Category: About Me

The Olympic Games just recently ended, and I was looking at the medal standings when an idea struck me.  The USA wound up with 113 medals, about 4.7 times as many as Canada’s 24, but they have about 9 times as many people, which means a population of say a million people would produce about twice as many medals for Canada.  Of course, reality is never quite that simple – the USA could have sent thousands of athletes instead of the 613 they sent to Tokyo, and they might have won a lot more medals.  Same could definitely be said for China.  But I decided to take a look at the games as a whole, and to compare how many people there are in a country versus how many medals that country won.  The smaller the number, the more bang for the buck that country is getting.  And the best ratio of population to athletic success for Tokyo 2020?  San Marino!, which is now officially the smallest nation to ever medal at the Olympics.

Tiny San Marino has only 33,900 people, but it won three medals.  That’s one medal for every 11,300 people – far and away the best ratio in the world this year.  Second place goes to Bermuda, population 62,000, winning one medal, but this appears an asterisk-worthy fluke, as only one medal could have gone either way.  Same with a few others near the top like Grenada, but San Marino won three, too many to merely be discounted as a fluke.  Not bad for the country that ranks 218th in world population.  Most of the top performers are island nations and Europeans.  Here are the top countries in people per medal won:

1. San Marino                      11,300 (3 medals)
2. Bermuda                          62,000 (1)
3. Grenada                           110,00 (1)
4. Bahamas                         195,000 (2)
5. New Zealand                  240,000 (20)
6. Jamaica                           333,000 (9)

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7. Slovenia                          420,000 (5)
8. Fiji                                    450,000 (2)
9. Netherlands                   475,000 (36)
10. Hungary                         480,000 (20)

Canada wound up 29th in the world with one medal per 1.57 million people.  New Zealand won 4 medals less than us with about 1/8 the population.  The worst performer per population was Pakistan, the world’s fifth largest country, whose team, picked from 220.9 million people, failed to win any medals for a score of infinity.  It should be noted they probably have more pressing issues to address back home than tossing shot puts around in shorts, but like life itself, this list is not meant to be fair.  China put on a great show and wound up second in the medal total with 88, but that works out to one medal per 16.35 million people.  Again, they had to limit how many athletes they sent and for sure they left many deserving souls off the team, but in terms of numbers this looks quite bad.

San Marino is in an interesting place.  If I find myself with time on my hands in Italy, I may pay it a visit.  It claims to be the oldest existing nation, founded in 301 AD, and is the world’s oldest constitutional republic.  It is also one of the world’s richest countries per capita, and one that can clearly afford the luxury of a well trained trap shooting team.  Trap shooting accounted for two of their medals in Tokyo.

It’s been a long time since I’ve pulled my shit together and wrote anything.  A casual observer might imagine that I’ve been too busy, just can’t find the time, etc.  But they would be wrong.  I have had more idle time than anyone should ever have, and yet I look at social media, pet the cat, stare into the fridge, look out the window, anything but be busy.  We sold our house, so the next few months will be about packing up to move and also doing a course at BCIT which they tell me will take 1 – 1.5 hours every day.  Then I will be too busy to write anything, now I’m just being a lazy lump.

Not long ago I went for a massage with my 15 year old grandson.  It’s the third year in a row that this was his birthday present, so it’s becoming a tradition.  When we went into the locker room to change into our robes, I noticed the kid now has hairier legs than I do.  Mind you, it isn’t hard to have hairier legs than me, you almost just have to be a mammal.  I hear about negative body images, and it’s usually in relation to girls and the pressure they feel to live up to the beauty ideals of society, but let me tell you, I have some of that too.  I am hairless to the point of being almost alien.  I have even been accused of waxing myself.  I used to have a couple lonesome hairs on my chest but my abdominal wall popped out of my belly button one day, and the corrective measures taken to repair it involved mowing down my few sparse blades of grass.  The week after the massage I started physiotherapy, which of course meant I had to take off my shirt every visit and sit there embarrassed, looking like one of those bald Egyptian cats.  When I was younger my self defense was to call myself “highly evolved,” since in evolutionary terms, mankind is getting taller and less hairy all the time.  Maybe I could start a hair club for men-type business that caters to us people who look like they were treading water in a vat of Neet hair remover?  I could plant little hair plugs all over them, run an ad on TV showing hot girls going crazy for some newly hairy guys, and get rich.  It’s about time the beauty industry started picking on men.

