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Published: August 2nd 2009
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Tracking Transitosaurus Rex
T-Rex Tracks: The Transitosaur is doggedly habitual and will stick to the same game trail generation after generation regardless of the changes around it. Bring out your pitcher! Bring out your can!
Get your nice fresh oysters from the Oyster Man! Chapter Two of Gumbo Ya-ya catalogues the calls of the street criers heard in early twentieth century New Orleans. This chapter is a little tedious, to be honest, and since the street criers are all but gone now anyway, you might be inclined to skip over it. Between the unstoppable force that is Walmart and the monument to conspicuous consumption that is Whole Foods, the independent street merchant, rapacious fellow though he was, has been done in at last. He didn’t have a supply chain management department, he just had four oranges for a dollar. Now he’s a mercantile Diplodocus and evolution demands his extinction. He’s expected to settle quietly to the bottom of an inland sea with the rest of his sauropod friends and stop making such a fuss. Nature, if there is such a thing, has no romantic side. It isn’t keeping the platypus alive out of nostalgia, it just didn’t see the little guy hiding under a log. Nature will get around to finishing that duck-billed anachronism off one day, despite man’s efforts to keep the odd little fellow around.
Patience Pays
From behind my camouflaged blind, I get a glimpse of one of these amazing creatures garzing beneath a Beaded Oak. In the pursuit of a better species, “nature” has no remorse and the Oyster Man is next on the schedule for elimination.
The fate of the street vendor, however, is not really in the hands of a pseudo-scientific construct called "nature," hence a metaphor between his impending extinction and that of an atavistic proto-mammal turns out to be a false one. The Oyster Man’s fate is a matter of economics, which means it is the result of human decisions, not natural selection and therefore less systematic, less rational. Exhibit A: the streetcar, that stupid, inefficient, ill-adapted leftover from the industrial revolution (the Jurassic period of technology). It clatters along a fixed route unable to keep to anything resembling a schedule. Nobody needs it anymore. It never evolved. It should never have survived. Buses have air conditioning. Buses can turn left if a route needs to change or if another bus breaks down ahead of it. The streetcar is Mass Transit-o-saurus, obsolescence incarnate, long since pushed out of its niche by competitors that are more efficient and more adaptable, it should be resting quietly in a glass case, not lurching and banging its unpunctual way along city streets. Yet, if
The T-Rex on the Hunt
An adult Transitosaur, already gorged on tourists, stalks another unsuspecting victim. you are prepared to wait awhile crouched behind a blind, you can spot Transitosaurus Rex in the wild, bumbling along its outdated route down St. Charles or Canal, a massive mechanical reptile, an exotic primeval beast, getting there whenever it gets there, if it gets there, and perpetuating its preposterous existence by grazing on tourist dollars at a buck and a quarter each. Not only is it still there, it’s packed with sweaty people hanging out the windows and gasping for what little breeze it can generate at its top speed of twenty miles an hour (if that). People on bicycles are passing it. There it is, despite powerful economic forces trying to send it the way of the Oyster Man. Humans have chosen to preserve the silly little thing for the same reason we’re preserving the platypus. It’s furry and cuddly. Buses are better in every single way except that buses are dull and uninteresting. Nobody rides a bus if he can help it. Buses suck. Streetcars are cute. So is it any wonder that, when I get off the streetcar at Canal Street, I hear a powerful voice:
Iiiiiice col’ watah!
Dollah a boddle!
No tax! Ice Cold Pack Hunters?
Once thought to be exclusively a solitary predator, we now know that T-Rex will hunt in prides of as many as four and is capable of coordinated attack. Here, one T-Rex runs the prey to exhaustion while a second makes a clever flanking maneuver. Water!
One dollar here!
It’s a street vendor working the streetcar stop; dinosaurs of a feather.
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mark Schottland
non-member comment
That was a good post, really clever. Gotta give that one to you.