Month: September 2020

Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Total tennis

September 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I watched a 15-minute YouTube video of largely abandoned small-town Mississippi – deep Trump country, surely – by TheDailyWoo. The commentator is amusing and has such attention to detail. So much of his video was sad but strangely beautiful. It’s one of a series – I also saw the Alabama one.

The New York Times dropped a bombshell by revealing that Trump had only paid $750 a year in taxes. I’m doubt this will shift many votes at all, but it keeps Trump in the news for all the wrong reasons, eating up the clock. There’s still time, of course, but unless the polls are systematically wrong, stagnating is no good for him.

Tennis. On Saturday we a storm in the afternoon, and even though it had passed by the time we were due to play, the courts were unplayable. Yesterday’s action went off without a hitch, though. I played men’s doubles, with the 85-year-old man on the other side of the net. He was incredibly lithe in the set we played. (I do alter my play to take account of his age, but not too much.) We led 5-3 and had three non-consecutive set points on my partner’s serve, but couldn’t close it out. At 5-5 we played a tie-break, because someone was waiting, and got taken apart 7-0 in the shoot-out. The senior among us shuffled off the court a winner, and was replaced by someone a bit younger. I kept the same partner. Again we led 5-3, and having lost my two previous service games easily, this time it was my turn to serve for the set. After numerous long rallies, as long as I’ve seen on TV the last two days, plus a double fault on set point, we got there on at least our fifth opportunity as the light was fading.

How weird it is to see the French Open being played in autumn with a bemasked skeleton crowd, but what I’ve seen so far has been utterly absorbing. Pure attritional, cat-and-mouse, clay-court tennis. Best of all, there are still no final-set tie-breaks at Roland Garros, and we’ve already seen some gargantuan, logic-defying matches, with scores into the teens in the fifth set despite many service breaks. Last night I saw the end of a match between two Argentines – Londero and Delbonis, which finished 14-12 in Londero’s favour in the final set. Londero served for the match five times and saved a match point. I thought it wouldn’t get nuttier than that, but tonight we had Colentin Moutet, a left-handed Frenchman, against Lorenzo Giustino of Italy. I thought Moutet would win – he looked the fitter and more composed of the two – and he served for the match three times, once getting to 30-0. But somehow the match refused to end. It was both gripping and draining to watch, and heaven knows what it must have been like for the players. Giustino really swung at everything on the return games and was the winner in the end, by the ludicrous score of 18-16 in the fifth, after six hours and five minutes over two days, despite being dominated for large chunks of the match. Giustino came through qualifying, so even if he totally crashes in the next round, this will be a useful payday for him.

At the weekend we had the Hungarian festival, which is always fun. It was smaller than usual, for obvious reasons. I got myself a bottle of Csiki Sör (pronounced “cheeky sherr”), the rather fruity Hungarian beer. It’s cool as hell honestly to live in a place where you see all these weird and wonderful languages.

Timișoara has a new mayor. Nicolae Robu, the distinctive-looking mayor of the last eight years is out, and Dominic Fritz (who sounds like a tennis player; he’s of German origin) is in. My students had told me that Robu was an overwhelming favourite to be re-elected, but it wasn’t even close. Robu got 30% of the vote, Fritz 53%.

Maybe it was that song Omaha by Counting Crows that told my brain I should be playing some form of Omaha poker.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Really hope I don’t get hooked again

September 28, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Work is certainly picking up. Last week I had six early starts. The switch to mainly online teaching means I’ve now got students from around the country – Bucharest, Maramureș, Brașov – and beyond (one in Austria, one in Spain). One of the week’s highlights was when a boy showed me his flight simulator during our online lesson. It replicated the real-time weather conditions wherever in the world you happened to be. I asked him to go to Queenstown in New Zealand – he took off from there in the middle of the night, when I hoped instead he would try and land there (not the easiest of tasks). In another lesson I taught the time. When I asked him to tell me the current time, he told me his watch wasn’t working. You’re not getting away with that one, mate. And anyway, the cathedral clock is in full view.

