After a long time, even Latvijas Televīzija TV channel showed and talked about something other than Covid - the Olympics. Latvians were glued to their TV screens, watching to see if Eiduka would finally be allowed on the ski slope, which place would reached all sorts of Aparjode, Plūme and Šics, what would be shot by Baiba in the trees near the biathlon track, how many quintuple toe loops and axels will Vasiļjevs jump, in which last place will Mad Max Vinogradoff, the northern ski jumper, finish, where will Haralds Silovs and the short trackers skate to, and will Harijs Vītoliņš and Rodrigo Ābols score any goals.
At home, meanwhile, the Freedom Convoy was announced by the anti-vaxxers tormented by the Covid restrictions. The application said the convoy would include trucks from Canada and Zablyedovka, tractors, excavators and other heavy machinery from Brazil and Muhosransk, cars from Australia and Afigenovka, and tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of people from all over the world. And so it was - ignoring the generally accepted norms of behavior and standing in a public place with a despicable look, all of them personified by a VIP limousine, a passing public transport, one rattling van, ten signaling cars, one flag-draped motorcyclist, one hornblower sticking out of a car window, a dog wetting a tree and Šlesers in his PJs. The image of the latter was a stark, harsh, truthful, direct and hard affirmation of the unity of an entire people and nation, making one feel the global breath of the Freedom Convoy taking place in Canada.
Meanwhile, the foremost Gobzems himself, to strengthen his revolutionary convictions, had gone to London instead of Razliv Lake, from where he sent letters to his oppressed and enslaved homeland via pigeon e-mail, tweeting, Facebooking and Instagramming in milk ink on a slice of bread. "I am in London. In England. Windy, rainy as usual. Yesterday I was jogging around Hyde Park, this girl smiled at me at the third meeting and twirled her finger at the side of her head - she must have heard of me. I went to the museum, and there was a Francis on display, probably Bacon too. I also went into a shop, to smell my running shoes and look at my favorite perfumes. Four floors, full of people, a DJ playing Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", or maybe it was a piece by Bujāns. I walked down the street and felt what it's like to be free. Truly free. You know, I felt happy. And then I thought about Latvia, and then I didn't feel that way anymore," Gobzems shared his impressions. "Oh, Aldis!" his electorate squealed in delight. "How touching, how true! We're rooting for you, dismis the Parlement!"
Meanwhile, the healthy pianist Pavļuts beat his chest and, holding his hand on Lenin's writings and a bundle of letters from Marx and Engels, swore by the lightning-struck oak that the government would not decide on any major easing of the Covid restrictions until at least February 15. But the moment he shut the cabinet door and his mouth, the coalition announced that it had agreed on a substantial relaxation from March. Kariņš promised that hitherto closed sectors could be opened up, working time restrictions reviewed and even lifted, and perhaps even the main Covid sites themselves - water parks and trampoline jumps - opened up. "The Ministry of Health has unfortunately so far taken a conservative approach to these issues," Kariņš told Linda Abu Meri on LTV's "Morning Pornorama". "Oh, the Ministry of Health?!" said Daniels with anger, saying a few choice words about the Prime Minister's mother and the acoustic concert hall and slamming the lid of the unpurchased grand piano in anger.
After some thought, Pavļuts proposed to allow closed industries to operate from March and to do away with Covid certificates in shops, and to lift all restrictions in April. Strangely, this time the thoughts of the honorable Uga and Perevoščikovs were not even asked for, the new epidemiological superstar of the government court, Trojanhorsianski remained in sad solitude with all his charts and graphs, while the omicron and the subsequent pi, rho, sigma, epsilon and omega viruses were allowed to multiply and mutate on their own. For the time being, however, there was no clarity about the Covid certificates - part of the ruling coalition thought it was necessary to extend their validity, part thought it was necessary to abolish them altogether, while the Latvian people were not unanimously clear as to when, from which date and for how long they would become anti-vaxxers and when they would become semi-vaxxers. "And in general - how are we going to drag them to get the boosters? How are we going to get them to take their fourth, fifth and sixty-sixth shots? No, this simply won't work!" opposed the Covid regime supporters.
For a week now, the new 100-year-old bottle deposit sites have been in full swing with their 100-year-old deposit machines, so it was possible to reach some statistical conclusions. It turned out that people had so far tried to deposit some 29,000 unrecognised objects in the deposit machines. Unfortunately, the expectations of the sensation-seekers that the deposit machines would be stuffed with an old pair of socks, a plate set, a shirt sleeve, a five-liter water jug, a stepmother and a flying barrel or something else did not materialize. "We conclude that in most cases residents have tried to hand in old packaging without a deposit mark, but we do not rule out the possibility that there have also been fraud attempts, however our heroic deposit machine has recognized and thwarted these criminal intentions, thus eliminating the efforts of a mafia-like syndicate to infiltrate our deposit system with a bottle bought in Lithuania or a can found in the bushes pre-February," said the Deposit Packaging Operator Stūrītis with satisfaction.
Of course, it was all small fries, as the Latvian champs were preparing for the Eurovision Supernova. Even the discussions about the tea mushrooms and the Artuss and Dārta saga died down for a week, with the main topic of discussion becoming whether the Citi Zēni boy's pants crotch ripped apart accidentally or according to a script, whether the central character of the Mēs Jūs Mīlam performance is Ralfs' girlfriend or boyfriend, whether Sējāns and Bujāns have gone mental, whether Elīna is still Gluzunova or has a different surname, and whether Aminata has contracted Covid, hay fever or water in her knee. But most importantly, will LTV cut off the end of Supernova at the announcement of the results, as it did in the Russian hockey match against the Swiss, to show how the short trackers fluff up their mattress before going to bed in Beijing. That was an important event.