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If I hadn't looked out my window, I would have thought that an ice cream truck was driving on the road that our apartment overlooks. For the entire afternoon, I heard the music for "It's a Small World After All." But the music was coming from these large truck sprayers (picture here, here and here.) My son Tony thinks that they are spraying for the Covid Xi Jing Ping Chicom Bat Flu. (Others confirm this.)
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I felt the menace of state power as I walking to a bakery near Tony's school. What happened was this: I drove and dropped off Tony at his school. I then drove up the school road a bit and parked the car on the side of the road which was not too far from an intersection with the road where the bakery is located. I park there because the traffic on the road where the bakery is located is usually very heavy, and I think easier to merge into traffic from a spot where the nearby traffic is lighter. Of course, it does mean that I have to walk a few minutes to get to and from the Bakery and that I do worry about getting a parking ticket. But so far, no fines. This particular time, I walked onto bakery street and saw twenty uniformed security men walking in line ahead of me. They looked to be cracking down on obstacles to road and sidewalk traffic, such as parked cars, parked e-bikes and stands that the shops on the street might have put out. I noticed that one of security men in the lineup had a pad of yellow parking ticket stickers. Seeing this, I worried about my car being ticketed, and thought to go back to my car and not buy bread, till I thought that the men were all going away from my car, and I probably had enough time to buy bread and return to my car without any trouble. But I quickened my pace in a mild panic all the same. I soon was on the tail of the lineup of security men. To overtake them, I went up stairs that lead to the shop entrances and walked along the entrances till I was past the lineup. I then descended back to the street level, and took a crosswalk to get to the bakery. When I had made my purchases, I went back to the crosswalk just as the line of security men had almost finished using it. At the tail end of the lineup, I saw a security man who surely was the leader of the group. I looked him in the face and saw that he had very severe looking eyes. Guys like him are a dime a dozen in China, but they are the ones who keep the regime in power.
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It's been raining the last two weeks. What can I say about it? It don't like it, but it's good for the farmers.
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An extreme case of drive- very-impatientiatus on the road where I had parked my car to buy bread. I had dropped off Tony and was cruising down this road to get to the intersection where I would make a right turn, when a white car passed me on the right, and then scared me for an instant. The white car was in the bicycle lane when it was passing my car and just ahead of our two cars, was another car parked in the bicycle lane. I grimaced because it looked like there was going to be a collision. The white car got ahead of me and veered to barely avoid hitting the parked car. If I hadn't instinctually slowed down, the white car could easily have hit my car. Needless to say, this driver raised my ire and I thought of lots of foul-languaged ways to describe him and other drivers from his race. I watched the white car continue on ahead and make more impatient and aggressive maneuvers. There wasn't a chance that I was going to get beside that car and see who was driving, but I am certain that it was a man. As I have said repeatedly in this blog, the locals are very impatient. But this driver was on the tail distribution of local impatience. But the driver behavior is not rare. I have seen many cars weaving in traffic so impatiently that I feel compelled to write about them in my blog or to try my best to annoy by getting in their way.
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One of my favorite retorts to the Black Lives Matter talk is to assert that No Lives Matter, Everyone is bad and Everyone should go boil their heads... Well, not so much assert as to post a meme saying that, except it uses more saucy and crude language. On a Canadians in China WeChat group, some person was posting how all the Prime Ministers currently depicted on Canadian currency have said things that would today be denounced as racist. I felt compelled to respond. So I posted a image of our current PM in blackface and the No Lives Matter meme. It immediately got a thumbs down from someone. I wonder if this someone thought that people were all good or hated the meme because it was a riposte to Black Lives Matter. Someone else then said that you can find things wrong with everyone if you tried hard enough. I thought that this someone else, even if he was on my side, was an idiot. You have to try hard to find flaws in people? What planet or bubble are you living in? Geez. The person who had thumbs-downed my meme, then responded my doing something to my meme. The No Lives Matter meme was changed to a No, Lives Matter. This person must have thought it was clever, but he was making the point the many have tried to make to the idea of Black Lives Matter, that all lives matter. Apparently, this fellow never got the memo that saying just Lives Matter or All Lives Matter is also considered to be racist.
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Phoned my Mom and I got depressing news. First, an aunt of mine had to be airlifted from Flin Flon to Winnipeg for some medical emergency. I pray that Auntie Edith survives. My mother also had the basement of her house flood, again. This time, it was because of a very heavy and intense rain that hit Brandon the day before I phoned her. 150 mm fell in five hours!! Lots of streets and basements and stores flooded in Brandon, including my mother's. I feel bad for my mother, and ashamed of myself because I am so impotent on the other side of the world and can't do anything to help her, beyond send my best wished and express my sumpathy. Thankfully, my brother Ron will be able to drive out from Winnipeg to help her, but his July 1st holiday will be ruined.
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