Coronavirus had plateaued (what a weird-looking word) in Romania, but it’s heading back up again. Several European countries, such as Spain and France, and increasingly the UK, are having a tough time of it. Another particularly bad place is Israel. I was talking to my Wellington-based cousin this morning, and she said that many Orthodox Jews simply don’t believe in the pandemic. We had a good chat. Her eldest boy will be 18 next month – he’s two days too young to vote in the upcoming election, unless (and let’s hope not) Covid postpones it again. He plans to study at Canterbury, which is where his parents met. (They both have PhDs from there.) It’s amazing how time flies. I continue to be envious of New Zealanders and their near-total lack of virus. Flu and other respiratory illnesses were almost nonexistent over the winter. Strangely there has also been a huge downturn in premature births.

I went to the doctor on Friday to stock up on antidepressants. He had a very obese assistant who I’d never seen before. This bloke tested my oxygen saturation, which once again was fine. I asked about flu jabs, and I should be able to get one next month relatively cheaply and painlessly. This afternoon my aunt called me. She’d just been put on a new antidepressant that I’d never heard of, and it seems to be working.

I don’t know what prompted me to fire up Poker Stars again, but last week I decided to install the latest software and play a bit of no-limit Omaha hi-lo, just for play money. Back in the day I never quite mastered it. Just for fun I did two laps around a play-money badugi table. God, I could see why that game was so addictive for me. That feeling when you hit your draw, and the adrenalin rush of running a pat bluff. You really couldn’t beat it. (It helped that I was a winning player.) These days the player pool is much smaller, and I doubt it would be worth depositing and playing for real money again, when there are better things to do with my time. Part of the fun right now is that the interface is all in Romanian, so you get all the weird and wonderful translations of poker terms. A flush is simply a “colour”. A straight is a chintă, which I’m pretty sure comes from the French quinte. A king isn’t called a king (that would be rege), but popă. There are even strange names for the numbered cards. Romanian for seven is șapte, but in cards it’s called șeptar. Ten isn’t the usual zece, it’s decar. And so on.

The US election. Just over five weeks to go. Biden could crash in the debates. He could get Covid. All the economic figures between now and 3rd November could be bloody marvellous. The polls could be polling all the wrong people. The chips could just happen to fall in all the right places, so that Trump loses by five million votes and still claims an Electoral College victory, perhaps via the Supreme Court. But right now, Trump is losing.

Politics - Tennis

Social surprise

September 21, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. To be honest, I do get slightly bored with playing exclusively doubles – I enjoy the physical challenge of singles and I’m better at it – but it’s certainly preferable to the alternative, which is no tennis at all. Last night they asked if I wanted to go to the pub with them after our games. I don’t like social surprises, and my first instinct, as it often is, was “no”. Where even is this pub? I went home, got a bite to eat, and joined them at the place beside the river where I sometimes go with Bogdan. I wasn’t allowed to squeeze onto their table – Covid makes squeezing a no-no – so we had to sit on two tables. I enjoyed the chat, especially with the wife of perhaps the best player among us. She described me as “nonconformist”. I usually find talking with older people – they were all older than me – more interesting than talking with younger people who can be rather superficial. Big generalisation, but people who lived under a different regime seem to have more interesting things to say.

Last weekend our game became almost secondary as people were following the final of the WTA tournament in Istanbul between Patricia Țig and Eugenie Bouchard, which was on a knife-edge. Țig saw three match points come and go at 5-3 in the final set, then three more at 6-5. She got there in the tie-break, on her eighth match point, for her first WTA title. This afternoon Simona Halep was a bit fortunate to get over the line in her semi-final with Garbiñe Muguruza; Halep led 6-3 4-6 5-1, then Muguruza came back to within one game, only to play an error-strewn service game (including double faults on the last two points) to hand Halep a close win.

This morning I spoke to my brother and my parents. Mum and Dad talked about the cannabis referendum in New Zealand. Mum will be voting against legalisation. (No surprise there. It’s a drug. Drugs are bad. If you legalise the drug, more people will take it. That’s just obvious. And it’s bad. And it will lead people on to other, even worse drugs. And that’s really bad.) I was surprised that Dad might vote against too, though he was undecided. For me, legalisation is a complete no-brainer. Loads of Kiwis smoke weed, and will smoke weed, legal or not. And it’s uncontrolled. (The fact that it’s illegal and uncontrolled is part of the attraction for young people.) Legalise it, and suddenly it’s regulated and taxed and boring. The strength will be limited. Police time and money will be diverted into things that actually matter, like violent crime, which marijuana almost never causes (unlike alcohol, of course). The proposed change is hardly a free-for-all – the legal age will be 20, higher than for alcohol which is far more dangerous. You’ll be allowed to possess half an ounce or grow a couple of plants. That’s it. And it will still most definitely be illegal to drive or operate machinery under the influence of weed. (That side of things needs to be beefed up a bit, I’d say.) I expect the bill will fail narrowly – the polls are close, but older people, who are mostly against it, are more likely to vote.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice, died on Friday night aged 87. Because this very old lady didn’t survive a few more weeks, the Republicans now have the chance to fill the vacancy with somebody who is likely to kill the Affordable Care Act. And kill people. Trump might now benefit from people’s attention being off coronavirus. The Republican party, and the whole American political system, really need to burn to the ground.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - Travel: Europe

