A Genius for Stupidity; Impeachment; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day; Christmas Day Argument; Tony Dreams of a Road Trip

• When it comes to parking or stopping their cars, the locals have an absolute genius for parking or stopping their cars in a stupid manner. It would never occur to me to stop or park my car in the way I have seen many locals do it. So maybe they are genius parkers; if genius is a way of doing things that normal people would never think to do. Then again, maybe the definition of stupidity is trying to force genius.

• What do I think of the impeachment of President Trump? Not much. He should wear it as a badge of honor for it means that idiots really really really hate him.

• Christmas Eve, my birthday, I had a 19:00 SPC. One student came. I then caught the bus and arrived home at 21:00. Normally, I would have gotten off at an earlier stop so I could get home later, but I had been lead to hope that maybe tonight, my wife Jenny wouldn't be tiger-mothering my son Tony. I was wrong. I got to the door. It was locked. My wife opened it with a scowl on her face. Tony had gotten a poor mark on some test and she was going over with him. Now, my Chinese wife doesn't so much tutor Tony as have an extended temper tantrum. And whatever was wrong with Tony was all my fault because I was weak and selfish and wasn't helping Tony, according to Jenny. Truth is I am weak (which I have had Jenny tell me many a time) but if I was to become strong, Jenny would like it a lot less than the weak me. A strong husband wouldn't be putting up with his wife's bullshit like I have.

• Christmas Day, I drove Tony to school in the morning and picked him up in the evening. Merry Christmas! I said to Tony. They don't care about Christmas here! He replied. (although to be fair, he does) On the way back home we had to stop off at Jenny's office to pick up something. So I took a bit of a different route home. Along the way, I saw this car driving really slowly with its four way blinkers on. Strange, I thought. And the car had to go ahead of me into the lane I was in!!! I resisted the urge to give the car's driver a fuck-you honk. But then we got to an intersection with a sign that said no u-turns between 16:30 and 18:00. I looked at my car's clock to see it was 17:00 and so I can say that I had been planning to make a u-turn. There was another place I could make a legal u-turn so it was no big deal to not do one there. However, the car, I was telling you about, was planning to make the u-turn and the driver, of course, ignored the sign or maybe didn't understand it or whatever it is that enters or doesn't enter the minds of local drivers. And so I gave the driver a fuck-you honk as he made his imprudent u-turn.

• Christmas Day, I was screamed at by Jenny for the usual reasons which I won't get into, and she gave all the reasons that we should divorce. I wasn't buying it. Though the reasons she gave for divorcing me were all valid, divorce is out of the question for me: I want to be a good Catholic. And the argument left me feeling me better anyway as so much tension was released that the release might have been my best Christmas present ever.

• One of Tony's dreams is to go on a North American road trip and visit NBA arenas. He has been asking me questions like how far Houston and other American cities are from Winnipeg.

You'll Never Convince Them and You Can't Have a Rational Argument with Them; Because Everyone Does It; For a Better Future; No WeChat Moments; Two Realizations; My Father Had a Gardening Hobby

