The Ultimate Covid-19 Vaccine

Here's wishing all my readers a safe and fun-filled time as you celebrate Christmas and the New Year.

Let's see where this gets me.

I've been going to the gym regularly for the past month and where my regime allows for the use of equipment that I have at home, I work out at home. I'm curious what I will look like by the end of next year. I'm under no delusion that there's going to be all that much change. And I don't mind.

As a naturist, I accept my body with all its human imperfections. I don't feel a need to hide anything. But of course if I have even a small fraction of Arnold Schwarzenegger's muscles, that will be fun. After all, I'm following a modified version of his 1800-page Encyclopaedia of Body-Building. It's Christmas today but that didn't stop me one bit.

May you experience the love and joy of Christmas

 Here's wishing all my readers peace, good health and joy as you celebrate the Holy Birth!

My kind of food

If you haven't seen this, you probably haven't been to the Far East or if you have been here, you probably haven't really lived here because it's found everywhere.

I eat a lot of it which is why if I have posted a pic of this before, it's understandable. It's extremely delicious.

This is bak kwa or 肉干. It's very commonly eaten in places where there's a majority of Fujian Chinese people such as Taiwan and Singapore. If someone tells you it's a jerky, banish it from your thoughts! It's nothing like the beef jerky which tastes like leather. The bak kwa is tender, succulent and incredibly delicious. It's made of pork and I've eaten both the Taiwanese and Singapore versions and if I have to be perfectly honest about it, the Singapore variety is about a billion times more delicious. Don't take my word for it. Try it yourself.

The Taiwanese bak kwa is absolutely dry but the Singapore version (which is the one I'm holding) is best eaten without clothes as you will often find lard still dripping from it. The one in this picture has chilli as well which adds to the amazing flavour of this delicacy. 

Australian wine is FUN

I bought this bottle last year in Australia before the world was destroyed by Communist China but I didn't open it up until tonight. I bought it only because of its name. I thought it was really fun. But I honestly don't like the taste of alcohol but if I must drink any alcohol, just do it to support Australian wine. Remember, every bit of support goes to show the evil Communist regime that the free world will not be cowed into silence and submission by the rogue state.

My quest for a safer skin colour

This pandemic has revealed the valour and goodness of mankind - we have all read about the amazing sacrifices of very brave people from healthcare workers who willingly exposed themselves to danger to a priest in Italy who died after he passed up his right to a ventilator in favour of a young patient who had no ventilator. Sadly, the pandemic has also showed up the worst of human racism. There have been numerous reports of attacks on ethnic Chinese people or people who look Chinese. 

It is easy to understand why such racist attacks are happening. Everyone knows Communist China is solely responsible for this pandemic. It's one thing to be the source of the pandemic; it's quite another thing to behave abominably. China tried very hard in the early months to put the blame for the coronavirus on the US and later, it even tried to put the blame on Italy as the origin of the virus. China had a massive coverup when it first detected the outbreak. It punished severely the whistleblowers, it encouraged its citizens to go abroad but at home, it locked down Wuhan so that a resident of Wuhan (the epicentre of the viral outbreak) could not leave Wuhan for other parts of China but he could fly all over the world, spreading the virus everywhere. China accused countries that sought to close its borders to Chinese tourists of 'hostile behaviour towards China'. I remember that because my country didn't dare to offend China and did not close its border to China until the US did so and we followed immediately after. 

And what is more, China very cleverly identified itself with the rest of the ethnic Chinese people everywhere and did not hesitate to play the race card and brand as racists those who called the virus the 'Wuhan virus'. Of course governments in the West, ever sensitive to any charge of racism however ill-founded it may be, complied with China's demands. The effect of all this is that ethnic Chinese people are seen as indivisibly one and the same as that rogue state China, which is of course nonsense. Many of us hate Communist China with a passion. But I have been called a racist for calling the coronavirus 'Wuhan virus'!!!  Because most people in the West don't understand Chinese, they do not know that Taiwan continues to call it the 'Wuhan virus' and the 'Wuhan pneumonia' to this very day. See the website I screenshot today from the Taiwan government's CDC. The words I've circled in red read 'Wuhan pneumonia':

Even now, China continues to behave like the thug that it is. It's been more than a year since China covered up the pandemic from the world but its behaviour continues to stink. It has unleashed a whole string of economic sanctions against Australia for asking the UN to trace the origin of the virus. 