Onboarding some more students

September 19, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Soon I’ll have my ninth lesson in two days. That’s getting back to pre-apocalyptic levels. Not every day, or pair of days, is like this, but the direction of travel is positive and I really can’t overstate the difference a steady volume of work makes to me. It’s hugely uplifting. There’s a new bloke who lives in Brașov, and after a few lessons with the upper-beginner-level woman from the north of the country, I’ve now started with her younger sister who lives in Spain. She’s at a much higher level than her sister – a 7 or 8 on my 0-to-10 scale.

Earlier this week I had a large Zoom meeting with members of the body corporate, to discuss the sale of our apartment block. I’m still always amazed by how quickly seemingly normal people switch into meetingese and really weird cadences. There are reasons FOR that. Oh yes. Next you’ll be telling me that my bags must be placed IN the overhead locker OR under the seat in front of me. We were told how many people had signed the agreement to this point in time, and there was discussion of onboarding those who still haven’t signed. The airline parallels kept coming back. But it wasn’t a bad meeting – everybody present had signed, or onboarded themselves, so the tension was gone. In fact there are now only three non-signers, and only one definite “no”, so they’ve decided to push on with the sale. It’s now officially on the market.

I had a good chat with my parents this morning, in between lessons. Mum reiterated that she doesn’t expect us to meet before 2022. We talked about our family holidays. Dad sent me a picture of me and my brother in Belgium in 1987, at a campsite with two similar-aged girls we met. That was a good holiday. I remember getting up at 2am so we could take the ferry from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge, a six-hour trip. The company was Townsend Thoresen; one of their ferries had sunk earlier that year on the same route, after someone had forgotten to close the bow doors, and there were a lot of fatalities. We travelled around the French-speaking Ardennes region, staying first at a campsite in a place called De Haan, before moving to the place where the picture was taken, alongside the Meuse river. The river had recently flooded the campsite which was still wet in places, and I wore wellies in the photo. The other family had a caravan and drove a Peugeot 504; we just had our extremely heavy old tent, and Dad drove the Mazda 626 they’d bought less than a year earlier. We visited Waterloo, Ypres, and Passchendaele where hundreds of New Zealanders had died. I remember having a tooth out while I was in Belgium, and finding 15 francs under my pillow in the morning.

Coronavirus cases have taken a sudden upward swing, as they have in much of Europe. (See my graphs.) Things could still get extremely ugly here. It was sobering to talk to my new student based in Spain this morning. Overwhelmed hospitals. Palpable fear everywhere. Economic carnage in the big cities that will take many years to recover from. I don’t think they ever fully got over the economic crisis that started in 2008.

In the last few days I’ve been listening to Manchester Orchestra, an American band. This Youtube video (nearly nine minutes) is quite magical. Imagine creating something like that.

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Kids and pics

September 16, 2020 plutomanby 1 Comment

If any of you are wondering what my little profile picture is, it’s of a busker drumming his guitar on Wellington’s Cuba Street. I thought I wouldn’t mind being him, so I took six snaps of him, and spliced them together to make a shaky, slightly manic-looking GIF. It’s cool that WordPress lets me use it as my pic.

I had a look at my posts from a year ago, and although the world has changed so much in that time, so much was the same: wishing I had a bit more work, Brexit, Sfânta Cruce, hot weather, and a gripping men’s US Open final that I failed to see.

Dominic Thiem came from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev 8-6 in the fifth-set tie-break. It doesn’t get tighter than that, or harder to take for the loser. Zverev was distraught at the end. It’s the first time the men’s final has gone to 7-6 in the fifth. I’m happy for Thiem that he won – he’s been close in grand slams before – and this might help him to win another slam, one that won’t be “asterisked” by the absence of players like Nadal. I didn’t see the match – it started late and I had a lesson early in the morning.