• I was angry all day after a morning argument I had with my wife during which she told me that I shouldn't listen to foreigners who had similar thoughts about how mad Chinese parents were about educating their children. That evening, in a Speaker's Corner, I told my students what happened even repeating the curse words I hurled at my wife, and the curse words that came to mind when I thought of the madness of Chinese parents. A colleague witnessed my rage and told me that I was basically pissing against the wind. Exasperated I asked why they did have to use such bullshit arguments to try and convince that there was reason to their madness.... Well, said my colleague, you can't have a rational argument with the Chinese.
• Because everyone does it is the first argument the students use to defend their behaviour. Exasperated by this argument and pointing out its silliness, I did get some students a the SPC to admit that there was too much homework, but they then said that there was nothing they could do to change it. (But there is, which is to no go along with it!) I thought later of the example of massive holiday traffic jams at Yellow Mountain and the stupidly enormous amount of holiday Chinese trudging the Great Wall. These are examples of how not doing what everyone else is doing would save one a lot of aggravation. Life, I should have told the students, was full of aggravation; and there was no need to add it.
• For a better future is another one the students parrot to me. Well. the future doesn't exist. And it isn't progress if what you are doing now is worse than what you did before. And I would like to see a present, not a future, where Chinese children don't have their childhood stolen from them by their parents, where they have free time on evenings and weekends to be kids and not be tormented by their parents with a quixotic desire for a better future.
• Three weeks in December and I have successfully withstood the urge to post on WeChat moments.
• Two realizations hit me unawares on the day of my near meltdown caused by arguing with my wife. One, is that there is a new Star Wars movie is in the cinema. I hadn't known it was coming. I have heard that it features a gay kiss in it, and I am thinking – call me prude, I don't give a fuck – to not bother taking Tony to it. (Which is too bad because taking Tony out of school on the 25^th and watching the Star Wars movie would have made Christmas 2019 tolerable) Two, we are at the end of a decade. I knew 2020 was on the way but I never thought to think of it as the arrival of a new decade till I heard someone mention it in a podcast 
• According to the Chinese parents way of thinking, my father was a bad parent because he spent a lot of his free time gardening, and thus not helping his three children to do homework nor giving us extra homework; my father was a bad parent because he took us on Sunday drives instead of making us do weekend classes; and my mother who had housework to do and three children to look after was a bad parent because she didn't tutor her children every night.

Worst Christmas Ever; Tony Wants to Play Basketball but...; Argument with My Chinese Wife; The Chinese Idea of a Good Imagination; Am I All Alone?; I Wouldn't Be So Bitter If;

• Sad to say but this will be my worst Christmas ever because my son Tony will not get to experience it. He won't get any Christmas presents. He won't get to experience the excitement of a Christmas morning. He instead will be going to school during the day and then probably being tormented by his mother at night.

• Tony would like to play basketball. I took him to this basketball complex because of a flier he saw and he got get a demo coaching session, after which said he wanted to do more. But my Chinese wife Jenny seems to have put the kibosh to it. They want her to pay for a year of coaching which would mean three classes every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I now realize that the reason Tony was going to swimming classes on a similar schedule because that was what the swimming place offered. Jenny just took it. When I asked her if she could pay for one basketball practice a week, she said that that was not done. Thinking about my hockey playing days, I recalled that we would play games during the week and once or twice on the weekends. Because of the stupid school system here, the idea of letting kids do something on weekday evenings instead of homework just doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. And so you have this situation where it is not possible to any free time on weekends. There is always some fucking practice to go to every goddamn evening!

• With these complaints in mind, Jenny & I have had a big argument. Her basic point during it that because I am in China I have to do things the Chinese way even if no one seems happy about it, and the basic argument about it all being for a better future is nonsense. During the argument, she told me to ignore the thoughts of foreigners with similar complaints and I lost my temper and said something about not wanting to only listening to f***ing Chinese people. And as of this moment of typing, I assume I am really in for it.

• I asked a student if he thought he had a good imagination and he answered that he did. When I then asked him why, he responded that he could imagine himself being rich. I suppose his idea of a good imagination was to imagine good things. It was not the answer I was expecting and of course, I was again baffled by the Chinese mind while having my prejudice that Chinese aren't capable of imagination confirmed. I and most foreigners would think of a good imagination involving being very creative and original as well as being realistic and detailed. A good imagination looks at things in many different ways and is never trite. And so to live in the Chinese mind would seem to be like living in a ghetto.

• Is there a foreigner who is in a similar situation as me? If you reader have a Chinese wife and your child is in the Chinese education system, please email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com or andiskaulins@qq.com. I want to know your experiences and if you are happy in your situation.

• If I wasn't married to China, I would have left it a long time ago. So as it is now, I am stuck here. If my wife wasn't so narrow-minded like most Chinese about educating children, I wouldn't be so bitter about it. I have a hard time liking people who mistreat their children so.

