On my way to see the good Dr. Chan this afternoon, I was

delayed at the King and University Streets' bus stop, where also a sweet, serious gentleman of a certain age, and a speaker of the local pidgin, though grave and circumspect and not at all childish in demeanor, was waiting, like me, for the Number One bus, not the Number One Ltd., who turned to me and said, so softly and with so incongruously childish an intonation that I had to strain to catch his meaning, "The flags at the military base, they be all lowered--Why?"  

"At half-mast, I imagine,"  I replied, "because of the murders of all those people in Paris."

"I thought we lowered American flag for Americans."

"Sometimes for our allies too."

"Why they kill them all?  So many--What do they gain?"

"Except to make themselves hated, you mean?  I don't know.  We don't know who they are or what they want.  I doubt they are even Muslim: They sound like the CIA to me."