Category: Old age of my youth – 2020

Week 22, 2020

MONDAY, 25 MAY 2020

I don’t really care for IKEA furniture and other household items. It’s all right – I’ll buy something if I need it. What attracts me, though – and, to my embarrassment I have to admit a few times every month – is the feeling that I’m in another country.

You see unpronounceable foreign words everywhere on the walls and on the posters. All the products have Swedish names. The furniture is displayed in corners that could be a living room or a bedroom in a Stockholm apartment.

Then there is the cafeteria: salads, a variety of sweet pies, meatballs, oven-baked chicken, fish fingers, lasagne, thick soup.

And just before you leave the place, there’s one last opportunity to imagine yourself in Europe: the supermarket with fresh bread, coffee beans, frozen whole pieces of vegetables, sweet treats, cookies you won’t find in any supermarket in Taiwan.

Being excited about going to IKEA is probably as sophisticated as being eager to have dinner at McDonald’s. At least one person has expressed surprise when I admitted it was one of my favourite things to do on a weekend. But – surely everyone has a right to some slightly embarrassing weaknesses, am I right?

TUESDAY, 26 MAY 2020

The Ngo brothers – the president, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu – who ruled South Vietnam between 1955 and 1963 are a good example of what can be achieved if you are confident. They believed they could transform the backward former colony of South Vietnam into a modern state – certainly not democratic, and capitalist as long as they and their allies could get rich from it.

Point is, they believed in their ability to carry out this transformation of a state with a population of approximately twelve million people. And they worked hard every day to make it a reality. They were successful enough in this ambition to obtain their positions of considerable power, and to cling to it for almost a decade.

A cursory study of the brothers’ rule makes it clear that they ruled without mercy, and that they did not think twice about wiping out one person, dozens of people, or thousands of people who threatened their positions. To say that they made numerous enemies is to put it mildly. The two brothers were confident, but they overplayed their hand. They were like two players in a high-risk poker game playing with money they borrowed from the most dangerous gangster in town. As long as they were lucky, played smart, and kept winning, everything was fine. If they made one mistake, they were dead.

And one mistake is what they made in October and the beginning of November 1963. They knew about developments to get rid of them in a coup. They thought they could trust people they had previously trusted. And then, on the night of November 1^st and the morning of November 2^nd, 1963, the horrible reality they had created caught up with them. A few days before, they were still thinking about and believing in their personal power to command people. On Saturday morning, November 2^nd, with their hands cuffed behind their backs, sitting on low benches in the back of an armoured personnel carrier, they were confronted with the other side of the vengeful, cruel reality they created.

* * *

At first I wanted to say, they thought they could do this big thing, but they were wrong. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. They believed they could manage a huge project successfully. They did not seem to think twice about the consequences of the methods they employed. Or they did, but they probably thought that they could undermine and outsmart all the forces that conspired against them until the successful completion of their project. In that respect, they did overestimate their capabilities. But they also misjudged what reality they were creating with the considerable powers and talents they did possess.

WEDNESDAY, 27 MAY 2020

For readers with an interest in the Vietnam War, I can recommend two documentaries.

The first is a 1974 production entitled Hearts and Minds. The film won the Academy Award in 1975 for Best Documentary Film. What I personally find interesting is the fact that the movie was made in 1974 – the year after America withdrew from South Vietnam, but a year before the war came to an end with the fall of the South Vietnamese government. So there hadn’t been much time to consider the impact that the war had, and would still have, on the psyche of young men involved in the war, and on the psyche of the American nation. Interviews were held with soldiers who initially believed in what the government had told them, but who had since come to other insights. There were also interviews with soldiers and government officials who still believed in the cause, who tried to explain why all the sacrifice and suffering were justified.

A full version of the film is available on Youtube:

The second film is a series of ten episodes on Netflix titled, The Vietnam War. The episodes are between ninety minutes and two hours long – giving you more than fifteen hours of film footage and interviews on the war. The series covers everything from France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, to US veterans returning to Vietnam years after the war to break bread with old enemies. Various aspects of the war and the historical period are covered, and numerous interviews are conducted with American veterans, former journalists, people involved in government, and with Vietnamese who were ordinary soldiers or officers on both sides of the war.