British Election Results; Old Student; Bring Back the British Empire; The Horror of IELTS Prep Classes; Mistake; What to do about Tony's Education; Accident Scene; I Had Bread for Lunch

• I will never forget seeing two "esteemed" colleagues high-fiving it after Obama won the 2008 election. Never have I seen grown adults act so stupidly. So with this is mind, I will say that the UK election results on the surface look satisfying but are nothing to get over-exuberant about. Sure, the labourites were given a well-deserved kick in the ass, but I am not sure if the result will mean a truly satisfactory, which means total, break from the EU. We will just have to see.

• There I was on the train, minding my own business, when a student from many years ago said hello to me. He told me he had good memories of his time at our school and that he had gotten very good at English. I was taken aback because I was full of sour feelings about my time teaching English in China.

• Here's an idea. Britain was better as the ruler of an empire than it is as a province of an European empire, so maybe it should try to become an empire again. Thus, I advocate for the formation of a B.E.U., a British Empire Union, a Commonwealth with a hands-off administrative approach to its extended dominions. Countries, nations are welcome to join, but the BEU won't recruit them. Let's face it! A British Empire in continental Europe would be an massive improvement on the E.U.

• All these courses with the intent purpose of having Chinese students get good scores on the IELTS test are a scam. I haven't had much to do with them till recently, and for that I should thank God; but now that I have been doing them, my view of the Chinese has also become even more sour. I always knew that these courses would be hell to teach but having known so hasn't stopped the expected annoyance from stinging less. The sight of Chinese students is enough to make one want to hang myself. Never can two hours seem so dragging long. How it is that I haven't had the urge to slap and punch them all is beyond me. My guardian angel must be keeping me in check. I have to try to teach students who resent it when I interrupt the conversations they are having in class with other students. The students are turning their back on me. These scam classes are being perpetuated by the schools. Teachers like me are asked to do the impossible. Better off trying to teach Orangutans play piano.

• I made the mistake of taking a half completed blog entry with me from work to home and adding to it and then not bringing it back to work. So, this entry will be longer than the normal six bullet points.

• What to do about Tony's education? I got to change my wife's way of thinking about it otherwise he's fucked. She is tormenting him and depriving him of a childhood and in turn of depriving me of my sanity. Her thinking is Chinese Tiger Mother. Her reasoning as far as I can tell is that by working him so hard, he will have a better future. What would be better about this future I can't imagine, because I think it would still involve some children down the line getting deprived of their childhood as well; and though it may well result in him maybe getting a good job, he will still be living a life devoid of higher purpose: the only purpose being to get his child to get high marks and so on. And the Canadian school system is satanic as well, I have heard tell. Tony has to be home-schooled.

• I walked past an accident scene where the positions of the vehicles involved made it hard to figure out what had happened. The vehicles were not at an intersection, they were a long way from any. in fact. The road they were on was four lanes wide; two lanes going either way with a double solid yellow line down the middle. The vehicles were almost at a ninety degree angle to each other; with one vehicle sitting at a perpendicular angle to the lanes, stopped on the double yellow line; while the other vehicle was faced parallel to the lanes, but stopped so that it was on the wrong side of the double yellow line, looking like it was headed in the wrong direction. Passing the strange scene, I fantasized about jeering at the drivers and telling them what idiot drivers the Chinese were. I then saw the vehicle that was perpendicular to the road lanes make a u-turn, while the other vehicle got back on the proper side of the road and continued on its way; and was able to piece together what had happened. One of the drivers had been trying to make a u-turn, and being Chinese they did it in an inappropriate spot and without looking to see if there were any vehicles about. The other driver had been following, and being Chinese, he was impatient and instead of slowing down, he tried to make an illegal passing maneuver, crossing over the double yellow line and thus running into the u-turning vehicle. Both of these drivers deserved to be jeered at!!!

• Me: What did you have for lunch, Chinese person? CP: I had rice. Not very informative but all the locals answer in this annoying way. So this is what I answer when I am asked by Chinese people what I had for lunch: I had bread and beef and vegetables at McDonalds!

Sports cards and Game Cards: So far, so good; Christmas; No Christmas in China; Vieglas Smiltis, Well-Worn Path

• Tony asked me if I preferred Sports Cards or Game Cards. I knew he was referring to Sports Cards as the Hockey and Baseball Cards I collected growing up and those Pokemon cards that Kids seen to like now. I told him, of course, that I preferred sports cards. He then told me how most of his classmates were into the Game Cards and how he was but one of the few or the only who liked Sports Cards.