I see people on the news almost every day who refuse to wear a mask when they are asked to.  I really don’t understand their objections, as wearing a mask is a very small inconvenience (I forget I have mine on), and has been shown to slow the spread of diseases, evidenced by the fact that this year the flu has been all but eradicated.  One study I saw said it brought the R number down 30%.  The R is the expected number of people you will infect if you get COVID.  When it’s over 1, the disease is spreading and below 1 it’s dying out.  30% doesn’t sound like much but if it would be 1.4 without it, it would be 0.98 with it – a huge difference.  In five generations of infecting people, 1.4 would be about 8 sick people, 0.98 would be 0.8.  Anyway, news stories about anti-mask people almost always end with the non mask wearer losing his mind in anger and assaulting someone.  Pretty convincing argument technique!  I hear people say they are reluctant to get the vaccine too.  I looked at the Canadian data so far, and there have been fewer than 200 serious reactions to the shot in around 1.8 million doses.  That’s one in every 9,000 or so – a success rate of 99.989%  If you are someone who knows they will react, I get it, other wise it seems pretty safe so far.  I will be getting my shot as soon as it is offered to me, and I hope most people do as well.  I’m sick of staying home and not seeing anyone, but not so sick of it that I will defy medical advice and go out before it’s safe.

Hang in there and stay well.  Let’s have ourselves a good summer.

I am officially bored of sitting in the house. Today is my dad’s birthday, and in any other year we would be getting together as a family for a dinner to celebrate.  I miss him and my uncle, which is my fault mostly as they only live about a half hour away.  There are other people I miss too, who I never see.  Me being a poor socializer is a sad reality, and this is a terrible time to be that way.

Today is a typical mid-winter BC coast day: rainy, windy and grey.  I have no where to go and I am sort of restlessly looking for food to eat and something to do.  Fact is, I got books for Christmas I could read, and there is always house work to do, but when you start doing nothing it gathers momentum.

Happy new year!  I see a lot of people are happy to see 2020 leave.  There were many reasons not to like it – the pandemic, street protests galore, rampant examples of public foolishness about masks and phantom election thefts.  I have seen where some people have said it was the “worst year ever,” but, while it might have been the worst in a while, it would need to have gone a long way to be worse than almost any year during the world wars or the black plague.  2021 should be a year of hope, and a year that brightens with time as the vaccinations start to rid us of the risk of COVID-19 and set us free again.  This hope and the lightening and warming of the world in spring may run in parallel, sort of the opposite trajectory of last year.  Maybe the family birthdays this summer will be back to normal?  I sure hope so.

I have a little bone to pick with the site that my blog appears on, Bloglovin.  I have written a few blogs that have not shown up there, and I see by the analytics that no one has read them.  That might be what they deserve, who knows?, but I wish they would at least post them.  I wrote Bloglovin twice and got no reply.  I think it may have been a problem with the ‘theme’ – the actual lay out of the site – which was out of date and not supported by their programming language.  That’s why the site looks different than before.  I kind of liked the old lay out better, but if this works, then it’s improved by default.  In a way, this post is a trial run to see if this gets out to the people who follow it.  We shall see…
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Well the Christmas holidays are here again.  I am pretty excited to have ten days off for the price of using three holiday days.  I plan to rest, drink moderately, and spend a lot of time looking out the window, as non-essential travel is banned for our own good.  Most of our traditions are out the window this year, but it was reassuring to see that I have accidentally continued one tradition we seem to have: small household disasters.

It started several years ago when we lived in our townhouse in Cloverdale.  That year around December 22 our hot water tank died, so we had to scrape together several hundred dollars we didn’t have laying around for a new one.  It could have been worse, as sometimes hot water tanks don’t just quit working but die in the hot water tank equivalent of a supernova, where they split open and flood the house.  Ours just died peacefully in its sleep, but its timing made it Christmas disaster number one.