If you subscribe to Netflix, it’s definitely worth watching.

THURSDAY, 28 MAY 2020

Two thoughts:

The environment in which you live; stress at home, at work, and in other areas of your life; what you take in as food and drink, and in what quantities. And by the way, it’s not about living to 80 rather than 65. It’s about the quality of your life. Even if I only live to the age of 65 but I am in relatively good health until then, it will be better than living to 80, but the last 30 years are full of pains and ailments.

* * *

Why do so many people want to live in 1970s Czechoslovakia, or worse, in Stalin’s Soviet Union? Because these people desire the certainty of rules and regulations. They want to know what they may and may not say. They also want to have control over other people, and prescribe to those people – with the support of the state – what they may and may not say. There are also people who like to hallucinate that what they are doing is for the sake of the underprivileged and the underdogs, while they ruin the lives of vulnerable people because they are supposedly against the “revolution”.

FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2020

Decide you’re happy, then take actions on a daily basis to make it reality.

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MONDAY, 18 MAY 2020

Comedians and actors, Jerry Stiller (born 1927) and Fred Willard (born 1939) recently passed away. I personally found both of these actors funny. I also saw what other people wrote about them.

I thought how precious their legacy is.

Can you imagine this is what is ultimately written on your headstone, or in your obituary:

“He lived. He was a nice guy – and really funny! Then he died.”

TUESDAY, 19 MAY 2020

There are reasons why we would have a better life if we lived in South Africa rather than in Taiwan. Family and old friends, barbecue, dozens of products you find in the local supermarket or bakery that you can’t find in Taiwan, a greater variety of natural scenery in South Africa, a better selection of restaurants, better pizza …

However, one reason why living in Taiwan – especially in the city – is a hundred times better than city life in South Africa is transportation, and the fact that one is not trapped in a suburb stripped of businesses. I ride my bike ten minutes from home to buy a container full of cooked food. When I have to leave for my classes in the late afternoon, I ride for twelve minutes to a subway station, then sit and read on the train for twenty minutes. The supermarket is a ten-minute walk from our apartment. The bank is seven minutes away by bike. There are several other eateries and coffee shops less than ten minutes’ walk from our apartment. If we want to go somewhere on the weekend, we take my wife’s scooter. If we want to go to a neighbouring town, we take the subway, and then the regular train. And if we want to go to Taipei – a distance of 350 kilometres, it only takes us an hour and a half on the high-speed train.

Compare that to South Africa – if you are fortunate enough to live in a middle-class neighbourhood, it should be added. You open the fridge and see there’s no milk. Okay, you get the car keys, put on some pants and a shirt and shoes, and walk out to the garage. Pull out the car. Open the gate and hope no one jumps from behind a bush to hijack your car. Close the gate. Start driving to the store. Stop. Drive. Stop. Drive. Turn left. Stop. Wait. Drive. Stop. Drive. Stop. Drive. Stop and wait and say no to people who want to sell you stuff. Drive a hundred or two hundred meters. Stop. Wait. Drive. Finally you’re at the mall. Find parking. Lock your car. Step inside the store, get your milk, pay, and walk out. Give the guy who says he looked after your car a couple of rand, drive the same way back home. Stop … wait … drive … stop …

After all these years, there are still things I miss about South Africa, in addition to missing my family. But I doubt I’ll ever get used to that aspect of urban existence. No, should we ever go back to South Africa, it’s either a small town in the countryside for us or a cow in the backyard. And a vegetable garden.

WEDNESDAY, 20 MAY 2020

The other day we socialised with a hot shot Taiwanese businessman. He’s a few years younger than me, drives a luxury sports car, and his wallet bulged with cash (didn’t mean to notice). He took us out for dinner to a place that smelled of expensive perfume, and where one enjoys delicious finger food with exotic cocktails.

Now, I still have to learn things about making money and about business he’s already forgotten. But I did observe that he was quiet when the topic turned to something other than money or business. He was quite interested when I talked about history, and asked me about music and movies.

I realised this morning that someone – maybe like him; I don’t know him well enough to say – probably will look at himself at some point and conclude that he has made it – in an area where most people dream of making it someday. Another few years of success like the last few years, and he never has to work again in his life.

