Sunday, 7 June 2020

Quarantine entry #78 - May 7


Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. I mean, here you go, reading about how a lobster fisherman caught an albino lobster, one in a 100 million or something, and then you learn that a 10-ft. great white shark, (that’s 3 m long, longer than an average man is tall and much stronger, too), unintentionally killed a surfer. That is life, but it still sucks, even if it is not COVID-19 bad.

…And then you read how some pilot drew a fish – I mean, a fist - for George Floyd in the air over Nova Scotia, and this is when I knew that the American society is in trouble…and also nuts. Why? Because it is bored. Everyone in the West – but especially in the U.S. – was bored because of the lockdown, and when the George Floyd protests came along, they piled onto it with no intention of stopping it.

Oh, sure, people like the Donald try to stop it…which they do…in a manner that is certain to make everything worse and to ensure that the ‘U.S. civil unrest’ beats-out ‘Coronavirus-19’ for top spot on news sites, (such as the MSN, but still). The fact is that people are sick and tired of COVID-19 and will do anything to forget about it; but…

…But what people are not talking about is how the ‘civil unrest’ issue will exacerbate the COVID-19 issue. Forget ‘Barkskins’, forget ‘Gordon Ramsey Uncharted’, they are out in the real world, where blood is being spilled, and COVID-19 is beginning to become ignored, sickness or not. Pause.

Here is the thing. Canada itself is doing just that, demanding justice for its’ own deceased POC, deceased under suspicious circumstances, I point out, but somehow it falls far from the scope of the U.S. – and they still have not opened the borders.

That is to say, the U.S.-Canadian border is permeable, but because my family does not want to take risks – and they are not entirely wrong there by now – it might as well not be. Pause.

Here is another thing. I doubt that this border is going to be officially open anytime soon, as neither D.C. nor Ottawa want to force the issue, and actually, they probably do not want to open the border at all. The U.S. – because its’ people have been moving as in ‘immigrating’ to Canada since 2016, (and whose fault is that? Not the Canadians) – and Ottawa because right now the U.S. is a burning pile of tires that is full of crap that stinks. The Donald and Trudeau are two very different people that did not get along too often in the past, and now it shows.

…The people…under other circumstances, the people would, and could, tell Ottawa and D.C. something about that, and so they do…about people of color, and about defunding the police. The latter part is U.S.-only, somehow it didn’t get caught in Canada, (cough), and so I feel comfortable enough to say that whatever is going on in Canada is only an imitation of the ‘U.S. civil unrest’ and the ‘George Floyd fallout’, and it helps Trudeau and his peers to feel important, while keeping them out of the U.S. level of danger. Anything else?

Speaking of danger, the first episode of S2 of ‘Gordon Ramsay Uncharted’ has reminded me quite a lot of ‘River Monsters’, especially the African episodes, for the obvious reason – hippos. We have talked about them repeatedly on this blog, but they are amazing animals, especially the common hippo. The pygmy hippo is remarkable in its own right, but people do not encounter it in the wild as often as they do its’ larger cousin, with ‘encounter’ being the key word here. You see, unlike the wildlife in Asia or South America, the African animals are kind of used to people, they know that if they charge first and think about the fallout later, they can survive their human encounters, while humans don’t. Sadly, humans are even smarter and are even better at killing than the African mammals are, and the latter do include hippos; hippo attacks are one of the main causes of death in Africa, whereas shark attacks…

Whereas shark attacks in Africa are something else, and we have talked about the AFO episode ‘Hippo vs. bull shark’ in the past. The hippo won, but that is not very surprising; I have seen some live-action footage, (not CGI) of hippos encountering bull sharks, and the latter give hippos a wide berth. They may be as formidable as the great white sharks are, in proportion, but otherwise? Nile crocodiles feed on them, and hippos can handle Nile crocodiles, no problem! Kudos to GR for channelling his inner JW, I say!..

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!

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