close. And also, you
know the leaves of these plants, junipers especially. I'm looking
at a bunch of junipers Virginiana on the side of
the highway right now that probably actually needs to get burned. Right.
They're covered in wax. They're covered in very thick cuticular wax.
The cuticle. You know what plants had to evolve when
they moved onto land from from these shallow near shore environments.
When they evolve, that of algae, the cuticle, right, so cuticles,
leaf hairs. Native plants have evolved very very you know,
very efficient strategies because they've been there for so long,
Like different phenotypes have been selected by the environment inadvertently,
of course, not intentionally. There's not intelligent design. It's just
how natural selection works. The more efficient phenotypes have been selected,
they got leaf hairs, they got thicker wax, they got
drought dormancy strategies. I'm really curious about the drought dormancy
because I see that a lot where I live. You
see these plants that look dead, but they're not dead.
They're just in a state of torpor. They're just dormant.
They're leafless. They've just dropped their leaves or their leaves
are just in like a wilting state without dropping, you know,
for a number of weeks. They exist in this wilting
state for a while and then once they get water,
they perk back up. How do they do that? That's
what I'm curious about, you know, especially in these dry
tropical forests where that's more of a thing when you've
evolved the trait of deciduousness, just like the Grand Old
Force of New England the fall color. Do you ever
go to Vermont in New Hampshire to catch the ball color?
Just like that, but instead of a response to cold,
it's a leaf dropping strategy in response to a six
month dry season because the intertropical convergence zone has moved
to the other side of the Equator and you don't
have a low pressure system in your hemisphere anymore at
your latitude that's bringing afternoon thunderstorms like it does every
day during the wet season. Have you ever been to
a dry tropical forest in northwest Costa Rica or the
southwestern Dominican Republic during the summer it's lush, it's green,
Or in Minajerias, Minas Jurias, Brazil in this in their summers,
which is like January for us, like that's ending summers
in Brazil right now. It's ending the wet season. You
go there in July, it's dry as balls. It's winter,
but our balls dry. I guess, so is that you
know what I mean? I don't know why it's speaking.
I mean, I didn't drive over the line. Well, you
better do something, body, All of them goddamn trees. You've done, bastard,
they're gonna suck up all the water. Gotta get some good.
Where's that young man? You head out here and the
skids there. Kid ain't too smart, it's not working with
a bull shit, but he knows how to drive skits there.
Get his ass out here, getting all the goddamn trees
out here, give him straight ball his ship off here.
And there's lamb bear because the trees are sucking up
all the water. So why not expose all of this
land to that one hundred and sixteen degree temperatures during
the heat of your life? Seems like a smart idea.
So anyway, that's how we get where we are. It
isn't that lovely? The least you can see it in action.
You got a full picture. It's a fucking a living
cartoon anyway, So Uh the fuck was I talking about?
I was, I was just working on some videos old
Ecuador stuff, Potain and Drogony, Cleo Macey. Real weird looking
all the Cleomes. They do weird shit. You know, their
order of brass akalls. They're in the mustards. They used
to be in the Caper family capa race, which is
also a mustard, which you can kind of smell in
the leaves and you can kind of tell when you
look at the uh, the flowers. But you know, there's
some really weird tropical members of that family that are
just the flowers are bigger, the leaves are bigger. It's
more humid. They can afford to be bigger without having
to worry about losing too much moisture out of those
big those big leaves, those big spreading leaves with all
the stomata. You know, you go to deserts, the leaves
get a lot in narrow or they're reducing service area.
But we saw Poda in Dragony. We saw, oh god,
damn it, there was another one, really weird one. I
think it was Cleome Anomala. It might have some different name,
but this thing was a massive shrub. We saw it
like eight thousand feet just below the Paramo on the
cloud forest. I still got Paramo videos that'll be nice,
real weird habitat up there, but PoTA androgony, I think
it was uh bractice. I've practiced something if I have
to look again. But you know, trying to get ideas
on some of these plants can be a real It's
fucking hard, you know, especially some of those like cranopigiums,
the weird Panama hat family, the cyclon they see family,
the Panama had they look like palms, but they related
to screw pines and the order pandinals. I might be
going to Speaking of the screw pines, I might be
going to the Philippines for two weeks in April. Got
invited there. I guys should actually look into getting airfare
soon because that'll be really cool with the team of
botan of bot Philippine botanists, Filipino botanists, and and checking
out some of the for est there. I really want
to see the oh god, damn it, the dip tarot
cars Order mal Vley's. But it's a clade of trees,
the Dipterocarpaci that's in the Old World tropics. Should be
really fucking wild. There's reflegia out there to the giant
parasitic plant with a huge flowers basketball the yoga ball
sized flowers that mimic rotting meat that are probably pollinated
by small beetles or small beetles or flies. I'm also
teaching a plant i D class sliding scales like one
to five bucks, right, super cheap donation based. Nobody turned
away for lack of funds at Kinta, Maza Lan and
McAllen in South Texas. This is an entirely selfish act
because the more people that know how to identify plants,
the more people might start paying attention to them, which
means that the world I live in down there is
less bleak. You've got more of a you know, more
of a culture for native plants there, and an awareness
of bodany. It directly benefits the immediate world that I
have to live in, right, because it's it's rough down there.
Car dealerships, so many personal injury attorneys. I've never seen
such a density of personal injury attorneys. I bet there's some.
There's a lot of personal injury attorneys in the Chicago area,
but per capita though, I think it's probably I think
it's certainly denser in the in the valley. Okay. Anyway,
we're a little bit further down along the road, watching
the Golden Hour, the sunset, and our out of Saint Louis.
I forgot they got Deli's. They got Italian delis in
Saint Louis. I'm gonna get some nice meats. I'm just kidding.
I'm gonna get some nice Deli sandwiches. I'm gonna get
some provo loan and a big gallant jar of jardanira.
And I don't really you out to meet some chicken
here and there, perhaps little bit of popop, perhaps a
little bit of turkey, but by and large I avoid
the red meats because if they make you predisposed to
colon cancer, the as cancer. Anyway, So I'm excited to do.
I'm gonna get a gamus. How much does a gallon
jar of hot jardin near a cost? You know, the oils,
you get some olive oi, you get some carrots and
jalapenos and onions and celery and shit. They got that
stuff in in uh, you know, in over there in
Saint Louis. I got some Italian Delis. I'm so close
to Chicago, but I can't go all the way because
I got to head back to Texas. It's so sad,
you know, it's just nice up there. Seventy four degrees
in Saint Louis in late February. Fuck anyway, we didn't
even talk about intimopathogenic fungi yet, which is are really
big in the tropics. You go down to the lower latitudes,
you're gonna see a lot of antemopathogenic fungi. That's cordis
EPs ovo cordiss a, cant of cordyceps is that one.
