O Fortuna!

Ô Fortuna, ô Coincidence, ô Surprise!

How you shook me when, as I was grocery shopping and when, looking up from my shopping cart, my brain took in the data being sent over by  the object that had just entered my sight!

For it was thou, O Goddess-That-Spins-The-Wheel, who put this man and his accoutrement in a space-time continuum close enough to mine on that fateful afternoon.

Reader, fret not for I intend to put an end here and now to the sense of expectation that has been gnawing at your insides and making your limbs numb ever since you bravely set about reading this post. Despite the stupor I’d been thrown into, my mind succeeded in ordering my arms and their appendices to make the few moves that made it possible for you, Reader, to contemplate the vision which threw me in a fit I am sure you are starting to measure now:

Ô Fortuna, you spinned the Wheel so his and my presence coincided in the same space-time continuum!

But… What… This flag!…  Could it be!?… Well, yes! It is the Taiwanese flag!

Fortuna, you knew! You knew that Taiwan is precisely the place my wife and I are moving to right by the end of this month, and you chose to place right in front of me this bold man, waving the Taiwanese flag in the midst of an ocean of Chinese-made junk!

Ô Fortuna, do you think this corsair, sailing between the “garden furniture” and “plastic-wrapped pots” aisles, knows the true nature of the thing he is proudly sporting?

I dare say I do not think he does. Not any more than those people who get Chinese-looking tattoos without even knowing about their hypothetical meanings, applied to their flesh by professionals not necessarily knowing how to write Chinese either.

He does not, just like the marketeers in Taiwan hoping to transfer the prestige of foreign-looking wording unto the products they wish to sell better this way.

Proof: