THE LOCAL WILDLIFE

Discussion of San Francisco having sunk from "The Metropolis Of The West" to "important city" then further to "a minor provincial outpost". Like a burg in upriver Burma, on the edge of the jungle, but without malaria, typhoid, or periodic famine and plague. "You see those mountains, son? On the other side is China, vast, mysterious, unknowable. On this side, rice paddies, pythons, and tigers. We used to tether a goat to catch a tiger. Haven't done that in years.
It's pointless, there are no more tigers. The goats roam free now. They ate all the tigers!"
Somehow the idea of putting goat milk in one's coffee isn't appealing.
Goat milk cheese, on the other hand, is pretty good.


This was after we had speculated about what would happen if, exceptionally, it snowed in San Francisco. And what a clusterfudge the roads would be if that happened.


Both of us agreed that the snows of Minnesota and the humid heat of the jungle would make life intolerable here. Tigers might make it interesting, but the necessary goats would diminish the thrill considerably. And, like belling the cat, someone else should milk the goats.

Also, if those bandy-legged dwarf bandits had had karaoke back then, they'd have been quite unbeatable. We had fled the bar at the other end of Chinatown because someone from Hong Kong with a Kempeitai fetish had been singing (badly) in Japanese.
Other customers called it "interesting". Yep.

The Dutch in the East Indies and the Brits in Malaya and Burma wouldn't have lasted two hours against karaoke screaming. We didn't even last ten minutes. I'm still shell shocked.


Karaoke spelled the end of Western imperialism.
There are no more tigers here.
Just goats.



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