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The Zombie Apocalypse
Izzie has many little rituals. Just one among many is slinking from work on Thursdays to an offbeat Chinese Malaysian restaurant.
They have a giant TV screen on one wall. It used to show lots of Ed Sheeran videos and K Pop music and I would generally not pay too much attention since most of the commentary and subtitles are in Chinese. And anyway, I am usually too busy either eating or filling in the little black book of days.
But about 8 weeks ago the content changed. When it wasn’t footage of workers in factories making face masks or doctors surgeries and hospitals running out of said items, or white vans roaming the streets with their occupants wearing hazmat suits every time they stepped outside the cabin, it was scenes from some conference or press briefing.
The scene was always the same. Three speakers at a table with microphones, a woman behind them doing sign language for the deaf and a written sign in English
“Centre for Disease Control and Prevention”
Occasionally there would be reports from BCTV and I was always wondering if all these channels were from Mainland China or if some were from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
I can recognise about 5 characters in Mandarin so basically my ability to follow any conversations is pretty much zilch.
But I did know one thing. This was the same government that covered up the poisoning of baby formula milk back in 2008. They were going out of their way to put on a good show for the Beijing Olympics and any form of dissent was being well and truly steam roller
Babies were suffering kidney failure and some were dying and the parents who kicked up a fuss were getting threatened and thrown in jail. For sedition and treason, I guess
Ever since a Kiwi working in the Chinese subsidiary of the Parmalat milk processing company spilled the beans on the whole melamine in the milk scandal, there has been a roaring trade in Chinese people buying baby formula here and sending it back to China for relatives or to sell at a huge profit. It got so bad that the supermarkets here had to put 4 tin limits on customers
So here you have a government more concerned about covering up and keeping power than protecting the rights of parents and children to have access to safe food. Especially appalling when taking into account the one child policy which meant that for many parents, the loss of that one child was even more devastating than it would be in normal circumstances.
So of course I was not surprised to hear that the government had also treated the Coronavirus whistle blowers as criminals and had threatened them with all sorts of consequences for speaking out.
But the epidemic just got too big for them and they could not keep it under wraps any longer and they started putting cities and provinces into lockdown
The story was getting some attention here around the end of January and especially when one of the original whistleblowers died of the very same virus himself. There was such an outpouring of grief and anger of this in China that I guess that was when the so called communist party lost control of the narrative. It was a big story here.
But not many people here in Oz really took it very seriously. However I was thinking that if a government that was happy to sacrifice babies on the altar of the economy was now shutting half the country down, then things must be really scary indeed.
Then suddenly there was a run on the shops here. You would expect gloves, hand sanitisers and cleaning products to be top of the list. Which they were. But no one ever expected the run on toilet rolls. Supermarket shelves were just wiped clean of them. It was like the zombie apocalypse was just around the corner
I would go to the shops just to watch the drama but soon noticed that the empty shelves had extended to pasta, rice and beans.
In the meantime, Racket Man had appointed creepy VP Mike Pence to manage the US government response to this looming epidemic but not before many rants at his rallies that the corona virus is nothing more than a hoax concocted by Democrats to make him look bad. Of course he was cunning enough to attribute those claims to one of his devoted supporters - what the snarks call the ‘Dear Sir’ dialogues. So he could always claim plausible deniability if called out on it. Which is exactly of course what he did
He spouted nonsense about there being only 15 cases in the USA and they will soon just disappear. Like a miracle
So last Thursday I went for my usual fix of fried noodles only to see a different format to the usual shit show on the big screen
There were video clips of Trump and Pence which were dubbed and subtitled so I could not actually hear what he was saying. There were maps of the USA with red, pink and white shades and pictures of trump and pence with red circles drawn around them. With Sharpies. I hope
There were then cuts to videos from what looked like tent cities in the US and people living on the streets as well as people queueing up to go to the latest trump rally
I asked the waitress what the presenters were saying. In particular, what do they do with trump. Do they translate literally or do they try to make sense of his word salad.