After we moved into our old house in Abbotsford we started having trouble with the water service line.  Honestly, we had a lot of trouble with a lot of things, but only a couple of them got busy and wrecked Christmas.  We had already dug up parts of the water line and made repairs to the old copper line, but it was Xmas day that it went with a flourish.  A big wet spot had showed itself on the lawn – surely another leak had started in the line – and this time our daughters ran for shovels and dug it up.  There they were in lovely dresses and makeup, digging up the muddy ground.  We didn’t finish the repair that day, we had presents to open and a dinner to ravage, but that time I replaced the whole 40 feet of old copper from the road to the house when the weather warmed up.

The next catastrophe occurred a year or two later, and it began with a phone call I got at work around the 20th from our daughter Lizz.  She told me water was coming out of the ceiling and running down the light fixture in her bedroom.  It turned out that about 60 years of kitchen sludge had completely plugged a drain pipe which had came apart above her ceiling.  For this adventure I had to remove about 20 feet of ceiling from the basement and cut out all the old drain pipe.  The pipe was clogged like a fat man’s artery.  There was a tiny little hole through which all of our dishwater had been seeping out, but it finally got too much.  Christmas afternoon as guests were arriving for dinner, they were greeted by my two legs poking out from under the sink, trying to patch together a working drain.

The next year my half-ass plumbing skills came back to bite me.  The drain I laid the year before wasn’t sloped properly, and the new pipe was already full of fatty surprises.  Of course it chose December 24th to totally stop draining.  Luckily Dorothy worked with a guy who was a plumber and who happened to live near by, so with one call I had expert help.  All day Christmas he helped me install a whole new drain and, most importantly, slope it so there weren’t any low spots where the crap could build up.  My helper even refused to be paid for his help!  It was awful, but there certainly was a silver lining.

Another year or so later we decided to renovate the basement.  (Of course, by “we” I mean Dorothy.)  It didn’t start out as a holiday-tainting event, but it wound up that way.  We scheduled in people to frame, drywall, do electrical and paint.  Everything was going along well, then a flu came around and everyone got sick and cancelled days.  The job got further and further behind.  My Christmas that year was spent pulling down old drywall, feeling sick but having to carry on.  I picked at my turkey dinner with drywall dust all over me and bits of plaster in my hair.

Fast forward to this year’s disaster.  On the 21st I was drying some dishes when I came to a canister we had stored rice in.  As I dried it, it started to slip.  It had a heavy glass lid that fit snugly on top with a wire hinge.  I fumbled the top for a second, then it fell.  I stuck my foot out to break its fall and hopefully stop it from shattering, but the actual result of what I did could best be described as me giving it a robust drop kick into the front of our glass stove which smashed into about fifty million little glass cubes.  The lid suffered no damage at all.  You might me surprised at how much glass there is on the front of a glass stove.  We swept up about five pounds of the carnage into a box for safe disposal.  Then we picked out more glass, swept some more, vacuumed, swept again, moved things and repeated.  Luckily the oven still works and the heavy inner glass door seems to insulate really well, so anyone with a poorly developed sense of danger who might touch the door with the oven on, probably wouldn’t get burned.  I say luckily because that is where the turkey is going to get cooked in a day or two.
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We are hoping that’s the only disaster in store for us this year, but we missed a few years, so maybe we’re due for two?  I am also hoping for a couple other things.  One is, of the last three posts I written, only one of them got published on Bloglovin’, so I’m hoping this bucks the trend and gets put where people can see it.  And most importantly, I hope anyone still reading this has a great Christmas, free of messes and chaos, and that everyone stays healthy and keeps enough sanity to get back to enjoying life when the opportunity comes.

