The current state of Tony's naughtiness. Go Canucks!

That Tony of mine! He be naughty. I tell ya! You don't what the boy's going to next.

Tony has a fetish for putting coins into containers and then dumping the containers on the floor or where ever else. I am wondering how much this interest of Tony's is costing me because I have seen ten coins suddenly disappear and Jenny not knowing where they might be. Tony, of course, won't volunteer any information.


You know your driver is nuts when he doesn't obey red lights. I think I will make a list.


When I ditter, I go on twitter.


The taxi driver should speak slowly when he asks me a question. Saying the sentence faster doesn't help. "Ji Ni" - what the hell was he asking me?


The Vancouver Canucks have the third playoff seeding in the NHL's western conference. They will meet the St. Louis Blues in the first round of the playoffs. I will try not to watch the actual playoffs. I will follow on the Internet. In my mind's eye, I have an image of what the teams, whose results in the standings I follow, look like. So the Canucks have their 1995 uniforms for example. The Boston Bruins look the Esposito and Orr Bruins of the early 1970s. The Philadelphia Flyers have the long hair of the mid-seventies. And so on...

If I had to put my money on it, I would bet on the Penguins and the Red Wings meeting in the final. I would love to see the Canucks and Canadiens meet. But I can't see the Canadiens even winning a game against the Bruins in the first round. But I can predict, with joy in my heart, that the Maple Leafs and Senators won't make it the final this year, because they have already been eliminated!



I am nearly finished that biography of Trudeau. Reading it is a reliving of my growing-up years of the 1970s. Trudeau was, as I later concluded, all style and no substance. In fact, his administration was terrible and he was intellectually incoherent. Other than bilingualism, I am not sure what ideas he had. He was a regular flip-flopper. There was one point in his career, if the book is to be believed, that Trudeau adopted neo-conservative policies. Yet the book tries to make him out to be a rational intellectual of some sort but he was truly following fashions. That he could have been Prime Minister of Canada for so long is sad comment on the country. John Derbyshire says Canadian politics is boring. I should be insulted because the events recounted in the Trudeau biography were riveting to me at the time. But I have found the occasional curling match to be riveting as well, so it may well be that the Derb is correct. Trudeau may have been a sad attempt by some Canadians to be interesting to the world. Canadians were better off being bland. Like the citizens of Iceland thinking they could be investment-bankers, Canadians were better off being dull and comfortable. Trudeau's world-class dynamism amounted to nothing.


I haven't much to say about China today. I had a truck load of workers scream at me because I was a foreigner. Another carload of young men yelled at me later for the same reason. Standing at the bus stop, a lady asked me if I needed help. Something about having to wait for the bus made me look like a laowei in distress.


Jenny and Tony are going to Beixing for a couple of weeks leaving me in the apartment by myself. I have no plans to become a bachelor again. I hope I can use the free time to watch the DVDs I have been meaning to. I have some writing I want to do: I am thinking to write a few short stories based on the characters I have meet in Wuxi, and the embarrassing situations I want to put them in. I have some other things I must consider as well. I will have to use the extra time I will have to lay some groundwork.

Speaking of DVDs, I hope to be able to at least watch the fourth and fifth seasons of the Wire.