She said that they were all speaking in Mandarin Chinese about the coronavirus epidemic but I don’t think she quite got what I meant. I explained that since trump can barely even speak English, how on earth can anyone be expected to translate what he says. I don’t think she got it but anyway she had other things to deal with apart from nosy customers commenting on their television shows
I was glued to the screen in spite of not understanding a word of what anyone was saying. But the way the presenters kept pointing at those two faces with the red sharpie circle around them and jumping up and down in a very animated manner, it looked to me like they were just beside themselves with astonishment at the sheer stupidity coming out of the USA
That now seems like a century ago. In one week, we now have several coronavirus clinics opening up locally and several major events in April and a crab festival on the weekend have already been cancelled
The number of cases in Italy has exploded and Ireland is closing down schools and universities.
Australia has added Italy to the no go list and even creepy Kommandant Kartoffelpuffer (also known as Peter Dutton- Australia’s version of Stephen Miller)
The stock markets around the world have gone bearish and dumb trump just makes things worse in his reckless attempts to appear like he is actually doing something
A week is a long time in politics and an even longer time in the life of an epidemic
I wonder if trump and pence will be the stars of next week’s instalment of Chinese Virus Reality TV
Pity the restaurant does not have popcorn on the menu
They have a giant TV screen on one wall. It used to show lots of Ed Sheeran videos and K Pop music and I would generally not pay too much attention since most of the commentary and subtitles are in Chinese. And anyway, I am usually too busy either eating or filling in the little black book of days.
But about 8 weeks ago the content changed. When it wasn’t footage of workers in factories making face masks or doctors surgeries and hospitals running out of said items, or white vans roaming the streets with their occupants wearing hazmat suits every time they stepped outside the cabin, it was scenes from some conference or press briefing.
The scene was always the same. Three speakers at a table with microphones, a woman behind them doing sign language for the deaf and a written sign in English
“Centre for Disease Control and Prevention”
Occasionally there would be reports from BCTV and I was always wondering if all these channels were from Mainland China or if some were from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
I can recognise about 5 characters in Mandarin so basically my ability to follow any conversations is pretty much zilch.
But I did know one thing. This was the same government that covered up the poisoning of baby formula milk back in 2008. They were going out of their way to put on a good show for the Beijing Olympics and any form of dissent was being well and truly steam roller
Babies were suffering kidney failure and some were dying and the parents who kicked up a fuss were getting threatened and thrown in jail. For sedition and treason, I guess
Ever since a Kiwi working in the Chinese subsidiary of the Parmalat milk processing company spilled the beans on the whole melamine in the milk scandal, there has been a roaring trade in Chinese people buying baby formula here and sending it back to China for relatives or to sell at a huge profit. It got so bad that the supermarkets here had to put 4 tin limits on customers
So here you have a government more concerned about covering up and keeping power than protecting the rights of parents and children to have access to safe food. Especially appalling when taking into account the one child policy which meant that for many parents, the loss of that one child was even more devastating than it would be in normal circumstances.
So of course I was not surprised to hear that the government had also treated the Coronavirus whistle blowers as criminals and had threatened them with all sorts of consequences for speaking out.
But the epidemic just got too big for them and they could not keep it under wraps any longer and they started putting cities and provinces into lockdown
The story was getting some attention here around the end of January and especially when one of the original whistleblowers died of the very same virus himself. There was such an outpouring of grief and anger of this in China that I guess that was when the so called communist party lost control of the narrative. It was a big story here.
But not many people here in Oz really took it very seriously. However I was thinking that if a government that was happy to sacrifice babies on the altar of the economy was now shutting half the country down, then things must be really scary indeed.
Then suddenly there was a run on the shops here. You would expect gloves, hand sanitisers and cleaning products to be top of the list. Which they were. But no one ever expected the run on toilet rolls. Supermarket shelves were just wiped clean of them. It was like the zombie apocalypse was just around the corner
I would go to the shops just to watch the drama but soon noticed that the empty shelves had extended to pasta, rice and beans.