All these different fungi that eat insects, and they're much
more prevalent at lower latitudes than at higher ones. I
presume just because the insects are larger and there's more bugs.
But it's a common thing, and a lot of people
get really amped about them. A lot of people that
I associate with get really amped about them. I guess not.
You know, your fucking plumber. Your plumber probably doesn't know
what ntemopathogenic fungi are. But you should tell him or
her or they them next time, you know, you want to,
you have an interaction, right the fucking AC guy comes over,
start talking about intimopathogenic fungi and why he or she
or whatever shit should care about him? Right? Do you
fucking know what to ask him? Do you know what
antemopathogenic fungi are? And why not you think it? Does?
You think it's not cool? You think it doesn't apply
to you? Are you not a living being tied within
this vest interwoven web, this network of life? Do you
think you just then a vacuum? Are you fucking special? Huh?
You just start ranting at him like that, very aggressively
as he's up there, you know, fucking with the ducks
and shit, trying to figure out, you know, what's going
on in your attic and why you know the is it?
Is it like a cooling issue? Is the is the
condenser fan fucked up? Or you know? Do you maybe
you just need more cooland what's going on? You know,
last time I had an AC issue was because the
the you know, the bathroom sink that the you know,
AC drain because the AC's in the attic drained in
due the bathroom sink got clocked because I got hard water.
So I said to go in there with a little
pipe cleaner and clean it. What the fuck is this
semi truck trying to do? Eat a fucking cock. You're
not getting over. Settle down, all right, mountain dew kidneys,
Let you settle down, chill out. Where are you going?
You're not going anywhere, you fucking Jesus Christ these trucks man. Okay,
so we didn't we didn't talk about ntemopathogenic funky. We're
talking about them now, very common and really cool. I
you know, I didn't do any long videos when I
was in Ecuador. I don't think I did, maybe just one,
but I just did shorts. I didn't have the energy.
I'm fucking burnt out. But I did a lot of
short videos. And one of the short videos had a
moth that had been infected, a large moth, the sphinx
moth that had been infected with a species of Cordyceps.
And I think that was Acantho Cordyceps. Maybe was there
in a kindo Cordyceps. I don't think so. Anyway, it
looked really cool, it looked insane, and the I forget
the species. It's on my iaz somewhere if you type
in corticipitacy or whatever. The one of the main clades
of Cordyceps fungi are. I've seen quite a few in
Mexico too, And of course I'm not out there looking
for these things. I've probably been around them numerous times,
but I don't I'm always looking at plants, you know.
Unless the thing is right in front of my face,
I'm not gonna notice it, or if one of my
my collegist friends points it out. And so. But that said,
I have seen some really cool ones. And my friend
Robert Kelly, he's like, you know, Mexican as hell, he
looks Mexican. His name's Robert Kelly. I don't get it. Whatever,
fuck it's like, oh Leary's tacos whatever. Anyway, he lives
in Morellos, the state of Morellos in Mexico, and he
and a friend just discovered a new species, what appears
to be a new species of Cordyceps that infects a tarantula.
That's really cool, that's really exciting, looks really cool under
UV light, as many fungui normally do. Is it fungy
or fun guy? I was doing the audiobook recordings for
Concrete Botany and I kept fucking this up. I would
go back and forth between fungi and fung guy. I
think it's a fun guy anyway. So that's really interesting.
And there's probably numerous new species of Cordyceps fungi all
over the world right, probably hundreds, if not thousands of
undescribed species of Cortyceps. This phenomenon is really interesting to me.
It's interesting. I mean, the process, how it works. I
don't know much about it. It's why it's such a phenomenon.
How this serves as it kinds of kind of checks
and balances on insects populations, what the role is in
the larger ecosystem, you know, the chemistry of some of
these fungi. It's all really interesting. Right. So there's a
new species that they discovered in a cave in Mexico,
some friends of mine. And then there's an this is
even more bizarre, there's a species of spider. I think
it's an orb weaver that mimics cort Aceps infection, because
many Cordyceps actually infect spiders. Doing spiders aren't insects, they're
not insects. Spiders, they're not insects. Neither are mites. And
but this mimicry. This batsy and mimicry. I mean, this
is this is the weird is saying, like, what selects
for that? Now, of course the spider is not intentionally
mimicking that. You know, for those of you that are
familiar with natural selection, you already know this, of course,
but many people aren't. They think, how does a plant
know how to look like a rock? How does the
spider know how to that? It doesn't, It doesn't. It's
natural selection. But my, you know, myke A better way
to say it is, what is what in the environment
is selecting for this trait? What in the environment that
the spider is selecting for the trait of us? You know,
the trait of looking like you have infection with cortesps?
Is it because animals that you're praying on and waiting
to ambush, or insects that you're insects or animals? But
you know what I mean, insects that you're that you're
pray insects, pray insects that you're you're waiting to ambush
and eat. Would think that you're a dead You're already dead,
and you have already been infected with this thing, and
so you can kind of protend, you know what I mean.
There's like with zombies, do you know, they pretend to
be dead, and the next thing you know, they're chopping
on your ankle right as you walk past them, and
they're laying on the ground and pretend to be as stiff,
and they're actually still you know what I mean, they
reanimate or whatever. And so I can see how that
would be an adaptive benefit. Maybe you start off with
a few of these fungal fungal like projections sticking off
of your body due to some weird mutation, and that slowly,
over time gets that trait becomes accentuated, you know, it
becomes embellished, and suddenly and after a certain amount of
generations it becomes fixed in the population or what. But
the benefits also, I would assume, and that birds might
pass you over as a prey if you look like
you're infected already. Birds want to eat spiders, they don't
They probably don't want to eat spiders that look like
they're already infected and colonized by a fungus, right, I
would assume. I don't know, Can you ask the birds,
you know, if do you guys, do you guys normally
pass over spiders that are have already been you know,
they look like they got you know, fungals poking out
of them. You know, if you like that, you passed
over Cordyceps infected spiders because maybe the the heifel strands
the kitan doesn't taste good. I don't know, but obviously
something selecting for it, because if there wasn't something selecting
for it, the bucking spider wouldn't look like like a
like it was infected with Cordyceps. So this is a
newly described species. I think the paper I'm not sure
if it just came out or what. My friend Alex
Uh down in Mara, Ecuador put this out. The species
if you want to read about it is uh. It's
a it's a Courtyceps mimicking spider. It's called tax Zanowski
aca t A c z A n O W s
k i A. It's a polloc name. Can you say polock?
Pollock's not like a racism thing, right, not racist against Polish.
