Why my wife choose the restaurant she did for the Toner's 100 day celebration and other Sunday musings...

• I let my wife choose the restaurant for Anthony's 100th, as I did for the wedding.  The reason she choose the particular restaurant she did, I have learned because the name of the restaurant, Zhuang Yuan Lou, has genius in the name.  So it is popular for Wuxi families to book the restaurant for 100th day celebrations.
• I really do need to make a commentary about this SDA posting in which a editorialist from the Chilliwack Progress wrote about Climate Change.  Now, I have lived in Chilliwack for a few years and my sister still does.  If you have lived in Chilliwack, you know that it is the end of the Fraser Valley.  Because of its location, Chilliwack has a smog problem.  It seems that smog from industry up the valley is blown into Chilliwack where it stays till rain washes it away.  I remember a particularly hot summer where it hadn't rain for a month and the smog in Chilliwack was thicker than it is in Wuxi.  Chilliwack on a clear day is beautiful.  But the smog can make it look ugly.  So much as I hate Al Gore, the commentators at SDA have to realize the local conditions in Chilliwack and understand that an Al Gore media blitz combined with local conditions can lead people in Chilliwack to think the sky is falling in.  Similarly, here in Wuxi, China, the local conditions can lead people to be convinced by Al Gore's panic-mongering.  The Climate has changed here since Wuxi's industrial revolution.  Students have told me that in their childhoods, Wuxi waterways froze over and that snow stayed on the ground.  It hasn't happened since I have been here.  So by the evidence of their senses, Global Warming and Climate Change are real.  But the evidence is that climate has changed before man industrialized for undetermined reasons.  Wuxi now is a far better place than it was twenty five years ago when it was a Communist hole.  It also generated less heat.  Wuxi is a foggy place even without humans.  Wuxi's environmental problems are more, I believe, a result of its culture of corruption than  unfettered Capitalism (markets do need rules fairly applied and universally obeyed).  And Chilliwack, despite its' smog, is still in a condition that China, in the most ideal of worlds, can aspire to.  A carbon tax that the editorialist talked about won't help in China, and would also increase the lawlessness (Chilliwack grows potent pot) in his town because of the high level of taxation that already exists there.
• I had a student ask me that if the victory of the Labor Party meant Australia was going Communistic.  I told him that it was an exaggeration to say that but that it would probably meant more taxes and regulation for Australians.  (*Now, I do think that attempts by World Bodies to combat Climate Change are Communistic however and must be fought.*)
• It is bloody cold in Wuxi.  It has to be five or ten degrees outside and inside.  I can't get the air conditioners slash warmers at school to work.  (No central heating in China below the Yangtze River)  My wife's instinct is always to save money and so she has not yet put on the heat in  our apartment.  She has Tony swaddled in four or five layers of clothing.
• The Duke of Wuxi is happy because Arsenal won yesterday 2-1.
• Pat myself on the back.  Look at this posting from Seablogger.  I have seen a lot of unauthorized reproduction here, and I have been told some horrible stories about measures taken to prevent the other kind.