And then, at a cocktail party one day, it hits you: Just having a lot of money is not enough – not if everyone in the room is loaded. You find people talking about art, movies, other countries, history, religion, politics. And not in pseudo-intellectual ways. You get the strong impression people are really interested in these topics. That’s when you realise that money is just one manifestation of the process of becoming a fuller version of yourself – just one part of the pursuit of your full potential.

THURSDAY, 21 MAY 2020

Last night (actually this morning seeing that I go to bed after 2 am), I dreamt a somewhat surreal painting.

The scene is a school, with a large open area in front of school buildings that look like the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Rows of pupils walk in light blue uniforms everywhere.

In the foreground (me, the dreamer, is apparently sitting on a bench on the edge of the painting) two scenes are playing out. One is a film about the life of Marlon Brando. An important aspect of the story is that Brando was an alcoholic and a rebel. Different actors (one I recognised as Albert Finney) interpret the different conditions of Marlon Brando’s drunkenness.

The other scene in the foreground is rows of soldiers in World War I-style khaki uniforms marching to a battlefield.

On the horizon, a huge balloon appears in the shape of the Earth. Just as everyone’s attention is on the balloon, it disappears – note, it doesn’t explode; it’s just gone.

The final scene is soldiers returning from a battlefield. Some of them carry wounded soldiers on gurneys. One soldier has his wounded – or dead – comrade around the shoulder. As the attention is on this soldier for the moment, someone comments: “You can’t hold on to your first death.”

And then I woke up.

FRIDAY, 22 MAY 2020

At the end of my first year in Taiwan, in November 1999, I bought myself an expensive Japanese camera – as reward for working from morning to late at night, and because I thought I would look less poor when I went to South Africa the next month.

In March 2000 I had to go to South Africa again, this time for my younger sister’s wedding. To show the family more of what my neighbourhood looks like, I took a bunch of photos. And because I thought it would be artsy, I bought a black and white film to capture the images.

Long story short, here are some of the photos:

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Week 20, 2020

MONDAY, 11 MAY 2020

There’s this theory that has been floating around for years in smart and imaginative people’s minds, namely that we and the world we inhabit are part of an artificial simulation – like in a video game, or like in the movie, The Matrix.

RedPilledAmerica.com describes themselves as a podcasting series that focuses on stories. The idea is that each episode raises a question, and then the answer is sought in the stories of everyday people. In Episode 62, entitled “Let There Be Light”, they ask whether science fiction can bring us closer to God.

The episode is about sixty minutes long, and really worth listening to. The simulation theory is explained, and references are made to people like Richard Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Scott Adams. The science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, whose short stories inspired Hollywood films such as Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990, 2012), Minority Report (2002), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011), also receive special mention.

What is my opinion on the idea that we might be living in an artificial simulation? It would explain why we live in a world where everything seems planned – the eyes of the fly, the tail of the leopard, the way some octopuses change colour. Well, scientists explain these things with the concept of evolution, but still – there are thousands of examples you can name where design does seem, at least in the eyes of the average non-scientist, like the more likely explanation. Does this mean that believers are right about a deity? That’s not a simple question: after all, there is a wide gulf between the idea of the creator, or creators of the simulation, and the specific mythology behind different gods. Will a simulation mean that there is a planned purpose behind our existence? The possibility is certainly there. Would this mean we still have free will, that we are still creators of our own lives, or would it mean our lives have been planned out by the creators of the program? To this question I will have to come back.

TUESDAY, 12 MAY 2020

Do you also get the feeling like this year is going slower than other years? I am amazed every time I think of how few weeks or months of this year lie behind us.

That the world we knew has come to an end surely has something to do with it.

After all, a short four and a half months ago, millions of people were still making plans to travel to other countries to discover places and cultures, or to study in what could have been a life-changing experience for them. Now weeks have passed since millions of children had last sat in a classroom. The oil price has fallen into negative territory, partly because fuel demand fell to a fraction of what it was last year. This means you could now fill your car and drive through the countryside for a few days – if you were allowed to leave your home. It should also mean that airline tickets would be cheaper than they have been in years, so you could take that trip you’ve been dreaming of for years … just a pity that dozens of countries have closed their borders to foreign visitors. In thousands of cities around the world, shops, hair salons and restaurants are closed. People are driven out of public parks by police with bull horns because the government ordered them to stay at home.

