Ain’t this a beauty? I snapped this picture at the Rockvale Square Outlet Mall in scenic Rockvale, Pennsylvania, during vacation last year. I’m not usually much for malls of any type—much less ones sporting warehouses brimming over with discontinued merchandise, separated by kilometers of asphalt—but the decision was not ours to make, I’m afraid. At least we came away with some cheap Doonesbury books and this picture.

There is a term used in tissue culture called “sectoring”. This is where two or more genetically divergent organisms growing on some sort of media (a petri dish, usually) meet up with each other. The line between the tissues becomes a sort of demilitarized zone, a solid line of demarcation in which the creatures slug it out for domination of the medium. I imagine that, were you to go into either of these stores and pull out the drywall that separates them, you would find just such a turf war going on, each side neither making headway nor giving quarter.