She's the polo, you know, it's what you say. In Chicago,
I had a friend he is to go out of
mang graffiti writer. He used to write Polac. I think
he still does write polarch so tony anyway, But uh,
it's a Polish name. T a c z a n
O w s k i A tajanowskia wasca w a
s k a I think the well, I think Wasca
means it means river mother or something in an indigenous
language of that quarter. I'm sorry, I can't give you
more information, and I don't know what what tribe it was.
Either way, it's astoundingly cool. You know, this is like
this is like on par with that snake and iran
you know what that viper with the funny tale that
mimics of, you know, a centipede. The bird comes down
and get the centipede and next thing, you know this,
the viper's got the bird. Right, So it's all just selection,
but it's it's such a high degree of selection, and
it's probably occurs under such stressful circumstances in a in
a stressful environment where there's high population stress on. Whatever
is slowly evolving this adaptation. It's remarkable. So I wonder
how many other insects and iraq nids out there do
this mimic? God, that's fucking wild. The thing really does
look like it's it's infected. If you want to see
pictures of it, you can go to Instagram and go
to Bentley seven Underscore seven and it's the post from
well from like right about now, like, what is it February?
What's the day today? What's the day twenty February twenty seventh.
You've got nice pictures on there. God, it's wild though,
man the fuck? Oh wait, no, that there's a either Okay,
there's a picture of spiders that actually are infected, and
then there's this or weaver that looks like it's affected.
It's bizarre. It's so weird, really cool stuff. You know.
It's like, it's like the the Fritillaria fertilaria the lava
in China that you know, humans have slowly selected for
ones that it's a it's a you know, Fertilaria. The
lava is a lily essentially that grows in talus piles
and it's thought to have some herbal Chinese erbal medicinal qualities.
If you you know, Masha pulled this above it and
put it on a sore in your answer or something.
I don't know. So there's high harvesting pressure on it.
For the bulbs, and so humans have inadvertently selected for
phenotypes that look more like the gravels that they grow
in the color of the gravels like this kind of
deepish purple hue as opposed to more of like a
green leaf. Cool stuff. Who to thunk, I mean people
that natural selection works, I guess, But you know, again,
there's just varying degrees of of amazingness. All right, we're driving,
We're driving back from Mobot and Saint Louis and all
that ship went to a nice Italian then deli uh
eight half of pizza at some fucking pizza place that
was delicious. Uh. Hung out with my friend Ben, my
friend's Ben and Megan, both wonderful plant taxonomists and uh
plant the collegists and field botanists. Uh. Almost got kicked
out of the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium. Again. I didn't
get kicked out at you, but I did. I did.
I guess. There were some very upset people. They were
all over the ages and they were upset about one
of the videos that I did there near burium. Uh. Uh, Well,
you know there's is there's a lot of people that
have just clenched it not a lot. A couple, okay, couple.
My friend Peter Bernard works there. He studies orchipolination biology.
Wonderful guy. Always hang out with him. He's fun to
go lurker on the library. But then they get word
that I'm there, and they got to send someone down
to you know, to monitor me, to make sure I
don't film anything. They're always very nice, they're very nice.
But there, you know, you could tell they run a
tight ship over there, Missouri Botanical Garden. It's not as free.
It's not as loose as I thought. And I got
a you know, I got a friend there who's working
in horticulture, who's having a bummer time. I guess this
was this really bummed me out to here. And I
guess it's not surprising because this happens to every good
botanic garden. But they were clear. I guess they were
clearing out in the living specimens and the h you know,
they had to change up in leadership, and uh they
you know, they the new guy is more of like
a show garden guy. Doesn't know a lot about botany's
not not doesn't really know anything about bondy. He's a
horticultures bless his heart, and he came in. He didn't
like all it's plaid hare one of the stuff that's
a showy. I like the show Garden and basically everything
I make fun of in my presentations. This guy is
fo and and it turns out he he threw out
a bunch of interesting stuff and uh, and they wanted
to put in these fucking knobs. There's some guy with it.
This guy's your car sounds like a fucking lawnmower in
an head up. You know, I was one of a
uh a valve fucked up? Why people want to have
cars that sound like that. I just like small men
that just always if not physically small, then figuratively small. Okay, anyway,
so this guy got these beautiful limestone road cuts in
the Ozarks. You know, there's a lot of meth here,
but there's a lot of uh wonderful geology too. But
so anyway, so I remember the first time I went
to mobile back in the back greenhouses like five years ago.
They had amazing living specimens, right, things that if you're
adult are gonna you're gonna find boring. But if you
have any interest in bodany or ecology or how plants
evolve really cool strategies to deal with the stresses of
the bizarre habitats that they evolve in. Uh, if you
have any insight into that, you're gonna know what some
of this stuff isn't find it interesting, right, If you
have an inquisitive mind, you can ask questions. But if
you know, if you like the home deskot garden section
and you like the showy shit, you know, the bullshit
that the you know, some rich orthodontist's wife likes and
wants in her front yard and the north Shore suburbs.
If you like that stuff, you're gonna see some of
these specimens and go, that's boring. A bunch of boring stuff.
The graphic fuck I want you Why can't I just
get some nice moms? I like it when you have
the cascading month, it's like you girl, mom, and then
you train it to look like at the fall, like
all that kind of shit, you know, the stuff that
made me think that botanic gardens were boring as fuck
when I was a kid, because that's what they were.
They were the people like that people put that stuff
in right, And so there's two different styles of botanic
gardens and The one that's far more prevalent is this
kind of show garden bullshit. I've ranted about this plenty
of times before. And the really cool botanic gardens, like
the UC Berkeley style Botanic gardens, where it's literally like
a living museum and it's all separated geographically, Like you
go to the South Africa section and you see all
these cool plants that you can't find anywhere else in
the United States because no one's growing them. You find
those plants, you feel like you're in South Africa. Or
you go to the Eastern North America section and you
feel like you're in Eastern North America even though you're
in the Bay Area of California. Or you go to
the Chile section and they've got all these all the
bits of the Chilean ecosystem. They're really really cool shit, right,
Or the College of Biological Sciences. I was surprised to
see this, the College of Biological Sciences at in St. Paul, Minnesota. Right,
They've got a greenhouse that's full with like every room
is like that. They've got that new Caledonian section of
South Africa section. Fascinating shit. Right, you put people who
are smart and well traveled or at least know about
these different ecosystems in charge, and you give them freedom
and they can produce amazing things. Right. They've got passion
and they've got intellect, and they're really interested in this stuff.
I mean, fucking Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago has an
amazing desert house, right because the cause Ray is interested
in playing, you know, he doesn't care about oh the
showy stuff, but put it has a nice flower at
arregated leaves like this, whack shit. Right, He's not into that.
He's into really cool xerophytes. Right, Zerophytic plants, really interesting
stuff that have cool ecological or evolutionary stories to tell.
It's pollinated by an interesting flower or interesting animal, it's
its evolved some novel traits that looks totally bizarre because
it's a way that it enables it to deal with
a stressful geologic substrate or a stressful habitat or whatever.