In the northern hemisphere, people are getting ready for a few months of warmer weather and sunshine. In the southern hemisphere, the blankets and coats and scarves are already out. Time moves on, slowly.

And yet, how quickly don’t things change.

WEDNESDAY, 13 MAY 2020

Gabriel Voisin was born on 5 February 1880 in Belleville-sur-Saône, France. His brother, Charles, was born two years later. When their father left them, their mother, Amélie, moved with them to Neuville-sur-Saône, where their grandfather had a factory.

The two brothers enjoyed the outdoors life – they undertook expeditions along the river, went fishing, and built all kinds of contraptions.

As young man Gabriel studied industrial design, and together the two brothers experimented even more – including building a rifle, a steam boat, and a type of motor car.

Gabriel Voisin, with the help of his brother Charles, was responsible for the design and construction of the first European manned, engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft capable of a sustained, circular controlled flight for at least one kilometre. The historic flight was on Monday, 13 January 1908.

After a long and prosperous life, Gabriel retired to his home in the countryside at the age of eighty, where he wrote his memoirs. He passed away on Christmas Day 1973 at the age of 93.

His younger brother lived a shorter, less prosperous life. A few years after the historic flight, on 26 September 1912, Charles Voisin died in a car accident. He was thirty years old.

THURSDAY, 14 MAY 2020

Near the vegetarian buffet place, in the alley behind the department store stands a delivery truck. Managing the delivery process is a man in a crimson T-shirt with, on the front, the words:

“Born to be Top Gun”

I don’t have a problem with sometimes absurd levels of confidence, I think. One could even argue that it makes sense in a world with so many uncertainties.

Ten minutes later I take the same way back home. The truck is still standing in the street. The man is now smoking a cigarette. This time I catch the back of his T-shirt:

“Never give up until the end of the world”

A fair sentiment, I think this time.

FRIDAY, 15 MAY 2020

Need to mention that the Battle of Frankenhausen took place on this day, 495 years ago.

On 15 May 1525, several thousand poorly armed peasants and townspeople led by the preacher and radical theologian, Thomas Müntzer, met an army of several thousand professional mercenaries led by Philip van Hesse and George the Bearded of Saxony on the battlefield in Thuringia, central Germany.

In his pamphlet, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Martin Luther urged the nobles to destroy the rebellious peasants with speed and violence. He wrote, among other things, that the peasants should be “sliced, choked, stabbed, secretly and publicly, by those who can, like one must kill a rabid dog”.

With such encouragement, the peasants probably couldn’t have expected much mercy on that day. Thousands of them were killed and maimed, and their leader was captured, tortured, and executed. Among the professional armies there were only six casualties, two of whom were only wounded.

By September 1525, military conflict and punitive expeditions had come to an end. The German Peasants’ War was over.

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Week 19, 2020

MONDAY, 4 MAY 2020

“We don’t have time for all this,” Bran Stark apparently says in the eighth season of Game of Thrones. “The Night King has your dragon. He’s one of them now. The Wall has fallen. The dead march south.”

Okay.

Since I was in high school, I thought studying Philosophy at university level was the pinnacle of profundity. “Isn’t that why people have been attending universities for 1,000 years?” I thought. “To study Truth and Meaning and Purpose of Existence!” That people go to university to learn how to be accountants, or engineers or dentists is simply not right. After all, these are things you can learn from being in the service of an accountant or engineer or dentist for seven years, as they did in the Middle Ages.

Seeing that I had already considered myself serious about things like Truth and Purpose of Existence in my late teens, I naturally wanted to study Philosophy, or at least Theology. It quickly became apparent that the only people who could study Philosophy were students with parents rich enough that they did not need to take subjects at university that could secure them a career.

After university I continued my own education. History of every direction the wind blows, language, geography, economics, even enough biology to understand how cells work. But Philosophy remained mostly mysterious. Over the years, a handful of Philosophy books have piled up in my bookshelf. And once or twice I managed to understand enough of something to incorporate it into my own writing (not sure if I completely understood the concepts, but it came in handy nonetheless).