 

 

 

 

Well I must say I was initially pretty relieved to see the Big Cheezie, Donald Trump, lose the election last week. I found his pouting and unsportsmanlike behaviour a refreshing change from his gloating and lying. But then he started challenging the election process itself, saying his ‘victory’ was stolen from him, claiming massive voter fraud. In itself, this would be par for the course. The thing that was bothering me was the sycophantic horde of uneducated zombies who agreed with him, usually to the point of screaming and yelling at reporters or threatening election officials with violence. “This is what the 2nd Amendment is for,” is a message left for one official, referring to the right to bear arms being linked to having the ability to kill tyrants who become a menace to the republic. What ever happened to being gracious in defeat, and maybe even hoping the new guy does a good job, since you’re going to be stuck with whatever he does? We’ve gone beyond that now. (Americans more than us, although I hear some of this bullshit up here too) The bullies and poorly educated masses who can’t distinguish between truth and conspiracy fantasy have been brought out of the basement, into the light, and given some encouragement in terms of numbers and political representation.

I wonder how long it will be before some beer-bellied huckleberry in a muscle shirt assassinates a public figure? He will believe himself a hero, protecting his vision of America against the “deep state” and the “socialist whackos” who want to give him free medical coverage. Sure, he will get taken down and maybe even executed, but there will be other people from the trailer park tattooing his name on their arms, too. This is Trump’s legacy, aided greatly by the internet and its open sewer, social media. The suspicious, technologically lacking people who relied on jobs now done cheaply in China, have been fed nonsense that makes them feel like victims of secret elite groups. Who will get that genie back in the bottle? How do you explain to them that those manufacturing jobs left their country because greedy, rich American companies moved their operations to Asia, where labour is dirt cheap and doesn’t get a benefit plan or pension? They believe those jobs were stolen, like Trump’s election. I think if the political sides were more clear, geographically, like the north/south division of slavery in 1860, they might even launch a civil war.

Maybe America should start teaching critical thinking again. Soon! And maybe a few greedy, rich companies could bring some jobs back home. Sure it would hurt their bottom lines, and their products would cost more, but think of the social benefits of having that armed, paranoid dude working at the running shoe factory instead of reading about QAnon, polishing his assault rifle.

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Anyway, I hope my little rant is stuff that never happens. I hope this is the high water mark of craziness from down south, and soon we see it receding and becoming another mania from another time. Joe Biden talks about healing, but he is dealing with people – Trump got over 70 million votes! – who feel threatened and angry. Is it too late to spike the water supply with magic mushrooms and let everyone have a big laugh?

When Trump becomes a vulnerable citizen again and has to answer for his obstruction of justice and tax evasion, I hope it will expose him as the new Wizard of Oz – a sad little man behind the big scary machine. And hopefully he will lose his lustre as the world’s top bully and braggart.

I find myself at home alone again which is my cue to write something in the old blog. It’s been quite a while, and the last post I wrote didn’t even get put on Bloglovin’ which is sort of the default site for my stuff.

Anyways, as to why I am alone. My daughter rescued a dog. No, not from a local shelter, but from frickin’ Morocco. She had to pay a bunch of fees, and the place in Casablanca would send her dog to Vancouver. Except when the time came, the Moroccans told her they were only sending the dog as far as Montreal and she would have to pick it up. Montreal, she explained, was the same distance to her, give or take, as Casablanca was to Moscow. In the end, after much arguing and some testy texts, a rescue group in Montreal is forwarding her dog on to Vancouver.

My wife is going with her, so our daughter can love her new pet up on the ride home and try to keep it happy. Of course, she had to pay some extra fees to make this all happen.

Today is our 25th anniversary. Yay Us! It seems odd to spend it apart, but there wasn’t going to be a parade either way.

We just got back from a whirlwind trip to Alberta that will have to be our holiday for the year. We weren’t comfortable hanging around other provinces as there is still some hysteria about COVID-19 and incidents of abuse and vandalism, so we did a hit and run. My uncle was visiting his old buddy in Alberta and we agreed to come pick him up as the central theme of our holidays. We bolted here to Calgary on the first day. When we got into town our GPS guide got drunk and sent us back and forth all over town which of course initiated yelling and irritation in our vehicle. Before any actual hand-to-hand combat broke out, we called my niece and who gave us calm and useful directions to her house where we ate and crashed for the night. She also gave me a couple new ideas for enchilada assembly, which I plan to put to use soon. The next morning I scraped the frost off our windshield, knowing that back home in Abbotsford it was forecast to be 31C that day. Once we could see and had our prissy little heated seats ready, we waved goodbye to my lovely niece and headed northeast to Irricana. There we scooped up my uncle who was, like us, grateful to be headed back to summertime.