You know, that kind of stuff. But anyway, they're clearing
I guess and miserve attentne garden. They're clearing a lot
of that out and hopefully this goes back. And that's
another thing I guess they've been saying that the pendulum
has swung too far. It's swung too.
Speaker 2: Far towards science and conservation. We're educating the public too much, right,
the pendulum has swung too far. We need to make
it more of an appeasing garden for the rich donors,
because that's who we're trying to please. And of course
we'll take that money. We'll take all that money, and
we'll fund science and conservation. Yes, yes, of course we will, yes, yes, yes,
But we need to please those rich donors, right, And
we don't want to make the rich donors feel stupid
because we're giving them too much information or because we've
got informational signs that tell.
Speaker 1: Them about an ecological habit of a plant. We need
to come at them like they've got a fifth grade education.
This is the kind of shit that they say that
that people in administration, in positions of authorities say. It's
fucking embarrassing. It's terrible, all right, what they're doing there,
Like they're throwing out specimens like really interesting shit. They've
thrown on a bunch of cool cacti, a bunch of cool,
dry tropical stuff because it's not showy enough. They've got
entire fucking greenhouses where they're training mums to look like
they're cascading over the rock wall. Fucking mums. You know
what I would ship my paint. If I went to
UC Berkeley and they the botanic gardner and they cleared
out everything and planted fucking mums, you know what I
would do. I would probably defecate right there in the middle.
I would be so upset as a matter of protest.
You know, it'd be like if you went into the
Smithsonian and you got rid of all the cool artifacts
and all the cool exhibits and instead used to you
filled it with like the American girl Doll collection, and
like some fucking glass bunny figurines from the nineteen sixties
and some you know, metal lunch boxes with cool uh
you know, cartoon imagery on them from the nineteen fifties.
You know what, do you understand what I'm saying? You understand?
And this is what if you go to botanic gardens
like you go to fucking Longwood Gardens. I've heard is like,
this is anybody listening to this podcast from Longwood Gardens?
I'm sorry, I'm shitting on your workplace, right, I've never
been there. I could be totally wrong. I've just heard
it is this. I call it rich cunt. It's a
non gender specific cunt, rich cunt botanic gardens, right, like
just boring fucking stiffs. People that are just it's all
people sniffing each other's parts out of wineglasses, trying to.
Speaker 2: Have cotillion dinners to fundraisers. Yes, very rich dollnews.
Speaker 1: Right. I cannot shit on this stuff enough. I could
do a whole podcast shitting on these kind of fucking
knobs because they make everyone dumber. They're spreading stupidity, and
they're all chicken shit anyway, right, And I'm not attacking
any one direct person. I'm just this is a phenomenon
I've seen. I saw it happen at San Francisco Botanical Garden.
They took everyone when I first started volunteering there, and
by volunteering, I didn't sign anything, I didn't sign a waiver.
I just started lurking around the greenhouses because I was
really interested and passionate about plants. And they took me
another wing, the people that were working there at the time,
it's like twenty ten, and showed me how to grow
plants and showed me a bunch of cool plants that
were just you know, have you heard of this thing before?
It's really weird. It's formed this mutualist relationship with this
species of blows so and so, and they had specimens
of it. I felt it was like going into a museum.
You learn so much. Right, when I go to Field Museum,
I learned so much when I'm there, I feel like
I'm walking into a textbook. Field Museum, Chicago. It's fucking that.
It is such an asset, right, And what's the benefit
of learning, of teaching the public. Well, it prevents the
whole American public from further sliding into this Saganesque dystopia
that we're living in. Right, exactly what Carl Sagan imagined.
We all have technology, we don't know how the fuck
it works. We live in the living world. We don't
know how the fuck that works. Right, everyone's just collectively
getting dumber. That's good for the economy. That's what's happening.
That's what's happening in America. This shit makes me mad, Right,
you do this lowest common denominator shit fucking show gardens. Yeah,
that's got a place, right, I guess like the boring
rich stiffs, they need a spot to go sniff each
other's farts and bump shoulders and shit and jack each
other off figuratively speaking, of course they need that. Why
does it need to be, you know, what's supposed to
be a public institution, like a boot panic garden. It's
just it's so sickening, and you know, it's I don't
think it's I think this shit is really condescending to
the public too, because I think if you show people
what it could be instead of a show garden, it's
a really cool educational you know, where you're taking pieces
of a living ecosystem and putting them on display for
the public and then telling the public what's so cool
about them? I think people would like that, right. I
think you're vastly underestimating what people would be into by
assuming they would not like that and that it's not
worth doing and that you have to talk to them
at a fifth grade level. I think that. I think
you're vastly underestimating them and fucking insulting them. It's disgusting.
And who gets put in these positions of power too?
Like why is someone that you know, for instance, let's
just say, would be better off managing a TGI Fridays
or an outback steakhouse. Why are we putting them, you know,
in charge of in charge of this stuff in charge
of shouldn't it be field bodanists or people that work
from the ground up, or people that you know both
grow plants and also have seen them in habitat and
are really excited about this. Shouldn't they be the ones?
Like a friend of mine who was working there used
to be he used to you know, he was salary,
so they didn't give him straight hours, and he would
come in on the weekends. Right, he'd show up at
like ten am weekdays, nine am the weekdays, but they
ain't come in in the week weekend because he just
loved being there. He loved it. Right, new boss comes in,
I watch you here right at seven am, and I
want you to be gone by that. You can't hang
out after three? Right? Why? Why that's fucking stupid? All right,
this isn't a fucking Benegan's restaurant, buddy, Okay, this isn't chips.
Let's give people who are passionate and have intellect, give
them freedom and watch what they can do. Right. Who
the fuck else comes into work on a week will
if I work there, and I never would in a
million years because it sounds like the people in charge
are fucking clueless. But if I did work there, I'd
be coming into the weekends. I love it and I
would want to do everything I could to watch to
make sure that that place thrived. Right, you take pride
in it, But then you start hammering people down. You
start being stiff and rigid, and that's good for stupid people.
That's not good for people that have passionate or smart. Right,
you start hammering people down, you make it just feel
like I sick any fucking job. I could just be
working the desk at a d dentist office and it's
you know whatever, Yeah, fuck it, I don't care about
this place anymore. You just drive morale as low as
you can. And I've seen this happen. This happens not
just at botanic gardens, but at private companies. Right. You
need to get people that do shit like this, You
need to get them out right, you can't. I just
it's amazing, man. More rules, more rigidity, more trying to
please rich donors, more dumbing everything down. It's embarrassing. It
really would be like if you put to the fucking
Field Museum in the SMITHSONI and you throw it all
the cool, got rid of all the cool exhibits, and
you filled it with lowest common denominator bullshit. Right, we're
gonna take you know, we're gonna get rid of the
Hall of Body. Let's fill it with I don't know,
a collection of plastic Star Wars figurines from the late
nineteen seventies, right, have you seen these action figures. We've
got every different, you know, because there's a multiple different
you know, during throughout the early eighties they were doing
different runs of Star Wars figurines, and so we've got
all of them here. It just it makes let's make
people dumber. That's great. It's it's horrific to see, man.