One of many philosophers about whom you should never attempt an intelligent conversation with me is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). That’s where the quote from Game of Thrones comes in. Attempting to discuss Hegel’s philosophy is like talking to me about the popular TV series. To date, I’ve probably only seen one minute of one episode. What I know is picked up from what other people excitedly share with each other within hearing distance. If the conversation is about Game of Thrones, I’m the one with a mouth full of teeth. Same with Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, or Lord of the Rings.

To be able to participate intelligently in a conversation about Hegel, you need to speak Hegelian fluently. As with Star Trek and other cult TV series or films, you’ll be caught out within a minute if you try to join the conversation without being one of the initiates. For example, on Hegel’s Wikipedia page you read: “Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.”

Say what?

The description continues as follows: “Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as ‘mind’) as the historical manifestation of the logical concept – and the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung, integration without elimination or reduction) – of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors: examples include the apparent opposition between necessity and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Hegel has been seen in the twentieth century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad.”

Now look, I have no reason to doubt that people who regard Hegel as an influential thinker really understand what he was talking about. If I could ever go so far as to decipher Hegel, it would indeed be a favourite pastime to expose false Hegel fans. I see myself at a barbecue, for instance, with a drink in one hand and a fork full of potato salad in the other asking a pretentious soul: “So which one of Phänomenologie des Geistes or Wissenschaft der Logik do you consider Hegel’s best early work?”

And if I did my homework properly, I wouldn’t drop the potato salad on my shoe if someone then stepped closer and asked me, “Do you agree with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who wrote that the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis all had their beginnings in Hegel?”

TUESDAY, 5 MAY 2020

Debate is one of the cornerstones of a free, democratic society. On the one end of the spectrum is fairly organised competition between two opponents, or between two teams, with rules, conventions, and even a referee ringing a bell. On the other hand, there is Twitter or Facebook, conversations around the barbecue fire or in a bar that ends with at least one person in the swimming pool or in jail, and discussions between friends and family that make the peacemakers in the kitchen or living room very nervous.

As much as I like a nice hot argument, I have to admit that the Wild West aspect of discussing politics or religion has been annoying me for some years. I can formulate a perfectly logical argument, but because the other person’s voice is of a higher pitch than mine, their illogical clatter is more audible than my logical mumble. And if my opponent also manages to throw in a light-hearted comment to win a little favour with the audience, I can just as well throw in the towel.

With politics these days it is almost worse than with religion. People have sorted themselves into camps, and eternal damnation will befall you if you don’t use the right vocabulary on the right topic – and no fence sitters are allowed! Want to ask more questions about climate change? There’s no time, Denier! The world is going to Hell because of people like you who don’t want to submit to Scientific Consensus! Want to suggest that Trump may perhaps not literally be Hitler? Don’t you know you are empowering the Orange Evil Incarnate with your middle-of-the-road rational approach?!

And on the topic of Trump – mention issues like Russia and Putin, or illegal immigration, or policies against China or the European Union or NATO, or the Kavanaugh saga, or the story of corruption in Ukraine, or the legality of the FBI’s actions towards Trump and the people who worked for him, and you enter a universe where there is apparently no documentary evidence of conspiracies against Trump or wrongdoing on the other side, no email or text message records, no single standard that applies to everyone, no facts. All that matters is what you believe, and with how much emotion you express your beliefs. If you believe X with enough emotion, it must be true. It simply has to be true. The opposite simply cannot be true. Our side simply cannot be wrong. The mere possibility is too painful …

What became of rules? What became of, “Let’s look at this like rational, calm adults”? What happened to “Oh, I didn’t know about that. If so, then I guess I’m wrong”?

When did politics become fundamentalist religion?

All of this almost makes one want to say: Don’t talk politics with me because you don’t accept the rules of the game.

“Rules of the game?” you might ask.

Yes, the rules that say, if I can prove beyond reasonable doubt with dates and references and logical deductions that X=X, you are not allowed to turn away and say it doesn’t matter.

One more thing: Just because I’m not singing in anyone’s choir, or just because I’m sceptical and I ask questions doesn’t mean you can hang a sign around my neck that says “ABC-XYZ Denier” or more repugnant labels. I ask again: When did this virus of religious fundamentalism infect so many people who used to be reasonable?