• Still no posting on WeChat. No one seems to have noticed. Whatever urges prompted my WeChat postings will have be directed to this blog.

• A whole gamut of emotions, from despair to elation, are what I feel in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I despair because I can't say that I have had a good Christmas since I was young. Many of my subsequent Christmases I felt very lonely because of teenage angst and then because I was very lonely. I never got in the habit of doing Christmas decorations. I have never had a season of Christmas party attending. This Christmas, I am hoping that I don't go to any. I would like to be invited to one just so I could refuse and tell the inviter that Tony has to go to school on the 25^th, it being a Wednesday, and so I can't do anything for Christmas because it would be without him which just won't do. But sadly, there will be no invites. But at least, I won't be attending a hotel dinner where you end up feeling like you were a victim of a squeeze-them-in-as-tightly-as-possible-and-extract-money-from-them racket. On the bright side as well, I hopefully won't be attending any Chinese Christmas parties which are all Santa Claus and no Christ. (I cross my fingers.) The best possible Christmas for me will be to stay home on the 25^th, treat it like a day off except that I have to phone my Mom and Brother in Canada, and I will read lots of literature about the Christ and the birth of Christ.

• It may well be that Christmas may not be celebrated by our school because the Chicom powers that be have decreed that the schools don't observe it. This will be fine with me. Chinese Christmas is a poor substitute for a real Christendom Christmas which aren't even celebrated in the West anymore.

• Ingrida, an aunt of mine, married to my father's half-brother, died on December 7^th. Her husband, my uncle, had died in early September. I have childhood memories of going to visit them in Minneapolis in the seventies and eighties. Ingrida was solid Latvian, a type that has gone extinct among my relations. The old Latvians are dying off and aren't being replaced by new ones. Some of like me never thought to embrace Latvian culture and identity till it was too late. Vieglas Smiltis

• I get to do a company class on Wednesday evenings. The interesting part about it is the drive to the company site. It takes about forty minutes and I go through parts of Wuxi that I hadn't been to in a while or just hadn't been to, and it makes me realize how routine and dull my life has become and how well-worn is the path I normally take every day.

Guardian Angel?; So Far, No Moments; Cross My Fingers; Mad I get; Lovely Thing for a Change; Three Accidents

• Since hearing Mother Angelica mention them in a podcast, I have occasionally wondered how my Guardian Angel affects my life. Sometimes, I think the GA is putting reminiscences in my mind of when I did things of which I should be ashamed or embarrassed. I have admit that in my late teens and early twenties, I had a feeling of being in a higher station than really I deserved to be; and so quit jobs because I felt they weren't good enough for me. A couple of those occasions came back to me recently, seemingly out of the blue.

• Since American Thanksgiving, I have not posted on WeChat moments. I am planning to start posting again at the end of Lent. So, I am looking at a good three months of WeChat silence. And the thing is, I don't think anyone who gets my moments posting will notice, which is most likely a good thing.

• So far, there has been no mention of our school having a Christmas party this year. I cross my fingers and hope that this will be the case. I am thinking my hope will be realized because the school would have already planned one if they were because we already know when and where the school will be having its Chinese New Year slash Spring Festival dinner.

• Things I shouldn't get mad about, after all these years I have spend in China, but still do: First, I was making a left turn and waiting for a car, coming from my left, to pass by so I could in fact make it when its driver made a right turn before me without making a turn signal. Second, I was trying to get off the train but was blocked by this old man with child trying to board. The signs and announcements all tell the locals to let the people off first before boarding.

• I saw a lovely thing for a change. A man on a wheelchair got on the subway. A bit later, I saw a little girl sit on his lap. I assume the girl was his daughter. I was a nice sight. I then thought I saw a couple, sitting opposite me, praying which would have been better if that is what they were in fact doing.

