Tuesday Random Thoughts

• It is still interesting to walk to work everyday.  I see things I would never see in Canada and I slap myself sometimes as I walk through the crowds of Chinese saying to myself "how the hell did you end up here."
• I love playing with the Toner.  He is now trying to grasp at things that I put in front of his face.
• A site that I must visit everyday now is called Small Dead Animals.  It has to be the best Canadian blog.  Two recent postings about the late Prime Minister Trudeau and the RCMP generated a lot of comments that I found worthwhile scrolling through.
• The better the students and  the more enthusiastic they are, the better it is to teach.
• We will be having a 100 Days of the Toner party at the end of this month.  I am shirking the decisions of who to invite.
• In the new apartment, The wife wants to put wallpaper, behind the sofa in the living room, that will have a large wedding portrait on it.  Apparently, this is now the thing to do for couples in China when decorating their new apartments.  I am horrified at the idea, but I am having a hard time talking the wife out of it.  She assures me that the wallpaper can be taken off when we move out of it.  I am not planning to spend the rest of my life in that apartment.  It is against my Gypsy, Latvian Diaspora nature.
• How to describe Tofu?  It is like cardboard pulled from a lake but without the flavor.
• The lunatic who hangs around the School as well as the next door Church has been singing hymns.  As I type, I can hear him doing his usual "whoop whoop" scream.  I sometimes envy the fact that the crazy can ignore the laws of decorum without remorse.
• All the good restaurants in Wuxi have been going downhill lately or so the talk I have heard seems to indicate.  Among the restaurants cited, I have heard all the buffet places, all the Muslim restaurants and the Sichuan Girls restaurant have gone to pot. 
• The Wuxi bureau of Foreign Trade puts out a bilingual magazine called Map that is sleek and glossy, and a must-read for all Wuxi Expats.  Visit www.maiqiu.cn for details.  The Wuxi editions of Map magazine are in second printings.
• I am trying to think of things to do and talk about in my next two English Corners.
• Luis (www.ponquenet.spaces.live.com) has become an uncle.  Congratulations to his brother Marcos, and his wife Pamela on the birth of Sofia.
• America is celebrating its Thanksgiving this week.  So happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends.  Marc Steyn tells Americans why they should be thankful and non-Americans should be thankful too.
• For lunch, left-over pizza from Romanos (which has not gone down hill) and a egg and ham sandwich from Careme. 
• Now that I have my Saskatchewan Winnipeg Grey Cup, who do I want to win?  I don't know.  This is one of those games where I hope the better team wins, as opposed to the team I am cheering for which, may or may not be the better team.
• The egg and ham sandwich is making my stomach feel funny.  Oh Oh!
• This is complete bullshit.  Everything in this article is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Governments ordering industries to do anything (for example,  directing Detroit to double all vehicle fuel efficiency) makes about as much economic sense as governments ordering prices for everything to be reduced 50 percent.  This columnist has forgotten the biggest lesson of the 20th century: "Command economies, that seek to rid the world of the profit motive, don't work.  They create poverty, environmental degradation and perverse results that are the exact opposite of what was intended."  There is a motive for creating affordable fuel-efficient cars.  That there are none on the market is because the technology is very hard to develop and government orders aren't going to change that fact.  Come on!  It is time to put central planning into the trash heap of history.
• Chavez and the King.  The King of Spain saying to  Hugo Chavez "Why don't you shut up!" was an interesting incident.  The Left would say the  unelected monarch was being out-of-line by telling an elected leader of another country what to do.  But the right would say that this monarch is of a democratic pedigree citing his role in the transition of Spain from a Franco dictatorship to a full-fledged democracy.  The right would also say that Chavez is being a democrat in the manner of a Hitler who was able transform a fledging German democracy into a dictatorship. 
• There are many unsightly piles of garbage in Wuxi which it seems are no one's responsibility to clean  up.  On my way to school this morning, I saw a pile of rubble removed from a shut down store front.  In the store front next to the pile of rubble, I saw a cigarette vendor and wondered how he could put up with having the pile so close to his business.