Day one on the road home we dawdled around, stopping at Canmore first, then Lake Louise. Alberta is mostly flat and grasslands, but the Rockies are amazing! We paid our $20 and entered the Banff/Jasper National Parks. This drive is 230 km of non-stop mountains and jagged peaks, usually reflected in some glacial lake.

We were stopping every beautiful spot we encountered until it dawned on us that we had driven about 30 km in an hour, and were on pace to hit Jasper by Christmas. So we picked up the pace, clicking pictures of nature through our car windows until we became fatigued of glaciers and wildlife and towering peaks.

Once we got out of the parks we drove to Valemount and checked into our hotel. It was a little downtrodden and sad, but we slept like statues for 9 hours and started over.

Day two of the trip we stuffed our faces with muffins and coffee in the continental breakfast area, then left town. First stop was Well’s Grey Park north of Clearwater. We stopped at Spahats Falls just inside the park boundaries to see the sights. It was a dizzyingly high waterfall that dropped into a narrow rocky gorge. Creepy thing: there was a cross and some flowers there for some young woman who went around the protective fencing and slipped off the cliff a couple years ago. Why? Believe me if you haven’t been there – it doesn’t look like a good idea.

We were nearly on empty so we had to turn back and not explore any more of the park. We fueled up then drove to Kamloops where we bickered about lunch, got shit from some woman about getting too close to her with my germs, and had a little picnic in the mall parking lot. Then we set off for Merritt. We decided to take the old highway through the Nicola Valley, expecting it to add a little extra time to the trip, but what we got was multiple construction delays which set us back quite a while. Still, it is a gorgeous valley so it was worth it in the end. After that was the mundane and familiar highway home, another year’s vacation expended.

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Nearly every day I stop and think: it’s been a long time since I wrote in my blog. But despite the fact I mostly sit at home doing not much, not even watching TV, I can never find the time to write anything. I think that being inactive breeds inactivity. Isn’t there some Newtonian law about bodies at rest tending to stay at rest? If there isn’t, there ought to be.

It’s Saturday night and find myself alone again, a bubble of one. The kids all have stuff to do, my significant other is working, and the cat is zero company at all. I understand staying away from people in general is a good idea right now, but I would really like to have an adult conversation with someone. And guess what? That person is you. Oh sure, you won’t get to say much, and you might find this lacking as far as a “conversation” goes because you can’t respond, but it will be cathartic for me, and, yes, I may just be that selfish.

Not really.

I need a haircut badly. It is long and straggly and keeps getting in my eyes. When I shower, it takes hours to dry, and if I open a car window, it gets so knotted up I can’t brush it. I have gone in search of a haircut a couple times but have been repelled by long lines and haircutters who have gone broke waiting for normal life to return. Your hair looks good. (This is me trying to converse with you.) Of course, when it comes to anything fashion-related I am mentally challenged, so who actually knows? Long hair wouldn’t be so bad if I could grow a beard, but I have the stubble of a grade 8 kid, and my arms and legs are so hairless I have been accused of waxing. I can grow a mustache if you have some serious time on your hands, but I mostly look pubescent for weeks while it gets going.

I think a lot about politics and the pandemic, but I don’t have anything to say that is going to help. At some point a person can just complain too much. What do you think about the upcoming US election? Race riots? Flocks of intermingling people spreading disease? Pipelines? Oh the interchange of ideas we could have! I would like to watch the news one day and hear about people having a 75th anniversary, or puppies being saved from Cruella DeVille. Some good news to put a lump in your throat and a big smile on your face. Maybe we could have contact with some aliens who could cure cancer, give us infinite clean energy and look like Jane Fonda in Barberella? Good news, large or small, would be welcome any time.