• I passed three accident scenes while driving Tony to school in the morning. First, there were two cars that had obviously collided because of improper lane changing. Second, I saw that an SUV had hit an e-bike. Who was at fault was hard to say. The e-biker could have been ignoring a traffic signal; the driver could have made a right turn without looking. Finally, I saw a car ran straight into the end of a traffic fence slash barrier. As I have blogged before, the authorities put what is basically fencing on the center lines of roads to get drivers to stick to their side of the road. But there have to be gaps in the fences so people can make turn. It was at one of these gaps that I saw the collision aftermath. The driver was female. This scene was one when you really had to wonder what the woman had been doing. She drove straight into the barrier end like she didn't see it was there. She was making a left turn. If she hit the fence end because she was inattentive seemed hard to believe. I speculate that another car must have been involved that had forced her to hit the fence end. Either the car was driving very quickly on the road already or another car making a left turn had the same time tried to overtake her so that she got startled and hit the fence end before she knew it.

Old Women Annoying Me; Serotonin Book; Tony's Christmas Wish; Running out the Clock; No Christ in Chinese Christmas, Christmas will be on a Wednesday

• I like to sit at back of bus which I take to work. There are four seats there in that back row, and I often have them all to my self. However, one day these three women had to sit by me. They nattered like hens so that I couldn't concentrate enough to enjoyably read. I got off the bus in a bad mood and then lost my temper at a old woman who cut in front of line of me at the bakery I always go to. I call her a f***ing bitch three times loudly. Everyone in the bakery stared and me, and I believe they understood the foulness of my language, but the old woman I was screaming at looked at me blankly. I couldn't tell if she was deaf or was incredibly inscrutable.

• Finished reading Serotonin, a novel by Michel Houellebecq . I sympathized with the novel's main character's alienation from the society; however, I envied his sex life and financial success. I felt like a real loser after I finished the novel.

• Tony doesn't know what he wants for this Christmas. I asked him one early morning in early December, and he quickly answered that he didn't know. He then came back to me later that day, and told me that he still couldn't think of what he wanted. What does tell me? Either he has everything he wants, or the only things he could possibly want are to be had on a computer or his Iphone.

• I had a few classes where I was really, really just trying to run out the clock. I had this two hour class where I was to prep these high school age students for the speaking portion of the IELTS test. Two students showed up. One of them, a male, didn't have the English ability to understand anything I was saying. The other, a female, had spend a year in an American high school and so I had to wonder what was the point of having her in the class. They both were more interested in their smartphones. The last ten minutes of the class seemed an eternity to get through and when I finished, I quickly stood up and gave them a goodbye with I hope I never see you again tone. I then had another class with young kids who didn't want to be there. Despite telling them constantly that they have to answer with more than just a one word answer, they would always answer yes or no and mumble the rest of the answer when I asked for more. Trying to explain a phrase to them, I saw that none of them were paying attention. The last twenty minutes of this class was an eternity. I couldn't run the clock out fast enough.

• No point in celebrating Christmas in China. It is Christmas without Christ. The Christmas parties, I have had to go to here in the past, are nothing better than a cake and cookie party for kids accompanied by clueless parents. I have this nightmare that our school will have a Christmas party this year and that they will ask me to be Santa Claus. Thinking about the nightmare, I wonder if I would have the gumption to tell those asking me to fuck off.

• Christmas is on a Wednesday this year. I don't think I will have any luck asking Jenny to let Tony stay home that day. Consequently, I won't be doing anything for Christmas. If it means not going to a school Christmas party, that won't be such a bad thing. I will be happy to have the 25^th off. I will observe the religious aspects of the holiday with the many prayer apps and prayer books for which I have access.

Stop Posting on WeChat!; Tony Born on Black Ribbon Day; Tony and Madden Football; American Thanksgiving; Being Unpopular in China

• I tell myself to stop posting on WeChat, but I can't help myself. I just love being silly and posting absurd things on it. I try not to show the world my life; just my absurd notions of what I think is humorous. In previous years, I have made a habit of trying to ignore social media as much as I can during Lent, but this year, I am thinking of getting off starting at Advent.

• My son Tony was born on August 23 which is a dark date for Latvians. It was the date on which the infamous Nazi – Soviet treaty was signed. One of the secret protocols of the treaty was the absorption of the Baltic states by the Soviets. What can I say about this unfortunate coincidence? Well, Tony's birth represents a new hope.

