by Finally! After five weeks, I now feel close to normal. I’m no longer ravaged by headaches and mentally and physically exhausted. What a relief. But let’s see how long I stay like this.
Speaking of relief, I went to bed last night not knowing if World War Three might have broken out by the morning. Last night I wondered, are you able to wager on such an outcome? Sure enough, I found a site called simply ww3.bet that allows you to bet on whether or not WW3 will start by the end of April. The site looks legit, but there are a couple of practical problems with a bet like that. Last night the implied chances of armageddon were around one in six. Crazy, but hardly orders of magnitude from reality. This morning, following the ceasefire, they were one in twenty.
Trump’s TACO Tuesday makes it more likely that I’ll see Mum and Dad in the early summer. Had the US followed through on “wiping out a whole civilisation”, the Gulf states would have likely been obliterated too, and no commercial planes would have gone anywhere in the region for some time. I spoke to Mum and Dad this morning. Dad thought that the alliance between Europe and the US was still worth holding onto, while Mum didn’t. I agreed with Mum. While the orange turd is in charge (and quite possibly for some years afterwards), America is enemy territory as far as I’m concerned. The other news I saw this morning (reinforcing my view) showed JD Vance just over the border from me in Hungary, cosying up to Viktor Orbán, trying to sway this weekend’s parliamentary election. Orbán is currently down in the polls. Whether that will translate to the election I have no idea, but let’s hope he gets a shellacking.
Mum and Dad will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on Friday. A few months ago my brother suggested that we all meet up in the UK and have a big celebration there. When I told him that yeah, that’s a nice idea, but it just wouldn’t fly for several reasons (the biggest of which is that there just aren’t the people in the UK anymore to celebrate with), he thought I was being overly negative. Just this morning, Dad joked that they’ll struggle to handle the sheer number of people at their party. (They did think of taking the TranzAlpine train to the West Coast and back, but found it was ludicrously expensive.)
On Monday my brother called me. He was very upbeat about his new job, as well he might be. He said there were six positions available, and he probably just barely snagged the last of them. His very good degree gave him a shot. (His wife didn’t think the degree would be worth it. Hmmm.) He’ll be working for BAE, which I called “British Aerospace” in my last post. It hasn’t been called that since 2000, so that shows how out of touch I am. His job should pay well and provide excellent job security, which is a rare commodity these days. This is a real boom period for the defence industry. I’m really happy for him.
My bike is now fixed, for the moment at least. This afternoon I had a maths lesson in Aradului with an eleven-year-old girl. I’m facing the same battle with her as with almost all my maths students. I’m coming up against an education system that so emphasises methods and procedures – can you remember how to do this trick which will be almost useless in real life? – when their real problems are (1) an inability to do basic calculations quickly and accurately, and (2) a general inability to problem solve.
The next round of the Scrabble league starts tomorrow. The common word “coating” already has a valid anagram: “cotinga”, which is a bird found in Central and South America. Maybe “tacoing” will have made it in by the next update.