Last point: I’ve picked up another trend in the last few months. Someone will make a good point. Any reasonable person would listen to it and either agree or say something like, “You make a good point, but I still differ from you for the following reasons …” The trend now is to indicate that the good, reasonable point that one person made is a so-called “talking point” of the Evil Incarnate Eternal Enemy (formerly known as political opponents). Because it has been identified as a “talking point” of Green, Red can reject it outright, or because it is a “favourite talking point” of Pumpkin Eaters, there’s no need for Carrot Eaters to even consider it.

Hello? Is there anything left in your head from when you were a reasonable, thinking person? Just because Green or Red or Pumpkin or Carrot regularly makes a point in discussions on TV doesn’t make it an invalid point!

On any hot topic of the day, whether person or issue, I can see that I could be wrong. If you lay facts on the table that contradict what I know, with proper references, and you use logical reasoning, I would lay down my proverbial sword and admit you are right, and I am wrong. If you have to be honest with yourself, can you?

WEDNESDAY, 6 MAY 2020

I have a basic idea of the history of the Philippines: the original inhabitants of the islands, the Spanish takeover in the sixteenth century, the eventual conquest of the country by the US – although they saw it as the liberation of the land from Spanish rule, Japan’s temporary takeover during World War II, and the iron fist rule of Ferdinand Marcos that ended in 1986.

I’ve never had a great desire to visit the capital, Manila. The impression I get from TV is that it is a noisy, busy, dirty place. Just about everyone I know who has been to the Philippines either goes directly to the islands or they travel through Manila on their way somewhere else.

Pleasant was my surprise then when I read yesterday about the “Intramuros”, an 0.67 square kilometre historic area in the heart of modern Manila. During the Spanish colonial administration, this Walled City was the centre of political power, as well as the centre of religion, education and the economy. Development in the city in the early twentieth century had already taken a toll. Then, in February and March 1945, the Japanese took their last defensive positions, including in the historically important Walled City, to try and stop the American advance.

As might be expected, the Battle of Manila destroyed the city, and most of the historic buildings: “Filipinos lost an irreplaceable cultural and historical treasure in the resulting carnage and devastation of Manila, remembered today as a national tragedy. Countless government buildings, universities and colleges, convents, monasteries and churches, and their accompanying treasures dating to the founding of the city, were ruined. The cultural patrimony (including art, literature, and especially architecture) of the Orient’s first truly international melting pot – the confluence of Spanish, American and Asian cultures – was eviscerated. Manila, once touted as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ and famed as a living monument to the meeting of Asian and European cultures, was virtually wiped out.”

THURSDAY, 7 MAY 2020

A few weeks ago I caught a song in a playlist of a Bulgarian DJ named Ahmet Kilic. I recognised it as a Metallica number, but only identified it today: “Fade to Black” from the band’s second studio album, Ride the Lightning, released in 1984.

The song – for lack of a better phrase – spoke to me. It wasn’t until I identified the title that I properly considered the lyrics:

Life, it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free

A little dark, but understandable given the singer’s background and emotions when he wrote the lyrics.

Anyway, the track seems to have become a staple at Metallica’s concerts, but here’s the studio version:

FRIDAY, 8 MAY 2020

I have finally ready a draft document, tentatively titled, “Covid-19: A Reading List”.

This is not the result of careful research. This is simply a series of articles I have read from March 2020, which I have bookmarked if I considered the information or opinion expressed within worth revisiting.

As everyone should know by now, the crisis that people in most countries of the world are currently experiencing is of a medical nature, with growing political and economic consequences. The articles on this list address all three aspects of the crisis.

Given that the crisis is apparently far from over, this list should expand over the coming weeks and months (hopefully not years).

Finally, because I am a South African living in Taiwan, there are some articles dealing with the situation specifically in these two countries.

Again, the link: https://www.brandsmit.com/covid-19-a-reading-list/

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Week 18, 2020

MONDAY, 27 APRIL 2020

Seeing that I’m still working on my coronavirus reading list, something more mundane …

I just got back from the supermarket. I left, on foot, about twenty minutes before ten. The sidewalks were scattered with people. Some people were trying on shoes in the shoe store, others were closing stores. On one corner people were throwing bags in the garbage truck. At the next corner, groups of people were gathered around tables inside and outside the Family Mart. Here and there a parent with a child in hand. At the next corner, at the fourth of ten east-west streets running to the coast in Kaohsiung, I turned left.

