Impracticalate

• Tomorrow, as I said in the previous entry, is a day off. What will the K family of AKICistan do? My wife, the ever practical one, is going to wash shoes. What will her husband, the ever impractical one do? He will impracticalate. He will teach his son to impracticalate too.
• Actually, and I am half-serious, I am thinking that I want Tony to be taught by the Jesuits. I read in the Northern Magus that their students become nasty-hard. Not wanting my son to be a dilettante, I hope he does something like join the Marines. Pierre Eliot Trudeau, to his great disgrace, never enlisted in the great W.W. II.
• Most of the students I talked to today didn't have much to tell me about their ancestors. They could only go back three generations. One student did tell me that his great great grandfather was an official in Wuxi for the Qin Dynasty. That man's son, not the student's grandparent, became an opium addict and sold his house.
• This op-ed from the New York Times is almost completely sensible, and scary, not because it is the NYT being out of character but, because of what it says about China. The Chinese did have a policy of not floating the RMB. The problem with the government fixing prices is that something has to give in another way. Like putting a lid on a boiling pot, pressure inside will accumulate until something blows. In China's case, the blow will come from the serious decline in exports that is occurring. Trying to rid itself of the U.S. treasury bills it has would result in a decline in the value in the U.S. dollar which would then mean a decline in the value of Chinese assets. China is in a dollar trap. It should have let its currency float.
• There are more Andis Kaulins's in the world that I would like. Someone sent me a message on Facebook. They were looking for an Andis Kaulins from Toronto (No!!! I am not from that God forsaken city.). Coming across this particular Andis Kaulins, they had to ask what I was doing in China.
• I learned of a practice of giving a family giving all children of the same generation the same name. In China, the first name is the Family name and two other names. With this generational identification practice, the second name is the family's generational name, and the third name is the individual's given name. So the children of brothers all have the same first names and second names - cousins, brothers, and sisters. This practice still is carried out in the countryside but not in the cites because of the one child policy.
• I had a grilled cheese sandwich tonight. Something, I haven't done in a long time. It was so good like the first ones my mother ever made for me.
• Tony saw my drinking some pineapple beer. He gave me his wallet full of money and then pointed at the can. The kid is learning fast. I will have to send him to the Jesuits tomorrow.