It was striking how many children were milling around in town today, either with their parents or without. Today is the second day of the school year, but most schools are doing some hybrid system of both online and in-person teaching. In some parts of the country, this is a real challenge, because not everywhere has the super-fast internet we do. (Those mostly rural places tend not to have much Covid either, so they have the green light for school to go back as normal, but there are exceptions.) Seeing all those kids, and the kids I work with, those incredible bundles of life full of so much hope and joy, makes me a bit sad that I’m unlikely to have any of my own.

Sfânta Cruce – or Sfânta Corona this year, perhaps – was as big as ever. Crowds outside the cathedral late night, and a long snaking queue today. Earlier this evening it was right back to the bus stop. Masks, mostly, but not much distancing.

Dad sent me a nice picture of Mum and me in Ireland. We went there as a family when I was ten. It was a very different country in 1990; the Celtic tiger hadn’t begun to roar. They still used pounds (for money) and miles per hour. It was beautiful but also bleak. We boarded the newly kitted out ferry, named Felicity, at Fishguard in Wales, and that took us to Rosslare. We spent two weeks, mostly in Cork and Kerry, where we camped. Mum saw a priest in Kerry to help with a family history request. (Her family came out to New Zealand from Kerry in 1874.) The weather was good for the first week, but it rained almost non-stop the second week. We came back a different way, from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, on an older ship.

Some good state polls for Biden today. “Only” seven weeks to go.

Here are some pictures.

Books - Coronavirus - Family - Tennis

Can’t put it down, but want to

September 13, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m near the end of the third book in Elena Ferrante’s four-part Neapolitan series. It’s dramatic and unputdownable, and very hard to read at the same time. The violence, the backstabbing, everybody’s lives being so intertwined, every moment of every day being no more than the next move in an impossible game. I would like to visit Naples sometime, but the life portrayed in the series of books is my idea of hell, and there’s only so much of that I can take. A lot of it is just me, I’m sure. I think I’m a nice person, and I’m able to get on with and connect with most other people. But I rarely have close relationships, I’ve never been part of an in-group (with a complementary out-group), never at school, never at work, never anywhere; I’m just me, navigating my way through life as unobtrusively as possible. That’s how upending my life and coming to Romania wasn’t that hard, psychologically, even if it was somewhat challenging on a practical level. Quite possibly I have low-level autism – I used to attend groups for autistic people in New Zealand, originally because I wanted to work with autistic people – and found the frankness, the crap-cutting, to be refreshing. But in these books you’ve got the exact opposite of autism, if such a thing exists, where every word or action is hyper-analysed, given a secondary, tertiary meaning. It’s a fascinating read, but just gimme someone quiet and unassuming, somebody likeable, just one among the dozens of characters. Fundamentally, the lack of likeable characters is a problem for me.

Last night I tried staying up to watch the women’s US Open final between Naomi Osaka and Viktoria Azarenka, but even though it didn’t start that late – 11pm – I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was a good match, the bits I saw anyway, and fortunes whipsawed wildly. Azarenka stormed out to 6-1 2-0, but Osaka then raced into a 1-6 6-3 4-1 lead. Then I woke up and things got exciting. Azarenka won a pair of long games to get back to 3-4 with her serve to come, but Osaka broke in the next game and served out for her second US Open title and third grand slam overall. Osaka was the first woman to win the final after dropping the first set since Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario way back in 1994. Osaka became something of a sensation for her masks. For each match, she wore a mask bearing the name of a black victim of police violence. Last night’s mask carried the name of Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who was shot dead by a policeman in Cleveland six years ago. Her quarter-final mask had George Floyd’s name on it. The men’s final between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem takes place tonight, but I can’t realistically watch it. Incredibly, it will be the first time that a man born in the nineties wins a grand slam. It hasn’t been a normal tournament. No juniors, no qualifying, no mixed doubles (though, outside Wimbledon, that functions as an exhibition anyway), and the men’s and women’s doubles draws reduced from 64 pairs to 32. Importantly, nobody was allowed to play both singles and doubles.

I should be playing tennis tonight. Last Sunday was our first session for four weeks, as some of the regulars had been away on holiday. The bloke who lives on my floor had grown a beard in that time, and I remarked upon that. He told me that his elderly mother had died, and it was a Romanian tradition for men not to shave for forty days afterwards. Death rites are quite complex here – a big part of them is the pomană – sharing of food at specific intervals after someone dies, with the final “feast” occurring after seven years.