So but that's what's going on. And uh, you know
you can see it in the greenhouses. And so it's
my job to shit on that. It's my job to
ship on that. We went there. They were having the
Orchid Show on Sunday, and I went to I went
to the fucking Orchid Show. I was like, you know,
because we had to go there anyway. I had to
drop them stuff out of their barrium and we went
into the orchid show, and I was just, you know,
it's they're first off, they're playing music that sounds like
it'd be playing in the dialysis clinic. It's like, you know,
or a cotillion dinner. It's like, really fancy. I felt
like I was at a fucking symphony where I was
gonna get, you know, thrown out for pocket too loud. Right,
they're playing they should have been playing Cumbia's. Most of
the fucking orchids they were showing come from neotropical areas.
Play Cumbia's. Play something that doesn't suck. You're playing this
music for these rich stiffs night. And then it's all
just show. It's all cultivars, it's all showy. Or there's
no mention of or kids have the whole family has
one of the coolest pollination systems, a diversity of pollination systems,
really cool stories ecologically and evolutionarily to tell there. And
there was nothing, there was no information about any of
these things. It was just here's a pretty flower. Hmm,
doesn't it smell nice? You know? And some of them
didn't smell nice. Some of them smelled like rotting meat
because like the bulb of phylens and shit, there. Some
of those are pollinated by flies that go after carcasses.
No mention of that, No mention, let's make everyone dumber.
Let's just put it's just the pretty plant. That's I
need to know. It's the pretty shower, pretty flower. And
this is more of the mentality again that separates us
from the living world. Right. Fuck the education, Fuck the
philosophical context. You can glean about your own place in
the world from learning about how these lineages work, how
taxonomy works, how evolution works, how two different species have
evolved that are relatively closely related have evolved different you know,
pollination strategies or ecologies. Fuck all that. He was a
pretty flower. Isn't it pretty? Isn't it It listened to
the music. Isn't it pretty music? Dude? It's pretty just
you know, bottom bottom of the fucking brainstem stuff. It
kills me. Man. So anyway, security finally kicked us out
of the orchid show. It's because they had a dog
in there, you know, the old service animal thing. Louis
was being really good though, but so they kicked this
out and then we were just walking around the little
gardens with all the beds in the green yard. They
got some interesting stuff in the in the bed they
had lighting area, which is cool. It's a cool member
of Simarubasi, a pretty rare genus. I've seen it here
in Missouri. I've seen it in East Texas. It also
grows in Florida. It's a wetland member of Simarubasi, the
Atlantis and Castilla family. But uh, but you know, they
said a lot of garbs. They had English ivy as
a specimen like it had its own label, and shit
English ivy in the fucking garden beds. You have a
listed invasive noxious weed as a specimen plant. That's like
when I went the four Worth Botanic car And they're
horrible for this stuff too, or at least they were
five years ago. Maybe they've changed. Probably not right, because again,
anywhere you have, you know, you're dependent on rich twats
for donations. You have to dumb it down. You have
to put this puke out there, right. I bet that,
you know. I bet if the rich people don't care,
they just want to spot to stiff each other's asses,
you know, and show off their money. They don't care.
You could put the take a gamble. You could put
some of the educational shit in there to a lot
more of it actually, and get rid of some of
this dumb show garden fluff. And they wouldn't give a shit, right,
you just had to explain it to them. Well, we
put this in there because it's a really cool plant
that's got a cool ecology. It's related to this thing,
but it took this drastically different turn on the phylogenetic
tree of life, and it looks rapidly or it looks,
you know, extremely different from all of its uh, all
of its relatives. Right, you can explain it. The little
rich don't care. They just want to sniff each other's butts.
They just want to be They want to have a spot.
They have their little banquets and shit, you know the
rich donors. You don't have to. It's just it's so
pathetic and chicken shit. But to have to have English
ivy like forwith Botanic Garden had Nandina domestica in the
fucking garden beds Atlanta Botanical Garden is another shithole for
this no offense. They do have some cool stuff, it's
like stuffed off in the corner. You got like some
New Caledonian stuff. But they have a lot of garbage,
a lot of this garbage. And I think it's because,
you know, no offense to anybody working there, at least
on the ground. This is administrative decisions. These are administrative
decisions made to attract oh, beautiful rockout cropping, holy hell
over here on Highway sixty seven through Missouri. These are
administrative decisions that are made to attract the wealthy and
to please the wealthy so that they keep getting money,
and they don't want it. They're afraid that if they
plant wild plants, wild ecotype plants of shit that's interesting.
And they if they you know, they don't plant a
hundred of them all in a line or group to
by color, that that's gonna be a turn off to
the wealthy donors. And so they want to do more
of this Victorian garden, this Renaissance garden bullshit that kills
me on the inside every time I have to see it.
If I never saw this kind of gardening style again
in my entire life, I wouldn't miss it. I wouldn't cry,
I wouldn't mourn it. There would never be an afternoon
where I woke where you know, or a morning where
I woke up and then thought, oh, Wow, I'd love
to see a hundred fucking moms cascading over a brick wall.
Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't that? I do miss being
able to see that. That will never happen. That will
never fucking happen. I spend time in a living world.
I go, I do field botany, I go look at
wild shit, I go look at cool stuff. Right, I
have a lot of context for what I like, like
having a lot of context for what I go. Look at.
My context for this bullshit is that some rich cunt
just make just bread this stuff to look stupid. It
looks really goofy. It doesn't look wild, it doesn't look natural,
and they just found it whimsically attractive, and it's supposed
to please some you know, double digitiq dolt with a
lot of money. That's what my context is for those plans, right,
That's what the context is. That's what you've turned it into.
That's what you're making us all look at. I've spent
twenty minutes talking about this. I'll spend another twenty east.
I mean I won't put it. I could easily spend
spend another twenty minutes. Really, heterohelis, you get English ivy
in the garden bed is a specimen tree? Are you
trying to be an asshole? Is this a joke? We
should make a joke. I want to make a horticultural
atrocity garden. If I ever have a botanical gun, I'm
gonna make a horticultural atrocity garden. And there's gonna be
a big fucking toilet in the middle of it, like
a big surrand. It's gonna be an art installation with
a toilet and a bunch of garbage, like just a
giant pile of garbage in the middle of this. And
I'll laminate it with that plastic you know, some some
epoxy so it doesn't move or blow around in the wind.