What I would like to see, although it seems naive to suggest, would be a gathering of people from all countries and societies and religions. They could come together and compromise, with the idea of conjuring up a societal model that everyone could live with that maximized everyone’s chance of prosperity, health, happiness. And also gave the world a lot less to disagree about. Dictators who are incapable of empathy and only want their egos petted would be turfed. They took a bunch of languages one time and cooked up an “international language” that was a Frankenstein made of words from all over the place and called it Esperanto. It never really caught on, but in a larger sense this is what I think the world needs. I don’t expect my idea of compromising on the big issues would work at first either, but maybe as a concept to be handed down and refined it could work. It should at least be run up the flagpole and see who shoots at it. Too naive? Too John Lennon? Too hippy?

When I was a kid, I wrote to some Esperanto group and got them to send me a starter kit of the language. When it caught on, boy was I going to be ready! Anyway, either they never responded or stopped responding after that, I don’t remember, but I do know they were out of business shortly. And it was sort of local, from Oregon I think. Kids, eh?

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In the first few days of the coronavirus pandemic, I worried about my health. I was middle aged, overweight, diabetic, and running around the country ringing doorbells, talking to people. I read the statistics and found a person in my predicament would have roughly a 9% chance of dying if I contracted the virus. Eventually I learned to relax about it and decided to let my fairly good immune system take it on, if necessary.

My next wave of anxiety about the disease was the number of cases. I was ridiculously relieved when the number of new cases each day started to go back down and stayed level for a couple weeks. I may have even ventured forth from my musty hideout without hand sanitizer a time or two. There were parts of the country and the world that still had rampant death and illness, but things close to home were on the mend somewhat.

Then began my third wave of worry: the contrarians of the world – mostly gun-toting Americans – had banded together to demand an end to the “tyranny” of social distancing. God himself had bestowed upon them the right to live free or die, so what government had the right to stop them? My question is, does the government have the right to stop you from killing someone? Of course it does. (Making it illegal doesn’t always work, but it’s a pretty necessary step if you ever plan to prosecute someone.) In my view, if you’re just going to go stand around waving your gun and drinking Schlitz, and that is potentially going to kill thousands of people, shouldn’t that be frowned upon? Of course it should. Unless of course you are a contrarian who knows better than all the immunologists, doctors, and scientists of every kind, and happens to know, in spite of excepted wisdom, that mingling about is harmless. And this is what God surely intended when he granted you all those freedoms. Despite some evidence you could use – you live in a trailer, you can’t even spell ‘tyranny,’ you didn’t quite make it through high school – you are smarter than everyone else! Yes, everyone else is fearful because they watch too much TV, or they think all them fancy scientist fellas are telling the truth. Ha! Not you! You have decided to buck conventional sense and go it (almost) alone, on the merits of your ability to think things through, unlike the libtards and snowflakes you see around you. Surely at this point you deserve to be rescued from the slight discomfort of your confinement, damn the dying people!

One stubborn group of contrarians that has made its presence known at some of the protests demanding the country open up again is anti-vaccine people. They still cling to the idea that vaccines are linked to autism. That argument got put to bed a while ago. What happened was this: the health community got sick of hearing about vaccines causing autism, so they handed over all their data on vaccinations and autism to the anti-vaccine people, and after examining the data the anti-vaxxers were forced to admit they couldn’t find any evidence of a link either. Get this, Contrarian Nation: the scientists were telling the truth all along. Maybe that isn’t always the case, but when the government tells you to stay home, ruining the economy and forgoing trillions in income tax, you can be pretty sure this isn’t the common flu, as was repeated on Fox News and by Rush Limbaugh, King Donald and other far right nut jobs.

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I haven’t heard it linked, but if I was looking around for flat earth believers, I’ll bet you I could find some at these protests, too.

Another startling absurdity from the far right is that they say they’d rather have people die than hurt the economy. Aren’t these, by and large, the religious people who value life so much they can’t bear to hear about an abortion? These elderly should be happy to die and save America, they say. Actually, these elderly are the generation who fought wars, paving the way for you to be born safe and prosperous, and your time to shield them from harm comes and you circulate the virus and bring death to many because you’re bored of Netflix? Very heroic.