• It rained heavily in Wuxi on November 27^th. Hadn't rained so heavily in the longest time. My plan to go home late to avoid Jenny's tigermothering of Tony was thwarted.

• Tony wants to play the Madden computer football game. He is becoming North Americanized. He knows about the NCAA. I call it the NC, double A. He prefers to call it the N,C,A,A, even rejecting my manner of saying it.

• Somewhere in Wuxi, American Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Overeating day is being observed. I treat it as the start of the Christmas shopping season. This year, I may even use the day to mark the start of my not posting anything on WeChat moments. But then, maybe I won't. I report to you rare reader either way.

• There's one thing worse than being unpopular with the locals in China and that is being popular with them. If you can keep to yourself in China, you don't get invited to many Chinese social gatherings which are a bore. If you are the only foreigner at these affairs, it can feel like a prison sentence. Never does one feel so lonely as when one is with dull company. (Of course, it might be that I have managed to get the locals to ignore me.)

Stupid E-Bikers; Zapruder Film on WeChat; My Own World; The Salvation Army; Winnipeg Blue Bombers Win the Grey Cup; Walking Down the Street Looking at a Laptop

• Friday morning, I drove Jenny to downtown Wuxi. At this huge intersection, you had to wonder if the e-bikers were short-sighted or stupid or both. On a green go straight ahead light, I was going straight ahead and saw an e-biker coming from my left, who I figured was trying to cross the intersection diagonally and thus cut in front of me. This sight made me feel sadistic, and it appeared I gave the rider the scare of her life as I honked the horn and made her come to a sudden stop. As I passed her, coming as close as I could to almost brushing her, I swore, hopefully loud enough, through the open driver side window, for her to hear f***! Continuing on through the intersection, I saw another two e-bikers who were also ignoring traffic signals and trying to beat oncoming traffic. Jenny swore at them.

• I really thought I had gone too far when I had posted the crucial fifteen seconds of the Zapruder film on my WeChat Moments. I was hoping that someone would say I was a sicko for posting the images. Instead, I brought out a couple tin-foil hatted foreigners who said they didn't believe the official account of the assassination. For what it's worth, I was a JFK assassination buff when I was younger. I bought many books about it and I was even able to visit Dealey Plaza when the assassination occurred. I didn't believe the official account either till I actually read a book that said Oswald did it. That book made the official account seem reasonable and ultimately the truth. Also, going to Dealey Plaza, site of the assassination, I was struck by how small it the place was compared to how I imagined it. Oswald had an easy shot and was able to kill the president despite actually shooting very erratically as any person trying to kill a president would similarly do.

• "Andis you are in your own world!" says my wife Jenny. When we argue, she says this in a mocking tone to which I respond that her way of being hard on our son Tony makes me want to retreat into my own world. Her world of scowl garners no desire to join from me, as well as no sympathy. But to be fair to her, I am a loner. It was my affliction growing up, but in the world that is now, it is a necessity. The urge to belong can make people go crazy or do crazy things like my wife.

• I was very disappointed in Chick-fil-A when I heard they had decided to not give money to the Salvation Army. (For what conceivable reason? I shudder to learn the details.) I had made a point of going to to Chick-fil-A when I was in the US because they seemed like a restaurant worth supporting. I am eternally grateful to the Salvation Army because of the comfort they provided our family during the death of my father. And it was a lady from the Salvation Army who said a prayer at my funeral – things that wouldn't have been done for us by fucking social justice warriors!

• The Winnipeg Blue Bombers won the Grey Cup this week. I was happy because Tony & I had attended one of their games this year and I have a soft spot in my heart for them. I wasn't aware that the Blue Bombers had gone 29 years without winning the Cup. It was so long ago that I was living in Winnipeg at the time it happened. After that 1990 game, a friend and I went to Portage Avenue to watch the celebrations. I remember seeing some people walk off with a newspaper dispensing machine, and this repetitive process of people climbing on top of some bus stop shelter only to shooed down by a policeman and then a few minutes later seeing some other people getting the same idea until they got shooed down. I also remember being happy in 1982 when the Argos ended a 31 year stretch of not winning the Cup, and even more happy in 1983 when the Bombers ended a 21 year drought. The Bombers won three Grey Cups in the 80s and so I figured, for 29 years, that their drought was over. It was only after this game that I realized that it had gotten worse. Which goes to show you how old I am.