It'll be a big pilot trash with a toilet in
the middle, maybe some old rolls, a carpet, a lot
of plastic trash, soda bottles, you know, chip bags, shit
like that. And then I'm gonna plant crape myrtles and
Andina domestica and daylilies and all this dumb bullshit around it.
And that's gonna be the horticultural atrocity garden. We'll stuff
it in the corner. It'll be an installation piece so
people can understand what was still going on in early
twenty first century American horticulture. Tony's Garden of Trash and Pain,
that's what we'll call it. Oh god, it's forty degrees.
It's like two in the afternoon. It's forty degrees. I'm
headed south. I'm going. I'm getting south to Texarcana. Man,
get south as soon as possible. The other route would
have taken me west before it went south. I need
to get south. This is Chili. I liked it for
a day. It's nice to get like a gray, gloomy day.
But now it's uh, you know, it's wearing on me.
But then, like three days ago was seventy degrees here.
You know, winter doesn't happen anymore. I remember growing up
as a kid in Chicago. You'd get snowfall on Halloween sometimes.
Now it doesn't come to like late December January. It's
it's so wild. It's just it's like there's no winter anymore.
Oh my god. So one hundred was one hundred degrees
in South Texas in late February, just nuts it's gonna
be a hot summer. And we started a war with Iran, well,
not you and me, but the US, the pigs and change.
You know, this is fucking nuts. It's nuts that just
that it wasn't bleak enough already, we got to add
a little bit to it. It was the thing. Going
back to Missouri Botanic Guarden though, and I talk about
Missouri Botanica Garden of course if you're wondering why Missouri
Botanical Garden, because it's it's like the American Queue, it's
one of the best, or supposed to be one of
the best botanical gardens in the UH in the country.
They've got a library, they have a press, they're responsible
for printing a ton of floras, a ton of books.
They're you know, they have pioneered a bunch of research.
They've got I mean, they wrote the Ecuador Catalog of
Vascular Plants that I was using when I was in
Ecuador came from Missouri Botanical Garden. It was funded there.
So they're they do good work. But the actual garden
itself is kind of going into the shitter. I mean,
I'm sure it's always been like this because that horticultural
garbage has always been a thing the Shill gardens. But
you know, normally botanical gardens will have that stuff, and
then they'll have people like cool people working behind the
scenes to actually get some educational stuff in there. But
it seems like now they've got someone behind the scenes
who's working to like liquidate all the educational stuff and
and put in show guards. You know again. San Francisco
Potano Garden, same thing used to be a lot of
interesting stuff. If I went back there five years ago
and I had heard this was happening, and you know,
some some guy had taken it over who cleared out
all the interesting stuff, probably because he didn't understand it.
He didn't he wasn't a botanist, he wasn't a plant
a cologist whatever, uh and and filled the ship with petunias.
They're show garden people, right. I like plants. People tell
me that I like plants, and what do you like?
And then it's like it's just a fucking and no offense.
And then that's great, but it's you know again, it's
just dumped down. It could you can really get people
to understand the context of where they fit into the
world and and to educate them, right, And that's that's
the kind of society I'd like to live in, right,
a place where people are smart, and because if they
have the if they have the context and to understand
where they fit in and they can, that affects everything else.
That affects everything else in society. You want scientifically literate people, right,
even just if it's just some dude working in a
fucking gas station, why not, you know, and why not
why should he not have a little bit of an
understanding scientific understanding? Well should he not know the geologic timescale? Right? Right?
Empower people anyway. But so we were we were in
the climatron though, and there's I guess there's a hummingbird
that got stuck in the Climatron, which is like their
massive greenhouse that's got to cost an arm and a
lake to cool man, because even on a chilly day,
that's got to get fucking hot in there. It's like
a giant dome shaped the greenhouse. And I guess this
hummingbird made it in there. He got stuck, and and
it's you know, it's a it's a it's it's uh,
it's a win anna lose because and on one end
he's got all these wonderful sources of food because there's
so many hummingbird pollinated plants in there. It's in this
tropical greenhouse. But then also he's got to be lonely
because he doesn't have a mate, you know, but to
make it in there over the he also doesn't have
to worry about flying south for the winter. You know,
you gotta get them a friend in there. But yeah, anyway,
so yeah, but if you're in saying, look, if you're
in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, go to the College of
Botanical College of Biological Sciences greenhouse. It's fucking phenomenal. The
people that are working there are doing amazing work. They've
got a lot of cool stuff. You can see living
specimens of plants that grow on really really cool ecosystems,
and wild type specimens, not some dumbass cultivar someone thought
was attractive. It's more shilly than there is, right. You
could see wild type specimens of really cool plants, like
plants that you would read about in botany textbooks because
they exhibit a really cool trait or evolutionary strategy or
ecological strategy. So that's good. Garfield Park Conservatory is really good.
You see Berkeley Botanic Gardens really good. Boyce Thompson Arboretum
is really good. In Arizona, They've got some really cool stuff.
You know that the kind of shit that Doults would
think is weedy, but it's actually really fascinating. They've got
a bunch of different types of Kreosode of Larrea trident
data at Boyce Thompson, which is cool like all the
South American because that's where Kreosa bush came from. South America.
So anyway, but back to the mobile, So I had
to go to the arbarium to check on some identifications
I had made when I was in Hidalgo. Mainly I
wanted to look at three dry land or at least
dry tropical members of the coffee family. And these plants
grew at higher elevations like five six thousand feet, so
they're not lowland tropics, but they were remarkable. Nonetheless, Searing
Ganta culture I was one of them. It was growing
with the Vaccalinia species, which was fucking wild to see
because Collinea is like a west They grow that in
West Texas horticulturally, so these are xerophytes. They're like dry shrubs.
Searing get the culture. I had really bizarre shaped yellow
tube flowers, probably moth pollinated. I think all these coffee
family members ruby Ac members I was looking at were
moth pollinated. Nernstya mexicana was another one that I saw
growing out of limestone with Hibiscus marchianis and a whole
and Aerocarpus and a whole bunch of other I mean,
it was wild to me. It's wild to see shrub
ruby ace xerophytes growing in deserts with cacti and all
this other shit, because it's just I normally just think
ruby ac is more of like a lowland tropical thing.
If we're not talking like you know, how Stonia or
something that it's it's gonna be, it's not, you know,
it's if it's gonna be like a shrub or tree,
it's it's gonna be more of a tropical, more music thing.
But that's not the case. So Nerdstya my Xicana formerly
Siguria mexicana, really cool one. And these should all be
in cultivation, by the way, you know, as zero fitic
plants in Texas, Arizona, southern California, and as far as
I know, no one is growing any of these. So
Nurdstya Mexicana searing Ganta cultureI and then Coude Portia. I
think uh co O U t E p O r
t I A maybe was another Guys Brick Giana ges
Geys brand g h I E S. That was another one.