Well, well, well, nice going! I sure hope you had a good time eating that pangolin, asshole. Thousands have died, many more thousands are sick. Panic has turned ordinary people into survivalist lunatics, stuffing their minivans with toilet paper and Purell. Everything has been cancelled. Is this because of nuclear war or global climate change or alien invasion? Nope. It’s because some dipshit(s) decided to order something off the human menu and eat a pangolin. One look at it should tell you all you need to know: it’s too ugly and too covered with body armour to be edible. Besides, it is has chubby little legs and no natural athleticism, so it is bound to be a crackling little grease fire anyway. Not to mention it is on the endangered species list! Still, people traffic them for their scales which are used in medicine. Another theory that I think has been disproved, is that the virus got into humans through someone eating a bat. Eating a bat, I imagine, would be a lot like eating a leather purse or maybe a baseball mitt with some bones in it.

Our chess club is cancelled too, but then again everything is cancelled so saying it is redundant. I sure am missing hockey already. My Canucks were doing fairly well and looked poised to make the playoffs for the first time in five years. That is, right up until Mr Curious cooked up his Asian armadillo. And we’ve probably just begun being effected.

I heard of an experiment done at the University of BC in the Physics department. If you read this and know of it, please let me know how accurate what I’ve heard is. Anyway, the professor fills an empty room with mousetraps, each loaded with a ping pong ball. The experiment is about chain reactions. To start the reaction, he tosses one ping pong ball into the room and – Snap! – one trap goes off and launches a second ball in the air. After some seconds the whole room is a cacophony of mousetraps snapping and balls bouncing around. When it settles down, every trap has gone off. Think of passing an infectious disease as the mousetraps. One dumbass eats a pangolin, then that infects someone etc. Today we are at the stage where there are about two balls in the air and the world health governing bodies are trying to catch them before they land and accelerate the reaction. They might succeed, but they probably won’t completely. In some places they are already at the next phase.

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I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, there is already talk of an early vaccine being tested, and people are getting ready to hunker down and avoid others for a while. These are good signs. Can they catch those two balls before they land and set off all the traps? Time will tell and I certainly wish them well. And I hope it happens before the Stanley Cup playoffs get cancelled too!

Well the final results are in. I didn’t place among the top 10 in the writing contest. They don’t arrange the 70 participants who didn’t win in any order, so I really don’t know where I finished other than at least eleventh. The feedback from the judges was mostly positive, but their main complaint about my story was they generally didn’t care for the ending. They also made a comment or two about it being too long a story to cram into 250 words. Fair enough. I still did better than I thought I’d do, and I may go in another one and see how it goes.

To make not winning more palatable, instead of turning to beer or ice cream, I decided to seek therapy by googling the people who finished in the top five to see what sort of competition I was up against. The winner was another Canadian who has at least nine published books, mostly fantasy and children’s book. Next was a poet from the eastern USA who has been published prolifically. Third was a science writer who has, among other things, contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fourth was a person whose bio describes him as an award winning writer and film maker. Last among the top five is another novelist who is only 25 years old and will likely write many books in her life, but so far has only nine novels published. So, being an unpublished and often grubby civic employee, I was sort of in over my head. Still, that little exercise made me feel better about how I did, as somewhere in all of this I likely finished higher than some other published novelists.

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Another odd thing that started happening during this contest was an author named Jerry Jenkins has started emailing me writing advice. At first I thought he must be a judge or someone from NYC Midnight – how else would he know I exist? The tone of the first email was “you probably have no confidence in your writing ability, and I would like to help.” I wrote him back to tell him I have enough confidence, but that if he felt that way after reading Lieber’s Report, then it must have really sucked! This was why I was so surprised when it came 4th and put me in the final. Up until I saw the results, I thought the judges were trying to console me! I googled my new pen pal Jerry, too, to see if he was a real person or some kind of literary Betty Crocker trying to lure me into a writing course or some other scheme to get in between me and my paycheque. Turns out he is real and has written over 200 books, a number that has probably increased since I started writing this post, and sold over 70 million copies. I got another email from him today. He never asks for anything, but I’m still a little skeptical.