MARKED BY YOUNG PEOPLE

Yesterday was all about the stems. Dunhill Pipe Mouthpiece Polish, Obsidian Oil, specially impregnated polishing cloths that lift oxidation, and paying haphazard attention to videos of Spy X Spy (an anime series) on youtube. Anya Forger likes shiny black stems.
Didn't take very long. There's a queer joy to cleaning pipes.
I highly recommend it for neurotic types.
Not that I would know.


During lunch at the chachanteng the language of the music videos on screen switched from Mandarin (sappy) to Cantonese. And though there weren't many people there, the mood changed. The Chinatown Cantonese nowadays are all able to speak Mandarin, after a fashion, but it isn't a language that has much 'oomph' for them.

Some of them, like my apartment mate, hate it.
She's too American for that crap.
Or those people.

What with not being Chinese in the slightest -- actually a glow in the dark Dutch American whitey-white -- it shouldn't make a difference to me, but given that I can read Chinese and speak Cantonese, I'm kind of with her on that. Yeah okay, I do like several songs by Chou Hsuen (周璇) and Theresa Teng (鄧麗君), as well as many oldies from the forties through the sixties, but those are kind of exceptional. Modern Mandarin songs are silly and boring.

I would post a video to prove my point, but that would be ... berserk.
Instead, how about a picture of smoking equipment?

This is one of the pipes I worked on yesterday. Lit it up after lunch and headed out into an alley, where a fellow considerably younger than myself complimented me on my style, "you have such a good look, like a professor", which altogether surprised me, because I think of myself as more like a grouchy clochard skulking in the shadows with my evil tobacco, and a little while later someone driving by slowly lowered his window to inform me that I looked like Sherlock Holmes, as well as totally cool. He probably meant Gandalf. All those movie pipe smokers look alike.

There was a day when pipesmoking meant gravitas. Nowadays it means un-electable shifty old codgers too stubborn to live clean and get with the programme. We go outside to poison passersby and little children. Who shouldn't be outdoors anyhow, it's dangerous there, seeing as there are tourists, bums, and drug addicts lurking in doorways.

We rudely waggle our hairy toes at people who complain.

Come here, little girl, would you like to sample some softly fragrant Red Virginia?
It's from the Old Belt, and evokes the history of our country.
Loving hands were involved in its production!

[The Old Belt is a section of the foothills of NC and VA reaching to the Piedmont, with rich loamy soil. The Eastern Belt extends further eat, is flatter, and has sandy soil. There are also the Border Belt and Middle Belt. See: Tobacco belts]


The little tyke is terrified! Bad men smoke tobacco.
It's, like, evil and disgusting. Nasty!
Everyone says so.



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