PRAYING TO A CELL PHONE

The other night, having an impending sense of doom about the soccer match between the Netherlands and Morocco, I got up and listened to 'Sawt El Hassan Inadi' on youtube. It's a song every Maghrebi knows, very stirring. And indeed the Dutch are no longer in the cup. But several Dutch teams still have a horse in this race, as many of the Moroccan players come from their squads.

This is kind of like that World Cup a number of years ago when even though the Dutch didn't stand a Belgian's chance in hell of getting to the top there were five Dutch coaches involved. Russia, Korea, and three other countries.

We're good. Just not that good.


My interest in the event is over till four years from now.


The rest of you can loose your minds over it. The most noteworthy aspects were Scotland drinking Boston dry and people dressed in orange doing a little group dance.
That was fun, it is all over now, everybody go back to sleep.
Please stop playing bagpipes.

Lunch both yesterday and today was exceptional. I went to a restaurant I've started going to again after a hiatus of six years, since the pandemic, which has changed hands but kept substantially the same menu. They've expanded it somewhat, and I was pleased to see a very 'home-town home-cooking' dish offered as one of their lunch specials: salt fish meat patty with rice (咸魚肉餅飯 'haam yü yiuk beng faan').

Not my home town, nor my family -- it is unlikely that my mother would have even allowed any fermented fish into the house -- but never-the-less a favourite of mine.
Totally great with sambal. Dee-licious!


I was still mentally smacking my lips a few hours later waiting for the bookseller and smoking my pipe. There were disturbing howls from a bit further down where the karaoke joint we now seldom visit is located, and a fellow watching a religious broadcast on a pocket device and praying at a nearby corner, not one of the usual neighborhood unstables. Very few tourists or drunken fratboys. Probably too cold for them. It is typical San Francisco summer weather and there is a nasty wind.


You know, if getting all religious about a televised preacher on your cellphone is your thing, in this weather you might want to do that indoors. You can be warm, and much louder. There are no public benches anymore. We hate homeless people and old folks in this city.

I am not religious or homeless, and I won't say that I'm old.
But seating with a backrest would be very nice.
Still. You don't want to encourage me.
Somehow I can tell.



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