Last Monday I played Monopoly for the first time this century, with the Romanian version. The eleven-year-old boy wanted to play. We were both pretty hazy about the rules. He started to build houses and hotels willy-nilly before I figured that something was probably amiss. Everything was in Romanian, and once I did myself out of £300 (euros, dollars, I honestly don’t know), thinking I had to pay £150 instead of receive it. I took photos of the board and bits and pieces, and we’ll resume tomorrow. Getting paid (real money) to play Monopoly isn’t too bad.

My aunt has had a lot of stomach trouble, and has been almost unable to see anybody about it. Waiting hours on a phone line that you have to pay for, and spending more hours in a waiting room if you even get that far – that’s all normal now in Britain’s almost third-world health system. It was bad enough before Covid, but since March the gaping holes have been laid bare for all to see. In the last six months, people have died in their tens of thousands of cancer and other non-Covid-related conditions, and will continue to do so over the autumn and winter – Covid case numbers are now climbing fast. My aunt would be better off in Romania.

Mum and Dad got back from Moeraki on Friday night, their time. They had better weather than was forecast. I was quite envious when they told me about getting fish and chips in Temuka on the way back, from the fairly rough-and-ready shop just around the corner from where my grandparents used to live.

Coronavirus - Tennis

X-rated (and a flashback to ’95)

September 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The anti-vax thing is starting to do my head in. Yesterday I met my landlady to give her two months’ rent, and she joined the growing list of people I’ve met who say they won’t take the Covid vaccine if and when it becomes available. Jeez. If it’s been through all the various phases of clinical trials and jumped all the hoops, I’ll want to be first in line, but if my small sample size is anything to go by, the uptake in Romania will be insufficient for herd immunity.

Another thing – why do some people write vaxx with a double X? I’ve also seen the spelling doxxing for practice of releasing incriminating information, rather than the single-X version I would use. English is full of exceptions, as I don’t hesitate to tell my students, but the “double X doesn’t exist” rule is just about iron-clad. I’ve never used a faxx machine or watched boxxing or got my food mixxer fixxed. And it makes sense that you would never double X, unlike other consonants. (A double consonant shows that the preceding vowel is short, as in hopping, as opposed to hoping. But long vowels before X almost don’t exist, so there’s no need to make the distinction. The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are coax and hoax, where the -oa- spelling indicates the long vowel, or diphthong, to be more accurate.)

The US Open, crowd-free of course, has been quite eventful, despite the absence of some star names. Simona Halep didn’t play. Her compatriot Sorana Cîrstea did, though, and beat top-tenner Johanna Konta in a close three-setter before falling agonisingly to Karolina Muchova. Cîrstea led 5-3 in the final set, then 4-0 and 6-3 in the tie-break, with two of the three match points on her serve. They all vanished, and she went down in the end, 9-7.

The big news though has been Novak, or should I say No-Vax. (Djoković is an anti-vaxer, and he got the virus himself at a stupid tennis party.) Frustrated at losing serve late in the first set against Pablo Carreño Busta, he hit the ball away in disgust, it happened to strike a female line judge, and rules being as they are, he was disqualified. He was unlucky, basically. Some people have attacked him on social media (he’s become a bit of target, sadly), and the line judge has also received a lot of hurtful and idiotic comments.

The Djoković incident reminded me of 1995 Wimbledon, where Tim Henman (who was still relatively unknown then) did something similar in a doubles match, and he and his partner were defaulted. The funny thing about that match was that Jeff Tarango (who had a tendency to lose it) was on the other side of the net. In a singles match almost immediately afterwards, Tarango himself was so incensed with the umpire over a line call that he stormed off the court, ending his tournament, and then Tarango’s wife slapped the umpire!

