In Memoriam: Little Shrimp on the Prairie

Some of you will remember that I've been covering, off and on, any news about the Little Shrimp on the Prairie, i.e., Tru-Shrimp's Madison Bay Harbor since 2018.

(See HERE for my adventures with Dark Ally as we went to Bellaton, searching for the lost Salt Water Aquariums of South Dakota Agriculture.  It's worth it for the scene where we found with 5 listless shrimp floating in a hopefully saline home aquarium, probably begging for their blessed release...)  

And, even though Tru-Shrimp got counties and towns to pony up development, money, and lots of publicity, and even though they promised endless pounds of shrimp from their dark saline towers, nothing has yet been built. Anywhere.  

And now it's official, folks, it never will be:  Sob, sob, sob... (feel free to read that anyway you like.)

"In December, 2018, the [South Dakota] Governor’s Office of Economic Development, or GOED, announced plans for a cutting-edge shrimp production facility in Madison, South Dakota. GOED granted $5.5 million to the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation for the project.

The Lake Area Improvement Corporation loaned the money to Tru Shrimp, the company, at 2% interest. The company is now known as Iterro. They planned to build the facility in 2019. Then, they pushed it back to 2024. As of today, it has yet to be built...

Rep. Marty Overweg is the Vice-Chair of GOAC. He said they need answers.

“They took that out and got private investors, South Dakota investors, to invest in their company also because the state of South Dakota gave them the startup money of $5 million," Overweg said. "So not only did they stick us for $5 million, they also stuck a whole bunch of South Dakota people who privately invested in this company. And this is bad business. I mean this is a drop ball, huge mistake.”  

(Uh, Marty, this is what South Dakota does best - look at EB-5, Gear Up!, and many, many more...) 

Iterro and the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment."  (LINK) 

(And if they did, Iterro would undoubtedly answer, "How about never.  Is never good for you?") 

And to anyone who wonders how on earth this happened:  Greed.  Simply greed.  Tru-Shrimp might as well have been selling shrimp-shaped trombones - NO ONE WAS GOING TO MAKE MONEY EXCEPT TRU-SHRIMP.  But there's one born every minute, and a lot of them wear suits and ties and seem sane on the outside... 

Oh, and before they ripped Madison off for $5 million in tax dollars, they ripped off Luverne, MN, for $5 million in tax dollars before ditching them.  

So that's their MO, and if someone comes to your small town or city somewhere on the priarie - or anywhere else - says, "Guess what! There's a company that wants to come here and raise shrimp!" RUN, do not walk, away from them, holding all your money tightly to your chest, because otherwise they'll rip it away from you the way you rip an exoskeleton from a shrimp.  

Me and Dark Ally offer our thoughts and prayers:

Oh, how we hardly knew ye.

*******

And now for something completely different...  

Some days it seems like that's all that's out there, doesn't it?

This is why I miss Colombo, Maigret, Tommy & Tuppence Beresford, and other detectives who actually like their spouses and their jobs.  And I keep reading Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Dame Frevisse and Cadfael, Nero Wolfe and Jackson Lamb's Slow Horses misfits. They all know who they are and are pretty comfortable with it, no matter how weird and wonderful they get.  

And speaking of being comfortable with who you are, if you haven't yet, check out 1989's mini-series "Summer's Lease" with the late, great Sir John Gielgud playing (at 85!) the cheerfully sponging, endlessly lecherous, sometime journalist Haverford Downs, who manages to slide into his only daughter's family vacation to Italy. There they find their host has disappeared, and there's a very suspicious death...  Gielgud won a Primetime Emmy Award for that role and he deserved it.  Here's episode one, from YouTube (which has all the rest of the episodes, too):

Enjoy.

MEANWHILE, BSP!  

A review from London's own "Murders for August" by Jeremy Black:

"Paranoia Blues. Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon (Down and Out Books, 2022) is an excellent volume edited by Josh Pachter, following similar volumes for Joni Mitchell (2020), Jimmy Buffett (2021), Billy Joel (2021) and the Marx Brothers (2021). Each story is matched to a song. Hardboiled America is the setting, and the themes are grim but also well-realised. The writing is spare and aphoristic, violence is to the fore, and it would be good if several of the novelists mentioned this month could match the quality of the writing here. There is no space to review all 19 of the stories, but they are impressive, kicking off with Vietnam echoes and killing in the New York subway system in Gabriel Valjan’s “The Sounds of Silence”. R.J. Koreto’s “April Come She Will” addresses fraud and blackmail, with some marvellous lines: “For men, the possibility of sex is actually better than sex itself…. August, the end of summer, a time when relationships die”. Robert Edward Eckels had stopped writing in 1982 but resumed at 90 to write “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine”, an account of office theft, poor management, and measured retribution. Frank Zafiro’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” deals with the travails of an elderly mob enforcer: an instructive perspective. Anna Scotti’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a brilliant and humane account of hardship, care, and a concealed suicide. Tom Mead’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” takes Civil Rights into violent crime in New York including a spring-loaded leather strap on the protagonist’s wrist. Excellent book."  

I am proud to say that my first "Cool Papa Bell" story (which is also its title) appeared in it.  Cool Papa Ted Bell, former shortstop for a minor league Florida team, is serving life for murder. He feels "kind of bad about it now", but not enough not to turn to the tried and true when he finds Aryan Nation gang The Brand is beating up the infirmary orderly. In prison, justice comes in all kinds of forms. And I never said he's reformed...  

Available at DownandOutBooks:

https://downandoutbooks.com/2022/10/31/new-from-down-out-books-paranoia-blues-crime-fiction-inspired-by-the-songs-of-paul-simon-edited-by-josh-pachter/

And my second Papa Bell story, "Round and Round" is in "Janie's Got a Gun", edited by Michael Bracken.  That one's a ghost story set in a penitentiary, and I can assure you that the ghost is real...  

Available at https://whitecitypress.com/product/janie/

And, of course, both are available on Amazon.com...

Enjoy!