I wanted to confirm, I said, I just want to
make sure. I saw him in in uh Hidalgo and
in San Luis poto C And I wanted to make sure.
And I took me a while to figure out what
they were just going through the flora, I I d
them and then wanted to make sure that's what indeed
what they all were, and it was. And they're all
really fucking cool shrubs, you know, shrubs, small trees that
should be in cult innovation, moth pollinated whatever, and that
you know, a couple of them grow just south of
the border in south Texas or and in northern Mexico,
excuse me, right, So they were probably there before the
place to seem cooling they were probably probably occurred farther north.
I mean, who's to say, right, but I'm guessing that
once that place to seem cooling happened, that knocked out
a lot of northern populations of stuff that still around
or lineages ancestors of shit that's still around in northern Mexico,
so I wanted to go look at that confirm. And
then there was a weird red flowered scutelaria I saw
in Mexico Scutlarium mulang tensius. They didn't have that at thebarium.
There was a weird rus kondra loma from Wahaca that
I'm still not confident that was the identification of the
small tree that I saw, but I'm guessing it is,
who knows. And then I was looking at some of
those pseudo smodingium as rash plants. Pseudo Smodingium P s
E U d O S M O d I N
g I U n which is a fucking dope genus
and a cardiac supposedly contains rushia all the poison IV compound,
and it was U pernissiosa. What was what was the
one I saw? Pseudo Smodingium pernissiosa priniciosa. I forget P
E R. I don't know. It was incredible though. The
leaves look fucking gorgeous, and I guess it's pretty common,
and there were quite a few specimens of it. You
could actually see the u rushi all on the leaves,
oxidizing the black. Not everything that oxidizes to black is
going to be rushi all of course, But you rushy
all does do that. So I'm gonna sharg you know,
to get these specimens looking really good if you do
collect them and you're from a wet environment, because I
would fork you up before. I used to just dry
these things, put them in a notebook, dry them on
the dash of a car. But if you don't have
a car around, like I didn't when I was in Ecuador,
you know, I just brought a fucking food dehydrator, and
you find a way to set them up right on
the food dehydrate, to use chopsticks or something to hold
them in place, sticking the chopsticks through the grill on
the dehydrator and put the book vertical holding, you know,
wrap it with a rubber band or something, and then
use that to dry. But you know, you want to
do it slowly enough so that you preserve the color.
You don't turn the whole specimen black. Whatever. There's a
whole method to the madness of this. How people do
this stuff right, That's one way I'm going to do
it the food dehydrate or the other ways, you know,
getting milk crates and setting the whole plant press on
the milk rate, throwing a blanket over it, getting a
small space heater, putting that under and to the you know,
right of the milk crate that your specimens are on,
and then you know, dramping a blanket over that. I
think I mentioned this in the last podcast, that the
channels the warm air up some warm air and movement,
of course pulls the moisture out of these plants and
uh and drives them right as opposed to just if
you heat them up too rapidly and then you just
cook them and they turned black and look like shit.
Oh now we just crossed an Arkansas, beautiful Neelyville, Missouri.
Stopped into the Longhorn restaurant and gas station to go
use the can, and some some fucking idiot had written
deports some MOLLI parasites parasites. They spelled parasites wrong. I
don't know fucking how. I guess the education systems fucked
just like it is. You know, the education system a
Neelyville's probably fucked like it is in much of Texas.
But I was proud of them whoever wrote that they
did spell so Mali wrong, So I you know, I failed.
They failed to explain in their athroom diatribe right on
a stall there, how Somali pirates are in any way
relevant to their meager ass life here in Neelyville, Missouri.
But I have a feeling that I can probably explain
that for him. It has something to do with, you know,
the propaganda they're inhaling on their bullshit, the Facebook page
or media source whatever, you know, it's all the same.
There's still critical thought anymore. People are just told what
to think and believe from. You know, they're ponds of
the algorithm that I was. I was proud they spelled
so Mali wrong, which I wouldn't have thought anyone from
this region could. Am I being mean? Yes, but we
did see we and bye by we, I mean me
and Louis the dog. We stopped and saw this wonderful
one point four billion year old exposure of rhyolite on
this rockout cropping. Most of southern and eastern Missouri is dolomite,
but we saw this beautiful exposure a ryolite. I saw it.
You know, we're going by these dolomite rockout crops on
a high way, on beautiful Highway sixty seven, and you know,
and they look just like you would expect any kind
of carbonate rock to look, you know, horizontal betting planes,
great texture. Where it's been fractured, you could see more white.
And then suddenly we get this. We hit this beautiful
forty to fifty foot tall exposure of a much more
darker rock which turned out to be this beautiful skeletor
purple ryot. Like ah, it was just fucking amazing. And
now where am I coming into? Now? God, what if
you had to grow up one of these times? I
feel so bad for kids. I got to do that,
you know, and you don't have cool parents or anyone
cool to like, you know, open your eyes to the
you know, window to the world. You know, all you
know is the relax in in the McDonald's and the
just everything is bleak and shit and the Dollar General
storets you know, you get the Internet. Of course, you
have the potential of seeing getting exposed to other facets
of the world, but it's likely not you know, it's
likely now what's gonna happen? It's likely, Now, what's gonna happen.
You're gonna get distracted watching stupid dances on TikTok and
you know, maybe whatever political shit your parents are inhaling
and there's not a lot of cultural opportunities, right, I know,
you never know though. Man, some of these kids, you know,
they surprised it it really there's hope, you know, Oh,
there's a Johndro that weren't they fucking people? Weren't they
fucking farmers? Recently they built in some software that was
bound to fail, or that you had to get set
up on, like a monthly payment plan to after you
and you only find that out there. You have to
do that after you buy the fifty thousand dollars piece
of farm equipment. Amica Mayriica, God shit, it's light for
day anyway. I just saw a wonderful fat Vance meme
of it was like an AI. I approve it. I
use of AI normally for procreating videos and pictures and
shit it's stupid, but if we're talking fatdvants, it's different.
It was Fadvance getting into an F sixteen with Pete
Hegseth and all these other worms. Look at it was
just a really nice little sequence you know. It was
like a twenty second sequence fadvance. So you look so
happy and proud, our bravest boy, A perfect symbol of
the dystopia or moving into it's moving forward into anyway. Yeah,
So I loaded up a bunch of fucking pieces of
rhyolite into the back of my truck from this this
one point four billion year old exposure, you know, and
most of them again surrounding that it's most of this
uh Devonian dolomite, and then you've just got you can
even see it on the Rocked app again. Download that
roc KD. The Rocked app can see what the rock
beneath your feet, and any map is most of the dolomites,
like four hundred million year old dolomite, and then there's
just these exposures. I love seeing stuff like that because
it got like, God, this fucking rock. Is it cooled
from a magma one point two billion years ago? And
what other like when did it get uplifted and exposed?
