7:59 PM View: Fireworks not, Ulysses, Costco Shopper

OThere were fireworks between the two apartment complexes above the road, but they didn’t show up in the above photo.

Almost finished reading Ulysses.  From it I got the idea to make anagrams and acrostics with my name.  I noticed details I had hitherto most certainly not seen in the previous readings like a sailor character who hadn’t been home for seven years.  I saw the word ‘demesne’ which was used in my favorite poem of John Keats.

Is Ulysses a great novel?  I’ll answer first by saying it’s not the greatest.  Some of its experimental writing attempts are lame.  Some of its writing comes across like a drum solo by a great drummer:  impressive but not enough to entertain one for more than a short time.  You could also say it comes across as the lead singer of a rock band doing a one hundred dash while performing a hit song at a stadium show.  He couldn’t have gotten away with if he hadn’t already made a name for himself.  Still, there is writing in the novel that lesser writers would die to have written.  Ulysses is a great piece of writing art but it doesn’t please the reader as much as a good thriller or a novel with memorable characters and events.

The Trump Tariffs have revealed a Northern North American political divide where Canada is basically a pseudo 51st state of the USA.  (Mexico is another story.) Anyway, I saw a video on WeChat Channel where a man in Nova Scotia, a Canadian province, went to a Costco, an American wholesale retail box store, to buy only products that were made in Canada.  To justify the contradiction, which he readily admitted to, the Nova Scotia man cited Costco’s support of DEI and the fact that the store was clearly marking from where its products originated.  People who like Trump would be quick to jump on the contradiction and point out how the man’s actions were more ideological than patriotic.  When I pointed this out on WeChat moments, an American, who supports the Dems, supported the Nova Scotia man.  Which only goes to prove my point.

It would seem that the Canadian patriotic rallying cry of “God, Queen and Country” has been replaced by “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”  I prefer the former.  It was the country that my parents immigrated to after World War Two.  I believe that the current Canadian regime doesn’t believe in any of the former cry’s rallying points.  Please! Please tell me that there is more to be patriotic when it comes to Canada than just anti-Republican anti-Americanism, the Canadian federal government and its administrative state with its many restrictions on freedom, a bunch of chain stores, and the Canadian anti everything that happened  before say 1970!