SQUID GAME, AT LAST

 

I am a frugal person, most of the time, anyway.  If there is a movie or a book I want, I would first check with the public library if the item is available for borrowing.  Enjoy the item then return it, zero dollar spent.  Then came the streaming services, the fragmented streaming services, to be exact.  To watch this movie you would need to subscribe to this service because no other services carry the movie.  I am no fan of monopoly but the whole situation is ridiculous.  Some years ago when the Netflix series "The Squid Game" was all the rage, my wife wanted to watch it but we didn't have the streaming service.  We still don't.  We have cable TV and we already barely use it, I see no point in getting into streaming service.  We survive.  Fast forward to the present, about a week ago at a free swap meet, someone donated a 3-disc set of Season 1 of the show!  It sat unwanted for a few minutes, then I snatched it.  It is a screener copy, probably something distributed to a limited test audience for feedback.  At the beginning of each disc, you are required to acknowledge that you would not copy, hold public performance, give away, etc the disc.  Oh well, it's been many years later, I suppose none of that sticks anymore.  I just looked around on the web, there are a few offers of the same disc set on eBay and elsewhere.  

Each of the three disc contain three episodes, for a total of nine episodes.  This past Friday and Saturday, I started watching the series and duly exercised self-restraint to not binge it.  The idea of people being killed in "games" is not new.  Many years ago I read "The Most Dangerous Game" in junior high school, although my English wasn't good back then I am not sure I understood what was going on.  Then along came The Running Man with Arnold Schwartzenegger.  More recently we had "The Hunger Game".  Killing of human beings for entertainment purpose.  Admittedly, I was entertained, although more annoyed, too, by the characters who sorta brought it upon themselves.  Just keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into the hole.

One thing I couldn't help thinking of is... Epstein Island.  There is no limit in what the rich and powerful will do and can get away with if the people let them.  It is entirely possible the girls that were abused on Epstein Island were in some sort of troubles and Epstein seemed to provide a way out, so they took the chance.  Maybe by the time I finish the Squid Game hopefully in real life the guilty parties of the Epstein scandal will suffer consequences.  Art imitates life, sometimes life is stranger than fiction...

MARCH MEET-UP FOR BUY NOTHING BB/G BROOKLYN NY

 For those local to Brooklyn's Bath Beach / Gravesend area:

HAKKA

Regrets, I have a few. Actually, probably many, I am nowhere as perfect as Mr. Sinatra. The regret I have in mind at this moment is that I didn't meet my late father's expectation of learning the Hakka language.As you may know, Chinese has the main language, Mandarin, but many dialects. Cantonese is a popular dialect thanks to Hong Kong, Toisan is well-known because of the many early immigrants. Then there's the Hakka people and their dialect, the Chinese for which literally means "guests". Supposedly they were displaced by other more aggressive Chinese and had to live in lousy places, when they visit civilizations they were treated as guests. So the story goes. Both my parents' root trace back to some Hakka villages. Two separate ones, I have to ask my mother the name of said villages. To make things even more complicated, I learned from my friend Robert, that Hakka people from Taiwan has their own variation! (Yes, same Robert from whose mother I learned how to make those origami boxes.) Anyway, it was a challenge I just couldn't meet. I learned some Mandarin in school, spoke Cantonese with the neighbors, but my late father wanted all the kids to speak Hakka at home, instead of Vietnamese. In the U.S., we next had to learn English, and slowly through disuse my Chinese, dialect or otherwise, just became forgotten. I know at one point one a sister of mine had a notebook with many Hakka phrases written down. I am going to try to use modern technology to make some recordings of whatever I still remember. I made a quick search on the web and came across some web site that probably tries to sell lessons, as the phrases they show were long and spoken at a fast pace.

Strangely, perhaps because of the humorous aspect of it, one phrase in Hakka I remember more clearly is the one in the video. Translated with much poetic license just to have the rhyme in place with no regards for meters and such, it goes

Fart
If you can, do your part
If you cannot, then depart








COMING UP NEXT: PROOF THAT LIZZIE BORDEN WAS A HAKKA.