In the meantime, Racket Man had appointed creepy VP Mike Pence to manage the US government response to this looming epidemic but not before many rants at his rallies that the corona virus is nothing more than a hoax concocted by Democrats to make him look bad. Of course he was cunning enough to attribute those claims to one of his devoted supporters - what the snarks call the ‘Dear Sir’ dialogues. So he could always claim plausible deniability if called out on it. Which is exactly of course what he did
He spouted nonsense about there being only 15 cases in the USA and they will soon just disappear. Like a miracle
So last Thursday I went for my usual fix of fried noodles only to see a different format to the usual shit show on the big screen
There were video clips of Trump and Pence which were dubbed and subtitled so I could not actually hear what he was saying. There were maps of the USA with red, pink and white shades and pictures of trump and pence with red circles drawn around them. With Sharpies. I hope
There were then cuts to videos from what looked like tent cities in the US and people living on the streets as well as people queueing up to go to the latest trump rally
I asked the waitress what the presenters were saying. In particular, what do they do with trump. Do they translate literally or do they try to make sense of his word salad.
She said that they were all speaking in Mandarin Chinese about the coronavirus epidemic but I don’t think she quite got what I meant. I explained that since trump can barely even speak English, how on earth can anyone be expected to translate what he says. I don’t think she got it but anyway she had other things to deal with apart from nosy customers commenting on their television shows
I was glued to the screen in spite of not understanding a word of what anyone was saying. But the way the presenters kept pointing at those two faces with the red sharpie circle around them and jumping up and down in a very animated manner, it looked to me like they were just beside themselves with astonishment at the sheer stupidity coming out of the USA
That now seems like a century ago. In one week, we now have several coronavirus clinics opening up locally and several major events in April and a crab festival on the weekend have already been cancelled
The number of cases in Italy has exploded and Ireland is closing down schools and universities.
Australia has added Italy to the no go list and even creepy Kommandant Kartoffelpuffer (also known as Peter Dutton- Australia’s version of Stephen Miller)
The stock markets around the world have gone bearish and dumb trump just makes things worse in his reckless attempts to appear like he is actually doing something
A week is a long time in politics and an even longer time in the life of an epidemic
I wonder if trump and pence will be the stars of next week’s instalment of Chinese Virus Reality TV
Pity the restaurant does not have popcorn on the menu
no subject
It must be very hard for translators to work out the ungrammatical drivel that drops from the Drumpf's mouth. It's bad enough for English speakers.
Here is a link from The Guardian relating to Trump's address to the nation -
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/13/donald-trump-coronavirus-national-emergency-sketch
I shall sally forth to the local supermarket on Sunday morning to pick up anything from the remnants left by a surge of hoarders raiding them this morning. I assume it was in response to Scotty from Marketing's speech played on all channels yesterday afternoon. I gather it didn't reassure them from their response.
Vile vectors and Aussie zombies
trump claims to have taken the test since but you just know he is lying. The way he is huffing and puffing lately, I would not be surprised if he has already got it.
I'm hoping that Ivanka turns out to be the vector in both cases. Such Karma
I do hope you survived the supermarket zombie apocalypse. Every day there is a new must have item that has vanished from the shelves. I sometimes go to the shop just to watch.
PS I just love the latest Honest Government advert about virus dumbfuckery. So they are now going international. Have you seen it yet?
Re: Vile vectors and Aussie zombies
Yes I saw the new Juice Media video. I think they had to go international as Trump is way worse than even Morrison & Co.'s just adequate efforts. I think Scummo was more interested in the Hillsong conference which has been on here in Sydney for the last two weeks and the weekend was the last two days that they could scrounge more money from their deluded followers and his best mate Brian Houston wouldn't be happy if it had to be cancelled early. Needless to say a lot of the participants were from the US. Maybe the spike of new coronavirus cases here in the last week may have been a result of the conference but they don't count in comparison to Houston's bank balance.