All this has an extremely negative impact on those of us who are ethnic Chinese or who look Chinese even though we have nothing to do with China. There have been many reports of violence against Oriental looking people. That means fair-skinned Asians. If you are ethnic Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, you are now the target of increased racially motivated violence because of China's evil excesses. 

My friend and I who are planning to travel again as soon as the pandemic is over are thinking of telling everyone we meet that we're Thai or Vietnamese (2 Asian racial groups Europeans are familiar with). But that's not easy to pull off. For an East Asian to pose as a non-Oriental Asian, one has to be much darker in complexion. Without a sufficiently dark complexion, an Asian is easily thought of as Chinese and the problem with xenophobes is they won't stop to ask you if you're Chinese before they land a punch on your face.

I view ethnicity as an artificial construct and I certainly don't want to get into trouble because of that.

Although I have been sunning myself regularly, I don't think I have achieved the same sort of tan that I had last year after a series of nude hiking in Austria and Germany. Just look at this photo taken on 31 July 2019:

Except for my feet which didn't get the sun because of my boots,
the rest of my body is deeply tanned.

I think I can pass off as a Pacific Islander or a Thai or a Malay with this tan. That's the beauty of nude hiking - you get a complete tan except for your feet unless you go about barefoot which I can't.

Here's a pic I took this afternoon, almost a year and a half after my nude hiking last year.  Even though the tropical sun has done its work, I doubt very much I can pass myself off for a Thai or a Malay. This is not a safe skin colour for me to go tramping round the globe in when you consider the current climate when some people may confuse their understandable anti-China sentiment with their anti-Chinese racism. 

How I keep myself uniformly tanned in this pandemic

 

Support Australian Wine!

If you believe in freedom and you think rogue states should not be allowed to bully free nations, you have to agree with me. I don't like the taste of alcohol and I don't really drink but I will henceforth buy only Aussie wine. Give it as a gift, bring it to a party and if you drink wine, drink it. You can cook with it too. Whatever you do, just buy Aussie wine.

Don't spurn modern technology!!!

For a long time, I rebelled against reading an e-book. I just couldn't imagine reading from a screen. It's enough that I look at the screen all the time, be it the phone or my laptop, but I thought when it was time for me to lie down with a book in hand, it had to be a REAL book. 

I then got started with reading books from my iPad and it was great. Some books are so thick that I can easily sprain my hands by just holding them up to read. An iPad can accommodate hundreds of thick books. Recently, I ordered a Kindle which has the advantage over the iPad in that it reads just like paper and you are not staring at a light source. And I'm absolutely addicted to it. Books that I used not to read because they were way too heavy for my hands are now easily accessible to me. Here I'm reading a book that actually weighs a ton and I'm holding it with one hand. It's amazing what modern technology can do for us.

Yes, I know, the Kindle has been around for more than a decade but I've been resisting it all this while. I used to say disdainfully to the typical ebook advocate that real books were made of paper. Now I blush at the thought of that.

The pandemic's impact on my health

I've been very lucky in that I haven't caught Covid19. But like most of us, I am sure my health has suffered a terrible impact from the lockdown and huge change of lifestyle. For one thing, serious travel restrictions have made it impossible for me to travel. I've also not been to the gym for a long time. Yesterday, I started my gym regime again.

I've read a lot about the impact the pandemic has on many people and one major negative impact is weight. A lot of people have put on more weight. Those of us who take frequent selfies can always compare ourselves over the course of a year. I took a pic in the gym yesterday and I found a pic I took a year ago in almost exactly the same pose. I'm glad apart from a little more weight, I'm generally not that much different than I was a year ago.

Here are the pics: the first was taken on 11 October 2019 and the second just yesterday, 30 November 2020. You can only find two pics that have such a remarkably similar pose and yet a year apart if you are a confirmed selfie addict. LOL.