Fragile Bird

I have on numerous occasions said I am worried about the future of the US and am deeply concerned about my American friends. The concern relates to the loss of civil liberties of citizens and the unfair treatment of non-citizens. Perhaps I am naive but gunning down student protestors or running them over with tanks has never been one of those concerns. I think Kent State was a shocking aberration in US history. Gunning down strikers or people who are not white, not so much, let’s face it there’s a long history of that. As for the heavily armed response, two days ago 8 police officers were shot trying to serve a warrant, 4 of them shot dead, in North Carolina. Not a peep in this thread. As a foreigner if I saw the barricades and heard the students say “we’re unarmed”, would I believe them? In a country where high school students take daddy’s rifle to shoot protesters? But as an American, knowing the American love of guns, would other Americans really trust that claim? I kinda doubt it.

Gee, what’s the death toll at Columbia?

Ok, the dog’s name was Cricket, and he killed the neighbor’s chickens. She doesn’t seem to brag about it, she just presents herself as a person who can deal with reality. Then she apologized to the neighbors with the chickens, helped them clean up the mess and wrote out a check for the damages. That seems pretty straight forward.What I hear in my mind: “ hey guys, I can kill dogs and goats without getting emotional about it and you can bet I could kill North Koreans, Russians, and whoever else needs killing (like maybe people crossing the border illegally).” The latter might be me going overboard but, hey, she can do the tough jobs.

Yes, but maybe they were talking about something that happened at the end of the week?

Was there some shocking news at the Trump trial yesterday? There was a live broadcast that popped up on Google that I listened to, but because I haven’t been following it closely I didn’t quite understand. Was some admission made?

I still shake my head about how much I liked him in Lewis. Damn.

There are so many times when I read this thread that I just want to say, “is he dead yet?”, and I feel like I don’t have to explain who “he” is.

Somewhere along the way I read a suggestion that mustard be substituted for the mayo, and I tried it out and liked it very much. I use Dijon, and to my surprise don’t miss the mayo at all. If that’s too radical, do half mayo half mustard, they actual bottle and sell that mix here as Dijonaise.

Happy birthday, Spocky!

Some of you might remember that about a year ago I had mentioned seeing an episode of Digging for Britain where a team goes off to look at a bunch of sunken ships, but I couldn’t recall the date of the maritime disaster. They talked about a large fleet of slave trading ships sailing down to Africa where they went to trade and pick up slaves, but got delayed, then sailed across to the US colonies to drop off the slaves and to pick up trade goods, got seriously delayed again, and so instead of making the crossing back in September they hit the rough storms of November and a huge number sank. It was very frustrating to troll through various maritime topics on Wikipedia but not be able to figure out the event. Well, I suspect I found the event by accident. I’ve been listening to the complete set of Hamish Macbeth murder mysteries and the author regularly refers to some of the wild weather of the highlands, at one point saying “like the great storm of 1703”. Out of curiosity I looked it up and I bet that was the Digging for Britain storm that sank all those ships. The storm is suspected to have been a mere, and I use mere advisedly, Category 2 hurricane that hit Great Britain in November with terrible loss of life and caused enormous damage. Ships sank all over the coast, with thousands of sailors losing their lives. An estimated 8,000 to 15,000 people died, but some say the number could have been as high as 30,000. And typical storm damage was done, but in a country unprepared for hurricanes. According to Wikipedia in London alone 2,000 chimneys collapsed, killing many people. The bishop and his wife in Wells died when the chimney collapsed on them while in bed. Queen Anne had to shelter in the basement of St. Jame’s palace because of structural damage done to the roof and chimneys. 4,000 oak trees came down in the New Forest alone, and thousands of people drowned in parts of the country that are prone to flooding. One ship was found 15 miles inland. Funny thing is, I’ve read a lot of English novels over the years and I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel where this storm played a role in the plot. You’d think someone would have written a novel where such a huge disaster was at the very least mentioned in passing.

Anyone ever make a dish with rice, pork and apricots? I was reading a murder mystery and one of the characters talked about his dinner. He just said a “chop” slow cooked with rice and apricots. Sounded good.

I just looked up that story. The police regret the words, but the cop’s not a media expert. A person approaches a pro-Palestine rally wearing a yarmulke, what do you think his motivation was? Maybe he didn’t want to set himself on fire, but wanted to commit suicide in another manner. Ok, the officer perhaps should have said “I’m afraid you might provoke a negative reaction because of the what you are wearing”, he shouldn’t have been so blunt.

@Zorral my laugh at your post is a deeply cynical one.

I used to go out with a guy who was a senior executive at a big mining company. He was visiting a mine in Indonesia, I think, or maybe Papua New Guinea, and the visitor quarters at the mine were grass huts on stilts. The walls were made of some kind of wood, bamboo maybe, that had bark on it and the wood had turned grey as wood will do. He was lying in bed reading a report late at night and caught something moving out of the corner of his eye, and grabbed the report and smashed it against the wall. There was a giant spider creepy crawling up the wall by the bed, and by giant, he said, he meant it was the size of dinner plate. If it had bit him it wouldn’t have killed him but he would have been very, very sick. The spider was the same grey as the wood and was more or less invisible against the wall. He also had a story about being in Australia (after a visit to Papua New Guinea) meeting with company executives in Sydney. One of them had a dinner party at his house for the visitors. The house was not too far from downtown Sydney, and was up on stilts with the parking under the house, and had a nice verandah overlooking the large backyard. The couple had small children, and my friend commented to the wife that he was surprised there was no play area in the backyard, swings or a slide, like you’d see in Canada. Ah, she said, the problem was the pythons, they had lost a couple of dogs to them and they didn’t allow the kids to play in the yard. I’m already nervous about spiders and snakes, thank you very much.

Years ago, maybe in the 1970s or 80s, there was a lawyer at a big law firm in downtown Toronto in one of the fancy bank towers. The banks in Canada do really well and they all built snazzy headquarters. The offices pretty well all have floor to ceiling windows. Someone visiting the lawyer asked if he wasn’t nervous about the window. I think the guy liked to lean his chair against it. “Oh no,” he said, “the windows are very safe, you can bounce yourself against them and it’s perfectly safe, I do it all the time!” Then he demonstrated to the visitor, and bounced his body against the window, and the window cracked and he fell 20 stories or whatever to his death. True story. I made sure never to lean against a window in an office tower after that.