The supermarket was still busy. In the fruit section, I picked two apples for our breakfast tomorrow morning. At the dairy fridge, a woman politely asked me in English to get her two boxes of low-fat brown rice milk from a high shelf. Shortly after, I grabbed my usual bottle of drinking yogurt, and on my way to pay remembered that I also needed oatmeal.

At the checkpoint, the only client in front of me was a young man with tattoos on his arms and legs. He was chewing betel nut, and paid for his dozen beers with a fresh NT$1,000 note.

As usual, I paid for my goods with the correct change, and sauntered the twelve minutes home.

TUESDAY, 28 APRIL 2020

Eleven o’clock at night is TV and snack time in our household. TV these days mostly means Netflix. And because I have a pathological inability to make snappy choices, we watch series rather than films.

We started last year with a Canadian-American series on time traveling called, Travelers. Then we watched a German series, also about time travel, called Dark. We followed that up with all the seasons of Big Bang Theory. Then we watched a French series about a man who discovered that a container that someone had wrongly delivered to his home was a portal to his own past – also dark, but not as dark as the German series where people discovered a portal in a cave outside their town. We also recently watched the Austro-German series Freud. The late nineteenth-century historical and political background was of course highly interesting, but the history and the somewhat fictional doings of the young Doctor Freud are not everyone’s cup of tea.

The series we are currently working on is an early 2000s series about a mother and daughter in a small town in Connecticut.

Here’s the thing: I have feelings about the main character – the mother. She’s supposed to evoke sympathy as a single mother and strong female figure, but she becomes more annoying with almost every episode. (I’m talking about the character now, not the actress who does an excellent job portraying the character.) At first I thought it was just me who think there’s something wrong with the woman, but a journalist at the time described the character of Lorelai Gilmore as “narcissistic and at times emotionally unstable, with strains of sociopathy”. A writer on a popular website referred to her “intense, overwhelming self-absorption”, and also opined that she is rude to people but always requires special treatment. Then there are her relationships with men. She and the owner of a local restaurant clearly have a good connection, but she ignores this and rather embarks on a string of relationships with men about whom she is not nearly as serious as they are about her. She even gets engaged to the one guy. When it becomes clear that she just wants to try out what it feels like to be on the verge of getting hitched, she breaks up with him – a few days before the wedding. A year or so later she’s disappointed that he seems to have gotten over his broken heart too quickly. And she speaks incessantly; she’s frivolous, and incredibly selfish. She’s driving me nuts! The creators of the character deserve some serious credit. After all, they could have gone for an underdeveloped, but safer character.

Anyway, it’s time for my late night cup of tea, and another episode of Gilmore Girls.

WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL 2020

Old readers will know that the bits of text I’ve been producing since last week are not my first literary endeavours. But for the five or six new readers who haven’t yet cast an eye on some older pieces, I decided to give a quick overview of the seven collections I made available for free in 2017 and 2018.

The first volume was In the grip of heretics – or, The Christian, a volume on religion, arguments against fundamentalism, and options for the unbeliever. Not a table, a dog or a pencil is about identity and other questions about human existence. Time doesn’t really fly is a collection of pieces on topics that couldn’t fill a bundle on their own. The real, or non-real purpose of our existence is, as the title suggests, about the potential why’s of our existence. In As long as you remain standing I try to convince the reader that it is better to remain standing, and if you stumble, to get up again. The title of the next volume, The necessary unpleasantness, exposes my feelings at one point about the need to make money. The adult life is about my modest efforts to survive the challenges most adults face. Bundle 8 – On writing and the writer is still in the pipeline, but almost ready.

As I mentioned, the bundles are available for free in PDF at Archive.ORG. In case you wanted a printed copy or wanted to read it on your Kindle, you can purchase it from Amazon.COM. There are one or two changes I still want to make, and the introductions still need work if I have to be honest, but they are nonetheless available as they are.