That 1995 tournament had a few moments, and they’re pretty fresh in my memory still. Greg Rusedski, who had just switched from Canada to Britain, had a good tournament, eventually losing to Pete Sampras in round four. Chanda Rubin played one of her customary marathon matches on an outside court. Boris Becker was up two sets in double-quick time against Cédric Pioline in their quarter-final, but the Frenchman squeaked out two tie-breaks and (if memory serves) went a break up in the fifth, only to be edged out in the end, 9-7, in the match of the tournament, on the men’s side at least. The women’s final between Steffi Graf and Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario had an extraordinary finish. At 5-5 in the third, they produced one of the all-time great individual games, Graf eventually breaking after 13 or 14 deuces. (Google tells me 13. That’s 32 points. Monumental at that stage of the match.) Then Steffi served out to love for yet another title. The men’s final in contrast was a bit of a disappointment. Becker nicked the first set on a tie-break, but after that Sampras dominated and won comfortably in four sets.

That’ll do from me. No let up from this extended summer we’re having. It’s crazy to think what it might be like in just two months, and how that might affect the Covid situation.

Family - Language teaching - New Zealand - Politics

Missing NZ (and more US election talk)

September 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The guy in Austria just cancelled his lesson 45 minutes before we were due to start. No sorry or anything. He’s a nice bloke and we have productive lessons, but when it comes to reliability he’s becoming a pain in the butt. The lessons with the woman in the north of Romania – we have two a week – are going well. My Romanian has improved to a point where I can handle beginner students, even online.

I spoke to Mum and Dad yesterday. They were about to head off to Moeraki for three days. I miss them a lot. I even miss the journey down there from Geraldine, through Oamaru and perhaps a stop at Kakanui, seeing penguins and seals, going to the pub there, and maybe getting fish and chips in Hampden or on the way back. It would be great to visit Central Otago again. I went there with my parents in 2014 – it’s quite a magical part of the country. Mum says we’re unlikely to meet before 2022, no matter what side of the world that happens to be.

Yesterday Dad said that America could enter a civil war if Trump is re-elected. Crunch time is approaching. Every poll of the country or a swing state is being met with delight or despair from the sorts of people who follow these things. And then there’s the geeky (but important) analysis. Is it a partisan poll? What is the margin of error? Does the pollster weight for education? (This was a big problem in 2016. Educated people are more likely to respond to polls. They are also more likely to vote Democratic. Four years ago, most pollsters didn’t take this into account, so their samples were skewed a couple of points to the left of the nation.) Yesterday a Florida poll showing Trump and Biden tied 48-48 got a lot of attention. Florida is a huge state. It has bucketloads of electoral votes (29) and tends to march to the beat of its own weird drum. The large Cuban population tend to lean Republican. It’ll be one of the first states to report on election night, so we’ll get a good idea of how the election will pan out (perhaps days or weeks later) by watching the Florida returns. Pennsylvania (20 votes) is also of massive importance.

It’s totally crazy that states allocate all their electoral votes to the winner, no matter how close the vote is. (See Florida – again – in 2000.) Or, at least, 48 states do. The two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where two votes are given to the statewide winner, and one to the winner of each congressional district, of which Maine has two and Nebraska three. This could be crucial in one of Nebraska’s congressional districts, centred on Omaha, the biggest city. It’s much more Democratic than the state as a whole, and there are non-crazy scenarios where that single electoral vote could put the Dems over the top, 270-268. (Although if it’s that close, prepare for court cases and frankly dangerous behaviour from Trump.) As for Omaha, there’s a lovely song by Counting Crows called Omaha. Released in the mid-nineties, it evokes a simpler time.

There’s plenty of Brexit news again. The government are just being extremely irresponsible now. There’s not much else to say, except for I didn’t vote for this.

We’re having beautiful, and quite hot, weather. There’s a string of temperatures in the low 30s stretching out as far as the forecast goes.

Politics

Ten percent?! (Some thoughts on the US election)

September 5, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I arrived in Romania just before the last US election – I watched the results come through while I was staying in that hotel room on the other side of the river – and we’re now in the last two months before the next election. Jeez, have I really been in Romania all that time? Almost ten percent of my life? That’s nuts.

So who’s going to win? Most people are saying Trump, either because they are part of his cult and according to them he’s the best!!! – a winner!!!, or because 2016 is still etched firmly in their minds and they fear the worst. They’re going with their gut, and maybe their gut will be right. Those who are more dispassionate, and look at the numbers, are making Biden the favourite. He’s in better shape in the polls than Hillary Clinton, who (and people forget this) only just lost.

