There is a high probability that I will regret putting paprika into the hot chocolate that I prepared for myself. It says to use four squares per 200ml but I used just six for 500ml. I let it warm up and melt the chocolate for the most part before adding some paprika, to make a spicier hot chocolate.
I think I will find it far too spicy. We will see when I taste it. For now it has to cool down before I can drink it.
I like hot chocolate but hot chocolate is a pain to prepare, mainly because it involves heating milk and I’m afraid of letting it boil, and I don’t like the smell of warm milk. It also requires more cleanup than tea, but a different type of clean than coffee. We are in a pandemic, and we need to try new things, while waiting for Covid zero, that impossible dream.
Impossible because of the leadership and anti-facters, rather than because the goal is unreachable.
I can’t focus when I am not in my usual writing spot, so I am not bothering. I finally get to enjoy a few hours of rain after long periods without. I still want to see rain in Switzerland but for that I need to be in Switzerland. I also have nothing to write because I didn’t spend time in thought, or do anything noteworthy.
I have had the same scooter for about 37,000 kilometres and yesterday I finally decided to sell it off, after years of frequent use. I sold it off because whereas the usual service was about 270 CHF the quote for the latest service was 500 CHF.
This wouldn’t be so bad as you don’t change brakes every year. It’s bad because the scooter is old. For at least two or three years I felt that it had less power than before. It accelerated more slowly, but this might be due to me gaining a little more weight. I think it has more to do with scooter age.
This scooter was also crashed into, while I was on it, stopped at a pedestrian crossing. I was fine but the scooter needed the back to be fixed. I rode it for another 10,000 or more kilometres.
I asked another garage if they would buy the scooter but a scooter is considered as worthless after 25,000 kilometres. If you want to sell a scooter do it before you reach 25,000 kilometres.
The beauty of driving a scooter, compared to a car, is that you can park anywhere. In some cases you can park meters from where you want to be. The other advantage is that you can go through traffic without waiting with the cars.
As an experiment when driving to Geneva I did behave like a car, and for a drive where I usually use a third of a fuel tank to go to Geneva and back, I used half a fuel tank, one way. Scooters are highly inefficient if you drive them like a car. I never did that again.
I drove over 9000 kilometres on a single set of tyres and fell three times. I thought that it was due to my scooter driving skill declining but it was due to not changing the tires after 3000km as you’re meant to. I eventually did get the tyres changed and it felt like I was riding on a monorail compared to before. If you start to fall, change the tyres. It is a great experience, so it’s nice to feel the difference, but I advise you to change tyres every three thousand kilometres.
Driving a scooter, compared to driving a car, is a lot of fun, because you lean into turns, you overtake, you feel the wind, you feel the weather, and you feel a certain amount of freedom that you don’t get with a car. If I replace the scooter I want to replace it either with an e-bike or with an electric scooter. The advantage of both is that their carbon footprint is low. The advantage of a bike over a scooter is range. A bike has an extended range, compared to a scooter, especially when used by a cyclist. My bike rides to Geneva are 50km and the range of a scooter is 37km.
And Finally
If the scooter service had not been double the usual price I would have paid for it to be maintained and used it for another two years, but at twice the normal cost of a service I’d rather not fall into the cycle of normalised 500 CHF services. This isn’t a classic Vespa, this is a conventional scooter that is 17+ years old with 37,000 kilometres. It has served a long time, on borrowed time, since after the crash it could have been considered dead. It’s the second time that I have used a vehicle until it is “end of European life”. Last year I end of life a Mercedes A class, and this year it’s the scooter.
The scooter will now head to Africa for a second life there.
If you’re a geek and you like mobile phones with a data plan then ingress is for you. Over the last two days I walked 18 kilometres playing ingress and winning back the City of Nyon for the Resistance. It didn’t last long. The same evening the enlightened players destroyed my hard work. I will just have to go back and liberate the city later. I have more important tasks this weekend. Tomorrow Ingress FS Neuchatel will take place. At least twenty of us will be playing, walking around the city, looking for portals and trying to take over the city.
Staring at a phone while walking around a city may sound counterintuitive, or absolutely normal for those who still use text messaging apps or tweet. In this case though you discover details of cities that you would not notice. You notice plaques, the names of places which you always walk by but never knew about and more.
Playing the game has two parts. Attack and defence is one part and farming the second. Attack and defence are good because they don’t require much walking around. They just require having a lot of “toys” to play with. The drawback to having a lot of toys to play with is that you probably walked around like I did going from portal to portal and hacking it. You get weapons, modules, resonators and more. They are good for game play.
There is a cultural aspect to farming. Missions designed by L9 players of ingress have portals related to a certain theme. If you walk in the old town of Geneva you can follow the Calvin track, the park brunswick mission or the Geneve, around the Cathedral mission. There is a good chance that you will know some of the monuments and you will discover others. With each portal players can write a description. These descriptions can provide you with a new understanding of the places you pass by. In essence it could serve as a guide book for those who like to see things in a different light.
In theory I should remain neutral and not comment about current affairs but what is happening in Europe and the US merits comment. The runaway growth of the pandemic warrants comment. We are in week 98 of the pandemic, just two away from 100 weeks and people are still debating whether to wear masks, sing in choirs and more. People are still meeting in large crowds and doing more irrational things.
I was looking at the statistics for the last few days in Switzerland and the situation is nuts. Almost all canton are with rates of at least 1000 per 100,000 but some are as high as 2000 or more. What is nuts is that there are no soft lockdowns, no self-isolate at home, no “please avoid events”. It feels as if the guarde fous have been removed and the nutcases are running the asylum. Governments are not being held to account for their incompetence, and in cities like Geneva people are protesting against masks for children, during what we know is an airborne pandemic. That’s nuts. It shows that people are not as knowledgeable about this pandemic as they should be, but also that the fourth estate is not keeping governments honest. Look at England and Switzerland as two examples.
A few months ago Japan had the olympics, and the number of cases went up, but within days they got the situation under control and within weeks it was back to normal life. In Europe countries like Switzerland have been through five ways, and no lessons have been learned.
We have gone from a pandemic that affects old and vulnerable people, to one that affects young adults and older, to, one year later, i.e. this summer, where the Delta and the Omicron waves work their way through child populations where masks, safe distancing, vaccinations and other measures are not taken. Governments are behaving in a manner that could be labelled as Eugenics, and they are getting away with it. We are in a pandemic and the emergency brakes have been disabled.
In the grand scheme of things I am frustrated that children’s lives and well-beings are being endangered by health ministers with economics backgrounds, rather than health or humanities, and by the prospect that this could go on for decades, not weeks, months or years. Every wave is getting to be worse and people are failing to learn from their mistakes over and over. We are living through an irrational time.
We know how to end the pandemic. We see that Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other nations have little flare ups but they deal with them immediately. Switzerland and other countries are just watching a pandemic, without doing everything to stop it. If Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other nations can control the pandemic then so can other countries. Europe, the US and other continents are failing. This pandemic could have been over a year ago. It is irrational that it isn’t.
I keep this post because I think it is important to log the absurdity of the situation we are in today.
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