• It is not an unusual sight to see someone walking down the street looking at their phone. I thought it was unusual when I saw a guy walking down the street while looking at his laptop.

Elbowed; Frustration; Don't Go to Hong Kong; Tony and a Baseball App; Trump a Traitor; Can't Listen to So Many Podcasts

• Sitting on the bus one evening, this older local woman annoyed me when she bumped me as she went to find a seat behind where I was seated. And then as she got off the bus, she stunned me with an elbow to the head. I don't think and don't even suspect that she did it on purpose. It just seemed that she was off-kiltered in her walking. (Or it just could be that it is easier to get away with bumping into people than it would be in the country where I grew up?)

• It is bloody hard to get these kids I am teaching to answer a question with more than one word. It is also hard to get these students to do anything but copy what I or some other student said. There was a lesson plan where a coin was tossed. I review the exercise with the students in subsequent classes. But it is so hard to get the students to call head or tails before I toss a coin. And when they do call it, they will always call "heads." Which shows to me that they still don't get it.

• A few students have told me that Hong Kong is not a good place to go to these days.

• Tony is obsessed with some baseball game app on my phone where he can play through a whole season with a particular team. The particular team he choose to be is the Houston Astros. At the time of my typing this, Tony told me that they had just beaten the Minnesota Twins 21-14 in the wildcard game. Said I: that is a football game score! Tony's Astros will play the New York Yankees in a divisional series.

• In an SPC, a student was telling me that he had heard that Trump had committed treason. I went on for about five minutes about what nonsense that was. Trump, I told him, was trying to deal with a mess of treason and was now the victim of an attempted coup because of it. (  I have to stop get upset about it. The world is fucked. The elites are crazy. Not much Trump can do about it.)

• I gave up on listening to so many podcasts. For one thing, there are too many. For another thing, I know what they are going to say. And with so much choice, what is the point of listening to one podcast episode religiously?

Globalists; Multiculturalism; Go Bombers Go!; Alzheimer's and Tiger-Mothering; A Game of Catch; Minnesota Twins Program

• I had a conversation class with a student who had been to Germany, France and Italy where he was looking at factories. The folks he was talking to were, he told me, were all globalists. They hated Trump, wished Brexit didn't happened, and thought that huge trade zones were a great way to mix cultures. To the student, I had to explain the mindset of the people who were voting for Trump and Brexit. The price of cheap stuff I said was the destruction of communities. The people running these global businesses were basically screwing their own people, the people of their communities.

• Were some cultures better than others? I asked the students I had in a class about multiculturalism. They said no but then I talked about cultures where sinners were thrown to their deaths, and I had them hemming and hawing.

• The Winnipeg Cheese Blintzes will play the Hamilton Tater Tots in Sunday's Gravy Cup Final for the Championship of the Canadian Foodball League.

• Alzheimer's is a terrible disease because it takes away a person's memories. Chinese tiger-mothering is a terrible practice because it doesn't give a child a chance to have a memorable childhood. People are nothing if they don't have memories.

• On Sunday, November 17^th, Tony and I played catch, with baseball and gloves, at the Hui Shan Sports Center. We found a spot where there were few people, the lighting was good and there was a wall behind Tony so he didn't spend most of his time running after balls he couldn't catch because of my uncoordinated throws or his uncoordination. I am glad to say that he showed improvement and was catching the faster balls I was throwing directly at him. I was even gladder at just being able to do a father-son thing.

• Tony still intently studies the program we got at the Minnesota Twins game in August.

