Sunday Night Ramblings.

• As the song goes:  "Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Oh Yeah!  Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Oh No!  Tomorrow is Monday!" 
• Yep.  That is how the song goes.   Although, I don't have to sing this lament because for me, tomorrow is my Friday.  So ha, ha, ha! to you!
• I had an adult with a job in class today.  I asked him how business was.  He said orders from American companies were up, but they were asking for more time to pay - a bit of a risk for his company, he admitted.
• Some of the students will begin school next week.
• Some of the students have to do military training.  A crash two-week basic training course where they learn how to march.
• I asked students about nicknames.  One student told me his grandfather called him sweet heart because the student was such a good grandson.  I told him he must have mis-translated what his grandfather meant.  The same student told me he was also nicknamed "Condom" because his Chinese name sounded a lot like that word.  Another student in the class then asked what a condom was.  I decided to waive my rule of having the students try to explain the word to him in English - just tell him the Chinese word and get the incident over and done with.
• My wife phones me to say that she and Tony had another accident, that no one was hurt, but it was trouble and she was waiting for me.  She phoned me while I was in class and so had no time to get the complete details.  I thought of all sorts of possible things going wrong and the wife having a confrontation with some one.  But when I phoned her I learned that Tony had inadvertently locked her keys and wallet in the "trunk" of the electric bike, after he decided to close the "trunk" lid.  The wife had to stay at a neighbour's till I got home from work.  We ended up having supper there.
• Tony has a bruise on his cheek after having done a face plant at a KFC playground yesterday.
• Should I read the Iliad by Homer, or Ulysses by James Joyce?
• Youtube has a download MP4 feature which I have been using to upload videos to www.youku.com (look for wuxiandis).
• After having heard of the death of John Hughes, I watched a couple of his films on www.youku.com:  Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  I could only watch PiP for about twenty minutes.  It was so full of cliches.  Ferris, at least, had some funny moments.
• I am enjoying reading about the protests against Obama care happening in America now.  The whole Health care fiasco shows what I knew about Obama all along.  His talk about a new kind of politics was bogus and wasn't going to last long past his inauguration.  And  the fiasco is in some way a miracle.  Obama has a Supreme Soviet situation with majorities from his party in both houses.  He had the numbers to put the health care bill before the August recess. (Funny how Democrats can complain about the opposition resorting to "Nazi-like" tactics when the plan was to have the health care bill passed before even members of their own party could read the thing)  It would be a terrible thing for the world if the Democrats tried to have more government control of the health care system.  Part of the reason Americans spend more on health care per capita is they do a lot of medical and pharmaceutical research.  Countries like Canada have made it a moral cause to leach off the American system by charging less for prescription drugs.  Meanwhile, who gets holding the bag for research cost - the Americans.  People could make some argument about the drug companies making obscene profits.  But companies have a right to make money and all research has to be paid for and innovation has to be awarded.  When leftists start talking about obscene profits, they ought to be shouted down.  When people start off using bogus premises, what is the point of hearing them through?  (Another reason America has high per capita costs is that its system, as currently constituted, does have many people not directly bearing the cost of their use of the medical system.  That is, someone else pays.  Other countries have to ration to kept the cost down.  America doesn't do that.  When others pay, there is no incentive for many to economize and misallocations inevitably result.  In markets where governments stay out of the way, like the computer market, the increasing inexpensiveness of products is something to behold.  Why can't the cost of medical care go down?  Government is involved in it.)
• One of my students in China told me that he didn't want the government running the hospitals.  He pointed out the example of the government running restaurants.  When this happened, he said, there were few restaurants.