Friday, November 7, 2008

The ride home.

My ride home tonight on the Electric Bike was dreary for the evening was windy and wet. It was also perilous. A couple of instances, I saw trucks go straight across my path without bothering to slow down and see if anyone was coming. But my thighs didn't get wet.

Hard to get a cross sample of students' opinions about things if one student does all the talking. Every once in a while, I come across a student who talks like Castro.

The wife has a bad tooth and will be going to her hometown to have a dentist she knows look at it. Tony will be going with her. I will stay at the apartment. I plan to watch the Quiet Man, starring John Wayne, in all of its entirety. And not get drunk.

Inside Outness. Only a problem I could have.

The Australians have crazy ways of saying things. I was just told what a budgie-carrier is; a tight pair of swim trunks.

Either I was given the wrong order or I took the wrong order when I went to McDonald's for lunch today. I could have claimed the clerk understood me when I ordered a double cheeseburger, fries, a cola, and two pies for takeout. But when another girl gave me a bag of food, I didn't bother to check it and it was only after I had walked all the way back to my office that I noticed that I had taken or had been given two double cheeseburgers, a McChicken, fries, and a large hot tea. I couldn't be bothered to go back to the restaurant to fix the problem but now I am reluctant to go back to the restaurant for a few days for fear that they will remember the dumb laowei who took the wrong food.

I think a problem with the world today is that a lot of people want to be cool. How else can you explain people trying to identify themselves as a moderate of a middle-of-the-roader? Talk about your declaring yourself as unable to have an original thought or even having any consistency of principles. But it is uncool to identify yourself as a socialist or a capitalist, or to have any sort of consistent belief. You would have to be a monomaniacal ideologue. And to be a stick-in-the-mud on a matter of principle? Why be an old fuddy-duddy? Better to try to be ahead of your time.

I have come across the blog of Conservative Philosopher Roger Scruton. It provides links to stimulating essays like this in which he makes a defence of religion. I have problems with people who scoff at religion, because they seem to only have a superficial idea of the human needs that religions cater to, and of course they have no idea of what to replace religion with except drugs and sex it would seem.

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