There’s not that long to go now – early voting has already started in some states – and Biden’s national polling is good. A ton of polls were reported on Wednesday and they were mostly favourable for him. He’s up by a smidgen over seven points, and the race has been stable. That’s because it’s largely a referendum on Trump, and people’s opinions on Trump are just about set in stone. If it were a referendum, decided by the popular vote, Biden would be an enormous favourite. But of course it ain’t, and the state polling is about three points closer. Biden could easily win the popular vote by more than the 3.9% margin Obama had in 2012 – which isn’t even that close – and still lose the election. What a ridiculous system.

The thing about Trump is that he’s stooped to such depths so many times that nobody bats an eyelid anymore. Encourage people to vote twice? Call soldiers who died in WW1 “losers” and “suckers”? With a normal, half-way human president, those comments would be scandalous – let’s face it, they’re both obscene – but with Trump you just add them to the pile.

The debates are still to come. The economic situation could well improve a bit. Coronavirus might not be as bad by early November, or perhaps more likely, people will have got used to it being bad. Perhaps Trump will announce a vaccine or miracle cure on 1st November. There might even be a James Comey–style bombshell in the final days. All of these things could change the race, or not. (It’s crazy that we’re even talking in these terms about someone who has been worse than useless in dealing with a pandemic that has killed about 190,000 Americans, but here we are.)

The Democrats have raised boatloads of money, and they seem to be spending it more wisely in the swing states than four years ago. They’re leaving nothing to chance. But still, Trump could be re-elected. For all the talk of the election being rigged, if Trump does get back in I’m guessing the deciding factor will be the Democrats’ inability to find someone younger and more dynamic, while still being perfectly “electable”. Literally nobody in that mould – out of about two dozen candidates – ran for the nomination. Biden is probably their best shot.

That pigeon laid a second egg in that cubby hole in the wall of my apartment. If I get really hungry…

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

What do you say?

September 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning one of my students called me to say he won’t be coming to our lesson tomorrow because his 64-year-old father had died of a heart attack. His parents live in the country and his father was out doing heavy physical work in the blazing sun. Yeesh. What do you say when somebody’s father dies so suddenly at a too-young age? He says he’ll be back to see me on 22nd September, but seriously, just when you’re up to it again.

Just last night I happened to be reading about Romania’s low life expectancy relative to other EU countries, especially among men, and especially in the countryside where people are poorer and have less access to healthcare. For a man born in 1956 in rural Romania, 64 is probably about average. Heart disease is the number one killer.

I had a good lesson this morning. My student couldn’t get the sound on Zoom to work, so we made do with WhatsApp. She got the present simple. To be in all its forms, and the positive forms of all other verbs. She’s got that first brick in the often-flimsy verb wall in place. After that we played Taboo and she added half a dozen words to her vocabulary. I happily extended the lesson to make up for all the faff at the start. Our next session will be on Wednesday. (I’m grateful for the 7:30 starts which are forcing me to get up earlier and helping me structure my day.)

My parents keep me updated on the Kiwi coronavirus situation, and I keep telling them that Romania is getting about as many cases daily as New Zealand has had in total. Tomorrow Romanian restaurants and cafés are opening up again inside. You can count me out, thank you very much.

In the last six months, coronavirus has shone a 500-megawatt spotlight on Western society in 2020, and not in a good way. The misinformation, the politicisation, the tribalism, the selfishness, the entitlement, the steaming pile of shit that is social media – it’s hard not to feel extremely pessimistic. I was just reading an article about Marseille’s anti-mask, anti-science, anti-Paris warrior – he’s all over social media, potentially killing the city’s residents with his advice, but they don’t care because he’s on their team. No country is immune from this nihilism, not even New Zealand who are perhaps the nearest thing to it.

In New Zealand, they seem to have good scientists who people (by and large) respect. One of these is Siouxsie Wiles, infectious disease expert. Judging by her long curly pink hair, she’s probably ever so slightly mad, but she’s done no end of good during the pandemic. As I said about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in another post, mad does not have to be evil; most of the time mad is good.

Yesterday, as I heard the strains of Por Una Cabeza and Vara la Țară from the buskers on a scorching late-summer day, I thought of how much time I’d spent alone this summer, even more than usual. The odd face-to-face lesson, the occasional drink with Bogdan, a few games of tennis, and that’s been just about it.

Last week I spoke to my brother – it was great to see him in such an upbeat mood. The UK Covid situation seemed to have dragged him down, even if he was managing fine from a practical perspective – but being back at work has given him a much-needed boost.

A pigeon has just laid an egg in a ledge outside my laundry.