Superheroes, Chicken, Cross Country

There's an interesting map at the Patchwork Nation website, where you can enter your county and it will tell you what kind of county it is?

Is it a Boom Town?
Is it an Evangelical Epicenter?
Is it Tractor Country?

As it turns out, I grew up in an Evangelical Epicenter. I have now ended up in a Monied Burb. I'd rather live in the latter than the former.

Here's a story about the town I grew up in. You might not know this, but the state of Kentucky is divided into wet and dry counties. (There is also a subcategory of "moist counties", which have one city as wet.) In a dry county, the sale of alcoholic beverages is not permitted. Drinking is not against the law, and you can bring alcohol in from a wet country into a dry county. Of course, you can only bring enough for your personal use and not for resale.

These laws do very little to stop drunkenness or crime. As a matter of fact, methamphetamine use is a real problem in my home town. People drug themselves in other ways, like prescription medications. The local religious hierarchy - deeply intertwined with local government - has put a stop to my home county becoming wet. I'm sure the bootleggers were more than happy to assist with any fund-raising in such efforts.

Anyway, back to the story. My hometown has a rivalry with a neighboring town whose only claim to fame is that the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was founded there. (There used to be billboards in Chickenville, long ago, that read, "N_____, don't let the sun set on you in Chickenville.')



If the fear was that blacks would lower property values, rest assured, Armageddon couldn't have lowered the property values in Chickenville. The place was a rock-bottom dump back then and despite Harlan Sanders, remains one today.

So our dubious little paradise always had the joy of looking down on Chickenville. My father said this: "This town will never let Chickenville get a leg up on it." (My father didn't think much of the churched residents of our hometown.) For the longest time, the county of my hometown and the county of Chickenville were both dry. But in the 1990s, Chickenville passed a law allowing liquor to be served in restaurants as long as 70 percent of the income of the restaurant comes from food sales.

Did my hometown raise the banner of war, and shout from the throat of every fierce tongue, "the sins of Chickenville shall not be visited upon our fair city?" No. One or two years later, my hometown passed the same law. Trust me, sundown towns and dry counties do not stem from great moral principles. They stem from something baser and meaner.

(* * *)

If you ever read superhero stories, there will generally be a set of powers that are evenly proportioned out among the members of any superteam. There's one person who is very strong, one person who can fly, etc. etc. These powers, as a whole, are not duplicated. There's never been a superteam where every single person on it had the same superpower - but if they wrote such a story, it would be interesting. (Five strong heroes, five fast heroes, etc.)

Many of these powers correlate to useful tasks. After all, when one has abilities far beyond those of mortal men, one first must understand what abilities are possessed by mortal men, and for what those abilities are normally used. These tasks are usually employment-based.

Super strength - any job where you have to lift stuff for a living, or where you have to use actual strength (carpenter, furniture mover)
Super intelligence - any job where you have to calculate something (mathematician, chemist, physicist)
Super speed - any job involving travel (pilot, mail deliverer, etc.)

If you think about it, one could start with the job and come up with the superpower. Maybe somewhere out there there's a super pet groomer, or a super actuary, or a super cordon blue chef. "Activate super cordon blue chef power, which is highly specific!"

Even the basest jobs could have a super power associated with them. Take all of the shit cleaners out there. Someone on the planet must have a job cleaning up shit. I don't want to do it. You don't want to do it. And there's some poor sap out there, cleaning up dung for a living. I'll bet he wishes that he had some kind of super power or combination of super powers.

This got me to thinking about something else - what is the definition of a superlative dung cleaner? I'd assume that the person could clean dung so well that you wouldn't know that dung had ever been deposited in the spot from which it was cleaned. However, there are two ways to clean dung:

a) by sheer effort - getting some water and scrubbing, or
b) using your noggin - by using some sort of specialized detergent that makes the job a breeze - or by using some method kept secret by the International Dung Cleaners Association of America (Local 3135).

So here's my question: you are presented with two dung cleaners. Both do a mathematically equivalent job of cleaning dung. The one does it with eight hours of sweat. The other one does it with some much easier specialized method that lets him drink rum and coke for his remaining seven hours and fifty minutes. The results are the same.

Which one is the better dung cleaner? Are they equivalent because the results are equivalent? Is Dung Cleaner B cheating by using some method that Dung Cleaner A doesn't know about? Do we have to provide both sides the same methods to make the results equivalent?

This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night.

(* * *)

I'm currently traveling on Route 80 in my imaginary run, and you can find out more about this road here at the Wikipedia article.

If you're not familiar with US history, there's a famous old road that took you through the American west called "Route 66". Route 80 was actually a transcontinental route at one time, that started at Tybee Island, Georgia and took one all the way to San Diego, California. Unfortunately, in 1964 it was decommissioned in California when Interstate 8 took it over and various other city and county governments encroached on it. The current western terminus of Route 80 is at the border of Dallas and Mesquite, Texas. That would be nice if I wanted to visit my in-laws; the difference is I want to trek across the country, in my imagination anyway.