What is it doing here? I just want to know
what's it doing here? Next stop Texar Cana. We're going
to Texar Cana. We'll stay in Texar Canada night unless
I drink a shit done a cold brew, and we
decided to drive in the midnight into the outskirts of Houston,
Texar cana is not that bad. I was there last
year and I saw some nice I saw some nice stuff.
When was I there? Was it last? I don't know
what to fuck it? Maybe was the year before that
I stayed in a really shit bag motel though, I
mean it was it was bleak. It wasn't you know.
It ended up being hygienic enough, but it was just
culturally and spiritually. I lost the bit of myself that
night just by being there. So but I remember seeing
some really nice habitat there was also there were some
woods that was you could tell fire suppression that had
been a thing they I wanted to burn them. I didn't.
I wasn't gonna do it, but you know, someone needs
to go in there and burn the woods. Northeast of Texas, Canada.
It was you could tell it was a nice It
was a piece of public land. I forget where exactly
it was. Could tell it was nice. They had a
lot of nice mushrooms coming up, but it was very
fire suppressed and it needed to be burned. Goddamn though, man,
the mojave. I guess is going off right now? I
got friends sending me pictures of Polisma sonore that parasites
in baranj and Ac. A parasitic plant that hits ambrosia
looks like a little disc. They call it sand food,
really stupid fucking common name, which is not surprising, sand food,
because you can eat it. It's incredibly rare and really
cool plant. And the fact you can eat it, that's
like the least interesting thing about it. It's a parasitic
plant that grows in the dests. What disperses the seeds,
what pollinates? Say? What? Is one of the most common
host plants. But you can eat it. You can put
it in your mouth without dying, without poisoning yourself. Is
it somebody hitchhiking out here? No, God, this has got
to be a bleak man Northern Arkansas, southeast of Missouri.
That's gotta be a bleak fucking place to hitchhike. I
can imagine all kinds of feeling, all kinds of depravity.
If you were like riding the freight train, you got
kicked off here, you got a hitchhike into town. Holy hell,
you're in for your going in buddy, you're going down
for a deep one, all right. Get ready to feel
some some spiritual futility for a few days or whatever
long it takes you to get out of there. I
experienced that in Deshler, Ohio. Shut up the beautiful Duschler
saying that sarcastically, Ohio. There were actually some nice guys.
They were probably mildly racist, but you know, I passed
that that were hanging out in the little rail fan
park there to I don't of them, help me get out.
They were nice enough, you know, they they were. It's
kind of working class SMOs. But yeah, Deshla, Ohio man
rough rough spot. Anyway, there was I was looking at
when I was at a friend's house in Saint Louis.
I was looking at that Bursra book. You know, the
genis Bursa, don't you, huh. Bursa racey, the Frankinsense family,
one of the the one of the main genera that's
known as the elephant trees. And there's a book that
came out by this lady out of Mexican. I forget
her name, but it's it's it's all about the genus
burs in their ecology it's really cool. And Bursa, you know,
most their flowers look alike. The main way that you
tell the difference. They're one of those families where the
main way you tell the difference are the leaves and
the habit And there are some fascinating I mean, she
really covers all the different species. She talks about the
resin canals that they have in their leaves and stems,
some of which are pressurized and actually squirt resin out,
mainly to dissuade these beetles that have they've had like
a a evolutionary cold war with you know, co evolutionary
war with over the last few million years. There's different
different species of beetles that attack different species of Bursara.
Because these things are Franknanson's family. They've got these volatile
chemicals in their leaves and stems that smell wonderful to
us but are meant to you know, their their armaments
in the the war against the evolutionary war against their
main antagonist beetle species. So, but the pressurized resin canals
thing is nuts, Like these things actually squirt resin out
if they're punctured or chewed into. So and there's a
photograph of it in the book Real Nice. It's called bursas,
copals and quiexotes or something like that. The different common
names for the different kinds of bursra b U, R,
S e r A. Yeah, really fucking cool book. I
had it in PDF form, but I just order the
hard copy tool because I need it for my library.
You know, you need it for your library. There's some
good stuff in Arkansas. You know, it's just the wrong
time of year, early March. Stuff is still just waking up.
There's some good habitat left in Arkansas. There's a lot
of uh, you know, devastation, though you look at a
satellite map, it's all squares of farmland with little areas
left around the rivers and creeks, little areas of remaining greenery,
much of it probably invaded by invasive species. But there
is that weird vernonia here that grows in the novaculate
exposures along the river. I think that's more southwestern and
so that. But there's you know, there's there's there's good
ship everywhere. There's some really cool Arkansas that vernonia grows
with and Amsonia as well on these novaculate rockout crops.
Above the river. If I could, I wish I could
remember where it was. Let me look it up for you.
There we go. Yeah, it was Vernonia letter Mania, right
where Tanner Street crushes the watch it Tall river. Your
sick baster wears that. I don't know, Malvern Arkansas, somewhere
around there. There's some good stuff in Arkansas. There's and
Amsnia growing down there too. You go under the bridge
just like you're a bummy going to have a fire
and spray your shit against the wall under there, you know,
and and it's right there. But it's the the Wachita
River has created these little microhabitats where this species gets in.
It's a really beautiful species. Team Supris. There's not more
people growing this thing? Letter Mania? Who's Letterman? What else
is going on in Arkansas? I don't know anyway, I
guess we can wrap it up there our forty five minutes,
not bet, Are you still with us? Are you paying attention?
We're going on tour with the Horticultural Atrocity slash book
tour late May early June. We're looking for venues, ls
cruses Tucson. Maybe I'll Passo San Diego, La et cetera.
Al still working out the shows. We should be the
book tour that starts in like like May twenty seventh
or something, I think, And then what am I doing.
I'm gonna be in North Carolina at the Carnivorus Plant
Society thing in mid May. Hopefully that goes all right.
It'll be fun, and working on another book that's gonna
be a pain in the ass. It'll be fine, but
it'll be a pain in the Ass's gonna be just photos.
It's gonna be all all photo book. And then we will,
Uh what am I doing in April? I know I
got a bunch of bullshel If I forget half this
stuff I got going on, you know, you just can't.
We'll check in next time. I'll be posting it on
the social media is and all that and uh yeah,
that's it. So anyway, enjoy the spring and try not
to focus too much on the dystopia that we're living through.
Have a grocery day, Go fuck yourself, bike o head
over road. Now, old h I hit on the wrong problem.
Who am the rose? Her mind? And the dream long
the kindle bring with now a shallow wol I pay
the fucking tas mother the fish