THURSDAY, 30 APRIL 2020

[Initially just a note to myself. I should have known the piece was going to become another round of public self-criticism.

Quick explanation: Hundreds of thousands of people bet on a daily basis on horse racing in Britain. Betfair.com provides a platform where people place bets, but also where people can offer prices that are better than can be found at other bookmakers. This buying-and-selling of prices takes place quickly enough, especially in the last five to ten minutes before a race begins, and at large enough volumes – sometimes over a million dollars per race – that one can make money trading the prices, as in a stock market. This process is known as pre-race trading.]

Almost three years have passed, and to be honest, I still haven’t processed what went wrong with my once promising pre-race trading project.

By 2013, I was aware that over the previous few years I had failed to focus for long enough on one project to generate a stable income from it. I had been interested in making money from sports and statistics for some time, and had read about people like Paul Shires of TradeShark who discovered Betfair trading in 2008 and quit his job by 2010 to trade tennis full-time. At the beginning of 2014, I read Caan Berry’s PDF on pre-race trading, and although I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the manual, I thought pre-race trading looked like the type of project I wanted to focus on until I mastered it. You could start with nothing more than $200 in your account, and all the action took place over three hours during the UK afternoon – between 9pm and midnight in Taiwan.

And did I focus! Over the next two years, I spent hundreds of dollars on more training – videos, PDF tutorials, online seminars. I watched dozens of videos, and read enough on the topic to compile six documents with notes.

By mid-2017, I had lost steam, and shortly thereafter stopped completely. I did not say out loud that I was going to stop; I just knew I needed a break. Initially, the break was only a few days. After three weeks, I restarted the software and traded a few meetings. But the interest was gone. And the same problems resurfaced.

What then was the problem? The software (Geeks Toy) with which one trades pre-race was honestly outstanding. There was hardly a move or money-flow that wasn’t displayed in some way. You could see in several ways how the price was moving, where the price had been, where it was likely going, and what was going on in the other “markets” – that is, the other horses in the race.

As complex as it was – with every horse in the race actually forming its own market, but all the prices also integrating into one big market, namely the race, and as stupid as I had shown myself to be with numbers, I had managed to get a grip on most of it by the end of 2016. Why didn’t I make money with it?

Two reasons: I frequently failed to close my trades before the race began – which meant you suddenly found yourself in a totally different market, with prices jumping wildly, big gaps in prices, and the strong possibility that your entire account can be wiped out in seconds if you’re not careful. This problem was easy to identify. The real problem was that I was not successful enough in the five to ten minutes before the races started. As I again surveyed this morning the screenshots I took of some races, I once again realised that the problem was not that I didn’t understand what was going on. The problem was that I couldn’t get in often enough at a price at which I knew I needed to get in, and I couldn’t exit often enough at a price where I knew I had to get out. Speed was the problem. It was either my computer’s processing of the software, or my Internet connection, or my reaction. Whatever it was, I was too slow.

In a Word document in which I regularly made notes about my trading activity, I wrote the following on Thursday, 11 May 2017: “People think pre-race trading, especially scalping, is about horse racing, because of the ‘race’ part, or that it is about trading. What they often don’t realise before they’ve already spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to master it and make some money is that it is in fact a video game. And if you’re not good at playing video games, especially fast ones where things change quickly, you will lose a lot of money, and waste a lot of precious time.”

FRIDAY, 1 MAY 2020

The first area of Kaohsiung where I lived when I arrived here in January 1999 was Fengshan – actually a city in her own right back then, but since 2010 a district. Fengshan is indeed much older than the city of which she is now a part. Kaohsiung was just a small fishing village until Japan took over the island in 1895, but Fengshan had already been an important administrative centre by the late eighteenth century.

On New Year’s Day we visited some historical places in my old district. In a former school for prospective government officials, now a museum known as Fongyi Academy, I came across a model of late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century Fengshan.

The first photo is of the whole town. Interesting to mention that the most important streets in modern Fengshan were laid out on the original dusty roads. The second photo shows where my first neighbourhood was – just across the river, on the outskirts of town.

For more photos of Taiwan, and other places, follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandsmit.taiwan/

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NEXT WEEK: The virus reading list … and other pieces of text.

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