PAT

For some road runners, the route is the same everyday. A few loops around Prospect Park, a few trips up and down the waterfront by Belt Parkway, a few times around Lafayette High School, you get the idea. I cannot do that anymore. I did start out that way, the block of Scarangella Park was my go-to route. Eventually I went all over, I need to see something new, something different with each run. Lately, I feel better if I go somewhere further out. Today, it was the Little Free Library on East 71st Street in Bergen Beach. I like that area because the B3 bus takes me there, no need to drive and pay through the nose for gasoline. The walk from the bus terminal to the LFL was my warm-up. With Saint Patrick’s Day being the day after tomorrow, I thought writing his shortened name would be fun to do. I have neither the stamina to spell the full name, “Saint Patrick”, nor the room to fit that many letters.

In case you wonder, no, I didn’t climb over some fences to make the letter “a”. It is a little trick of pausing and resuming the tracker, in this case Strava app on my smartphone. While heading toward Avenue X, I paused the app when I was about midway through East 72nd Street. Then I ran back on East 72nd to Avenue W toward East 71st Street. About midway down 71st Street, I un-paused Strava. The computer only knew that I was last on East 72nd Street and that I now re-appeared on East 71st Street. There are many ways to get from Point A on E. 72nd to Point B on E. 71st but the shortest distance is the straight line, so that was what the computer chose. Everything else involved actual running.

 

SOME HEROES WEAR DUST JACKET?

Much as I like to do heroic things, I am not one to declare myself a hero, but I like to make jokes and puns.  The typical superheroes, at least in the Western Hemisphere such as those in the Marvel or D.C. universe, wear capes.  Batman, Superman, Thor, you know the drill.  The saying goes "not all superheroes wear capes", meaning some people do heroic work but are just normal people.

This past friday the 6th of March 2026, a member in my Buy Nothing group alerted the group that somebody dumped a few bundles of books at the base of the Little Free Library on 15th Avenue between 84th and 85th Streets.  She already took some but there are many left, in four or five neatly tied bundles, and the Little Library itself was pretty full.  The Library is in front of a medical office, but, I just checked, back in 2024 the building was occupied by the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn.

Whatever the business, if the books were left alone at some point they will resemble garbage.  The business will not like that and will treat them as such.  Besides, it may rain the next day and the books would be ruined.  To a book lover like me, that is unacceptable.  On my way home, I got off the highway one stop early and went a little bit out of the way to rescue them.  The bundles of books were still there, some bundles probably had books take out of them so the strings couldn't keep the books together.  I rescued them all, about 30 books.  Over the weekend, I added them to a catalog in LibraryThing that I named BuyNothing20260306 and shared a link with the Buy Nothing group (Bath Beach/Gravesend).

Free Books if you are in Bath Beach/Gravesend areas

In recent memory, this is the third time I rescued books.  Before this incident, someone asked the local library if they take old books.  It's an old policy, they don't.  Or at least not the local branches.  You would have to go to the Central Library by Grand Army Plaza, I think.  The nice thing to do with all those books is to find someone who may want them.  But this person wasn't interested in doing the right thing.  They just left a Target shopping cart with two big boxes of children's books.  The librarian lamented about the situation on social media.  Once I found out, I took possession of the cart and put the books away in a safe place, away from the element.  The next day, I returned the cart to Target at Caesar's Bay.  Over the next few days, I shared some of the books with a few members of my Buy Nothing group.  On the 5th of March, I happened to visit an LFL in Jersey City that was mostly empty.  In went all the remaining books from the loot, about 30 of them.

Before the Library incident, there was a Curb Abandonment alert about books on 65th Street near West 1st Street.  For that incident, I left the house early and was able to rescue the three bags of books.

All this book-rescuing work, I would like to come up with a catch alias.  The Book Rescuer is too obvious, I prefer something that, even if contrived, present a little puzzle.  Maybe a tongue-twister or some alliteration.  Got to think hard about this...