Save The Nauga

Just in case you didn't know...  Vinyl is sometimes known as naugahyde.

I am known to spin a yarn, from time to time.

Occasionally I hook someone who doesn't know enough to tell that the tale is constructed entirely of bullshit.

Having a confederate who will back your outrageous claims assists a lot in keeping the ignorant from losing their willing suspension of disbelief.  Special thanks to FuzzyGeff and Mikhail Ronaldovich in this regard.

There was a burger joint in Ames, Ruttles, that was upholstered in shocking green vinyl.  So shockingly green you were convinced that they asked the warehouse what was cheapest, got the green, and then decorated around it.

Decent burgers though.

Ames, being a college town, has a large population of young adults who've got absolutely zero miles on their odometers and are just starting to realize that their educations to this point, to put it politely, skimmed the available pool of data where it wasn't outright glossed over.

This makes them vulnerable to stories told with a straight face and conviction.

We were talking about what the attributes of the nauga must be and how the vinyl industry had hunted them near to extinction...

That's when some 19 year old at the next table asked us what we were on about.

So I started in on how the price of cow leather had gone up over the years and how substitute hides were introduced to fill demand in the auto industry, but the wild herds of nauga were nearly depleted and it was proving difficult to raise them in captivity.

When confronted with vinyl being an artificially made product, I just hit them with the conspiracy angle... with endangered species laws, wouldn't YOU hide that you were single handedly wiping a species off the map?

Mikhail provided supporting "evidence" of the scarcity by mentioning how you hardly see a car with vinyl seats, most going over to cloth now...

FuzzyGeff stepped in and noted that the prices Ruttles charged for a burger were likely to pay for the extravagance of upholstering in naugahyde, in its natural color no less...

They were hooked.

They left, ready to campaign to save the East African Nauga from poachers and certain extinction.