First unveiled item that I’ve
learned over the past month is Vietnamese people that like Pizza often enjoy
catchup atop said pizza, as opposed to a non-catchup alternative within the
pie. In fact, one of only a couple knowing encounters with catchup I’ve made in
the country has been pizza adjacent. Should this be held against me, I’m innocent
of all concocted charges of provoking application of catchup on any and all
pizza pies. K? Statutory plea of ‘it was like that when I got there’ necessary
and applicable. Will my nephew now visit me? These two elements under discussion
(catchup and pizza) are his two favorite things to this day. They correlate
well with personal qualities, like an observed red tint in his hair (not
present in either of his parents, who each have feathers), and general wholesomeness.
I’m not sure if he’d be down for the two elements combining. Sounds like a major
short circuit.
Second pale
veil/pell-mell – I came across and befriended a not yet stumbling, self-proclaimed
drunken Irishman on a morning stroll along the lake. I never said anything
about his inebriation or nationality, although I must say friendship in such cases
needs to be founded more than once. I found the emerald gentleman in a similarly
national and spirited state on Saturday. A benefit of having ebullient friends is
they can take on the lion’s share of the charisma in social environments. You
can lounge around in a nice pub with such a fella, and bare witness to how
interesting attendees are drawn to your gab-enriched compadre’s magnetism, only
to stay around for you, seeing as how you yourself are not simply a drunken
Irishman. I am genuinely obliged, oh blarney-blessed one.
Third
discovery of the past couple weeks comes from a native chum of the Ho Tay/West
Lake area. I asked him if he ever sees or has seen waterfowl in the lake. What
better fish to ask than a chum? He tells me that, while not anymore, when he
was a kid just a couple decades ago, the lake was still plenteous with a bird
called Sam Kam, meaning ginseng bird. I must assert that this name almost begs
a person to hunt the so-named entity to extirpation. That’s why I advise linguistic
engineers to begin calling greedy rich folks ‘acai-throated genital-enhancement
leopards’. The Sam Kam is/was a seasonal species, migrating from China. It has
been storied that the bird fattens up on ginseng in the mountains up north
before coming to winter in Vietnam. The bird has apparently long been a
favorite, and thus it is curious why it only recently got wiped out in the
area. It’s not coveted everywhere however. In England the species is called the
Eurasian Coot, and it is extraordinarily abundant in many urban and rural water
bodies of Europe. Coots are small, duck-like relatives of cranes and rails that
mainly eat aquatic vegetation and invertebrates. I’ve certainly heard hunters
in the U.S. say American Coots are no good for eating, although I’m not sure if
distaste vs taste for Sam Kam accounts for the birds’ ubiquity in some parts in
contrast to others. The species is red-listed in Vietnam, and generally there
are multiple reasons why species go into serious decline. It doesn’t take too big
an imagination flex to suppose pressure from contemporary commerce, modern
hunting gear, regional population growth, and/or food shortage could ramp up
hunting to well above typical short-term prey resilience -- don’t know.
Some folks keep ducks around Ho Tay, although besides these
penned domestics, and self-proclaimed drunken Irishmen, I’ve not encountered
any waterfowl on or around the lake; though fish (harvested by some against
warnings not to) are somewhat plentiful in spite of periodic mass death. I
caught word on a blog a while back that piscivorous (fish-eating) mud herons
can still be found around the nearby Son Hong/Red River. Perhaps they are nowadays
really sustained with catchup pizza deliveries (pizzivorous), though they vigorously
deny it naturally.
