The first drive-thru daiquiri stand*.

In 1980 a small store in Reston, Louisiana, called Wilmart sold frozen flavored alcoholic drinks they called Frostys. For customers, getting the drinks was woefully inefficient--what with having to park and go inside and wait in line. A Louisiana Tech college student named David Ervin was studying business when he had a "eureka moment."

Why not offer frozen drinks at a drive-thru? In a parking lot, he took chalk and sketched out a layout for a hypothetical shop where he could serve drinks swiftly. He bought lots of strawberries and every can of Coco López cream of coconut within miles and experimented with drink recipes, all of which he called "daiquiris." With a $20,000 start-up loan, he bought frozen drink machines, leased a lot on the outskirts of Lafayette, and ordered a prefab building. "Everybody told me I was an idiot," he says.

Then came the legalities--since no one had done anything like this, there were no regulations on the books. The city of Lafayette sought to shut him down from the beginning. In one citation, the city said he violated the open container law prohibiting open drinks in vehicles. Amid some media fanfare, Ervin announced he had invented a sealed container: A piece of non-resealable freezer tape that covered the hole in the plastic lid where the straw went in. He unveiled the innovation to news outlets, and prevailed in court.

That is exactly how it's done currently in Heebie-ville. They put a thin layer of cellophane over the straw-hole, and hand you a straw that's strong enough to punch through it, and everyone pretends that you're not going to drink your icy concoction until it's a melty mess when you get home.

Also:

Perhaps surprisingly, even though Louisiana adopts a fairly laissez-faire approach to alcohol, it's not an outlier when it comes to drunk driving--24 states have higher drunk driving fatality rates than Louisiana, including almost all of New England.

(For reasons unrelated to drive-thru daquiri stands, Heebie-ville is actually a significantly more sober place than it was 20-30 years ago. Back then, the state university was the party school for rich white kids that famously did not hold classes on Fridays. Now it's got a lot more first-generation Hispanic students who are not quite as determined to get black out drunk for giggles, and they finally started holding classes on Friday mornings, at least.)

*I was able to read it using my one free article, but after that you might need to go to archive or a new browser or whatever.

How are you holding up?

E. Messily writes: I have a lot of mixed up feelings about the trend (or at least my perception that there's a trend) of people saying things along the lines of NOW THEY'RE EVEN BEING MEAN TO THE WHITE LADIES. For various values of metaphorical white ladies. Now they're even locking up the nice British tourists for no reason.

On one hand, it was also very bad when this was not impacting well-heeled friends of journalists, and it bothers me that there seems to be a sense of outrage that Even People Formerly Treated Well are now being treated badly (again, in various contexts, of which this is just the one that most recently caught my attention). At the same time, it is genuinely horrifying and upsetting that the bad treatment is ever more openly displayed and that the perpetrators of the bad treatment are no longer exercising restraint in their choice of victims. It's bad that it takes a nice white English cartoonist being jailed for weeks to get a Guardian article, but it's good that there's a Guardian article? I guess. Publicity/popularity no longer seem to be having much of an effect on policy decisions.

What a mess.

Related.

Heebie's take: I know, and I'm totally torn.

It's important not to overstate this issue - for example, 60 Minutes investigated the backgrounds of all the Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador, and found that 75% of them had no criminal history. Or the several high profile cases, like Mahmoud Khalil or this Columbian graduate student or the Tufts student. For those who are paying attention, I think there's good coverage of what's happening (but maybe I just don't know what I don't know. I know that 40 "Venezuelan gang members" were rounded up locally, and nobody knows where they are, and it's not getting national attention, so I assume this is one of many such instances.)

But at the same time, those stories just don't trickle down to the low-information voters the way White Lady Who Could Be You! does. And the white lady's story is harrowing!

I think I land on the side of thinking that it's worth leveraging privilege to draw attention to this issue. But I also get why it feels irritating.

It's kind of wild that two months ago, Trump caved on tariffs with Canada and Mexico because Trudeau and Sheinbaum invented some plausible pretext and sold him on it, but now in April, he appears to be sticking to his guns with on the entire world*. Like, when push comes to shove, Trump is generally terrible at sticking to his guns! He loves waffling and rambling and changing course constantly. But then when it comes time to drive the world economy off a cliff, by god he's going to do it.

Paul Krugman:

To be honest, I'm actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.

I partly feel that way, but then I also feel bad because I realize how many livelihoods will be ruined - globally - along the way.

We're still too close to November, where every single one of these shitstorms makes me still ragey with regret. A year from now, I won't feel like I can almost taste the alternate timeline like I can now.

It is definitely wild and unexpected how T2 is managing to blaze destruction in totally different ways than T1. I feel like right-thinking, lefty people are forgetting how awful T1 was in light of T2, but it's more that it was awful along just wildly different axes.

*Aside from Russia, which is so on-the-nose preposterous that it would jar you out of a book if it were fiction. Like, do we think he's an actual-actual Russian asset? Actual-actual-actual?

New kitchen sink thread here, but this time I'm not listing topics and tying my hands over putting up a dedicated thread later. FOOL ME ONCE, HEEBIE.

We took the kids to see Hamilton last night. They're all extremely the right age for it.

I feel like it became fashionable at some point to shit on Hamilton, and I think the critique goes something like this: the story is either inaccurate or not well-interpreted, and layering the black culture on top of it does not actually threaten the status quo. It just takes black style and culture, and uses it to pizzazz up old white guys.

Maybe so! It probably did get overhyped in its heyday.

But I'm here to say that the songs are still just great songs, and the lyrics are still extremely clever and funny, and it's still very sad at the end. It's okay if it's just mythologizing the founding fathers through a modern black style, and maybe not more than that.

I'm unusually sleep-deprived right now, though.