We had a dreadful issue with slugs in Pennsylvania years ago. We actually switched to all potted plants after a while and had to resort to wrapping a loop of copper tubing around each pot to stop them from climbing up the sides.
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Mostly we don’t get enough rain here to get slugs. But we get worms, or caterpillars, I guess. Thousands of them. The tomato hornworm is particularly grody. It’s the size of my thumb, and a couple of them can decimate your tomato plants in no time. We have peach trees here, but we’ve never gotten even one peach from them, because the worms bore into every single peach. Every. Single. One.
Gardening is not peaceful.
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Those little creatures are why I was delighted when I realized that parasitoid wasps had decided that our lovely little garden was their perfect new forever home! Of course, I just love them as is- they’re fascinating, with such a dazzling array of morphologies and behavioural adaptations -neurosurgery in the middle of an all out bar brawl, with the emerald cockroach wasp- but they’re also fantastic at controlling the hornworm population! By infesting their bodies and hollowing them from the inside out as brooding incubators for their young, of course. But hey ma, no thumbs! Or, er, insecticides, or pesticides. I’m blowing little kissies for those itty bitty wasps and their babies. Braconids are a gardener’s bestie.
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I’m trying to keep an open mind and forming questions as I go. I’m not being deliberately pedantic 
.
Here’s where I’m at right now:
Not all writing is Literature. But I’m starting to consider Literature as a transport for Speech.
If Speech is a form of local action, then Literature is a means of action at a distance.
So I do think that a sign with the single word ‘Stop’ can be literature under that definition.
What sort of writing is not literature? Playing cards (J, Q, K, A is not speech). Dictionaries?
I’d say a well-crafted dictionary could indeed be literature. What about a Thesaurus?
I’d say no, probably.
A sign on a pole which says Stop can be literature. But a thesaurus which contains entries like:
stop (verb): cease, quit, halt, end, finish, likely not.
The reason I care about this sort of thing is that I’m currently refactoring my Python IF library, Balladeer.
I’m carving out certain components and I need to be clear in my own mind what their focus has to be.
For example, I recently released Speechmark as a separate package. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t done a fair bit of research in how to approach all this stuff.
Thanks for playing along, I’m finding this discussion really useful. There’s no one I know in real life who would be able to have this sort of conversation with me, sadly 
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You realize that I’m the guy who initially asked if a stop sign was literature, right? 
If I understand what you’re getting at, you are approaching literature as simply the written word, not the genre of writing. However, you are taking the definition of “written word” to a deeper meaning and dissecting it. I think you are treading toward intent and purpose, but I’m not sure.
Now I’m confused. A thesaurus is trying to convey alternative words and provide a utilitarian service for writers… just as much as a stop sign is providing a service for drivers.
Describe, as succinctly as possible, the problem you are trying to solve. If you can’t describe it concisely, then you are still too foggy about the issue. Take a step back and describe something about the problem that you actually can describe clearly and see if that leads to more clarity. I just don’t know enough about where you’re coming from to offer a constructive perspective at this point, but give me something more succinct and I think progress will be made.
Right back at you. If I did find someone in real life though, my conversations would most likely end with a shoe being thrown at my head. This digital barrier works just fine. I still reflexively duck while typing though. 
Oh, and by the way, Speechmark looks really cool. It looks like it might provide a possible foundation for blind IF players with screen readers as well. I’ve read that some Twine story formats are not quite there for the blind audience. Anyway, that’s a discussion for different topic.
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In Mexico, as I understand it, “soft taco” is synonymous with “taco”, and it’s made with corn. The soft flour tortilla taco is an invention of Taco Bell.
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Flour tortillas predate Taco Bell by a couple centuries. Tortillas made with masa are more common in most of Mexico, but tortillas de harina are absolutely part of the regional cuisine of many parts of northern Mexico, like Sonora.
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From my understanding as a white guy living in Southern California, there are definitely authentic Mexican flour tacos - albeit corn is more common - but the hard-shell taco is an American (primarily Tex-Mex) innovation.
Both seem sandwich-adjacent while not being sandwiches to me.
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Thanks for the clarification! I had always thought wrong.
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Kinda. If you go to a Taco Bell and get a hard taco, the particular kind of hard taco shell you’ll get is a 20th century, American invention. But serving stuff in folded hard corn tortillas is an idea that predates the U-shaped, ready-made version. The first form of taco that became popular in the US, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, appears to have been a corn tortilla filled with stuff and then fried until the tortilla was crisp, and the modern taco shell appears to be an evolution of that.
Edit: Here’s a link to California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book by Bertha Haffner Ginger that describes a “taco” as “Made by putting chopped cooked beef and chile sauce in tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed togeter with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it”. That’s the earliest known recipe for tacos in English, from 1914.
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The hard shells make me angrier than any food product should. They are awful. And if you want taco stuff on corn chips, there’s this thing called nachos, which is the correct way to eat crunchy corn chips with stuff. There should be no hard tacos.
A soft taco is done correctly in a soft corn tortilla. The texture of the tortilla can vary, and there are appropriate uses for tortillas using finely ground corn, and more rough ones. A reasonable consumer knows what establishments make tortillas everywhere on this gradient, and uses them accordingly. Same with salsa.
I recently discovered that not everyone lives in a place where they have access to a vast variety of handmade salsas, and this made me feel so sad.
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Coming in with a particularly cursed way of eating them: I just pre-emptively break the hard shell taco casings in half, assemble, and then eat it like a giant nacho chip. I find it frustrating and off-putting when they break mid bite, but I also like being able to spread out all the ingredients evenly across the bigger surface area instead of using nacho chips, where it’d be way fussier to get it layered all proportionately.
6* should/can be swapped out with sour cream. If it’s mayo, it’s usually Kewpie mayo.
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Nachos Supreme makes me angrier than any food product should. They are awful. The nachos with toppings are soggy and unappetizing, yet the nachos that still have crunch and structural integrity lack sufficient toppings. The provided ratio of toppings to nachos is never correct and you’re left with either no toppings and a pile of dry nachos, or a pile of toppings and no nachos with which to eat them. If you want to serve Nachos Supreme, serve the toppings separately in a bowl and simply hand me a bag of nachos from which I will retrieve the proper amount of Nachos as needed. There should be no integrated Nacho Supreme.
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Oh. Well, you yankees definitely do some foods very well. If that’s how you like your tacos, well, bless your heart.
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Are Canadians like honorary Yankees?
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Texans consider everyone north of Oklahoma a Yankee.
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I’ve had enough partners from the American Southern States to know what that means! In the interest of scientific silliness, I updated my last reply with some crudely labelled and drawn diagrams.
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Okay, now that I can speak again, I must ask about your “taco”. Is this a depiction of an actual thing? A “taco” with layers cheese/mayo/lettuce/ketchup?
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Yeah. My brother is indifferent to any structuring of his, (half the time he’s just spooning ketchup mixed with ground beef into his mouth while eating the broken up shells) but I can’t and refuse to eat them if I don’t put everything in that exact order. (The layers doesn’t show the like, quantity of each item, just where they go in the stack.)
I really like ketchup, so it’s basically glue. Also, it’s not Hellmann’s, Kewpie mayo is different (it uses only egg yolks rather than the whole egg. It’s really good on french fries.)
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