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br>Actually I have no idea what the point is. A lot of my stories don’t go any deeper than “things remind me of other things”. Which is pretty much the only way I know how to understand the world; I remember as a kid being fascinated by the idea that every word in the dictionary was defined by other words in the dictionary that were in turn defined by yet other words in the dictionary. br>
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br>Anyway. When I moved away from Iowa I took a fully loaded 30-foot truck to Seattle. Now I’m moving my stuff in a 17-foot truck. Which means that my life is now 13 feet of stuff more simple.


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br>We used to use whale oil in automatic transmission fluid. But the TV show Flipper changed American minds about sea mammals, and in 1971 the United States banned the importation of sperm whale oil. Soon thereafter American automakers began using entirely non-cetacean friction modifiers in their automatic transmission fluid. The 20th Century was a good one. It was the century when we stopped putting whale juice in our cars.
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