Billy Bob Thornton on Acting School; The Worst Ideas; Is the Universe Infrastructure?; Longer Walk Home; My Son Tony's Priorities; Impeachment

• I am making my way, slowly, through the Norm MacDonald live series that was broadcast on Youtube before he got a Netflix series. The fourth episode featured guest Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton made an observation about Acting Schools, saying he thought that they were useless and that he had never seen a bad actor turned into a good actor by going to one. This observation stuck with me and makes me wonder what I am doing. Has anyone's English ever been improved by going to an English school? If someone asked me this question directly, I would shudder.

• Multiculturalism is one of the worst ideas that man has ever had. Communism being the worst. The Chicoms like to proclaim that there are 57 nationalities being tolerated and living happily in the PRC. The truth is the Han nationality form an overwhelming majority of the PRC population. The only way there can be the other 56 is that most of them get massacred, ground to a powder so that only a few are there to add spice to the mix.

• Could it be the enormous universe is the infrastructure needed so humans can survive in their puddle in the outskirts of an insignificant galaxy?

• Thursday night, I got off the Subway a stop earlier so I could have a longer walk home. And then when I got near Stately Kaulins Manor, I found a park bench to sit at for fifteen minutes.

• The first thing my son Tony did when his mother finally finished tiger-mothering him was go on the computer and check out the NBA scores. That's my boy!!

• I've been tempted but mostly I have chosen to ignore the impeachment proceedings that are taking place. All I will say is that they are moronic and are a new low for the Democrat party. But then maybe it is all a circus on the part of the ruling class to stop us from watching what is really going on, which is that they don't give a tinker's tuss for the people they are supposed to care about.

Set Me Off; Traffic Signals Fail; Prayer Time; God and Evolution; Tiger-Mothering Nightmare; Making an SUV Yield

• Sometimes, I tell myself before I drive to Tony to school is to be calm. Expect the idiots and don't get upset by their bad driving! I say over and over again.. But it is easier said than done. Sometimes, you get idiots that are so aggressive in traffic that you can't be magnanimous. Recently, I saw a guy who was so aggressive in cutting in that I made a point of blocking him, even drifting into another lane to do so. Little people, are some of these Chinamen in cars. If they tried to cut in like that when walking when they should justly be elbowed in the face.

• Second time in a week, the traffic signals stop working as I come to an intersection. I was in front of the line so I just tried to get through before chaos ensued. I succeeded but wonder if the traffic camera caught me.

• After I drop off Tony, I drive back to Stately Kaulins Manor and park the Citroen in our assigned parking spot. I turn off the ignition and bring out my phone and I open a prayer app on my phone and pray. Sometimes, I have this sweet feeling of silence and calmness. It can be the best moment of my day.

• I listened to a debate about God and Evolution between the atheist Dawkins and John Lennox. Two observations: 1)The debate meandered. 2)Neither knocked out the other. If I was open-mined about the issues – I wasn't, I was cheering for Lennox – I would say that the God question is an open question still. Lennox I found more likable. Dawkins was no help on how to live our lives with a deity. What did Dawkins mean by "live your life to the fullest'?

• I arrived home at 8:30 PM on a Wednesday evening. The door was locked, so I knocked. My wife Jenny opened the door with a scowl on her face. She said nothing to me and and in a huffy manner, went back to Tony's room. My biggest evening fear had been realized: Jenny was tiger-mothering Tony about his schoolwork. I took a brief look in the room and Tony had tears in his eyes. Jenny eventually stopped tutoring him at 11:00 PM. Is it just me or is this nuts? I got a tongue-lashing the next morning with Jenny telling me that my attitude was bad and this was affecting Tony. Could it be that she is giving both Tony & me a bad attitude? I don't know what I can do about Tony's attitude to school. I worry about his education but couldn't give a damn about his schooling. And it was Tony who posed the following question to me: "China is boring. Why did you move here?" This thought was original to Tony. At the time he said it, I counted it as a kid saying the darnedest thing; now, I look at it in a different light. He was being very clear-eyed and observant. The problem as I see it is Jenny's narrow mindset. To be fair, it is a result of her experiencing poverty that I never had to deal with. But it is a very materialist mindset and based on a flawed theory of education. (Are there any other expat fathers with Chinese mothers and their children stuck in the mainland China schooling system? Please, please email me.)

• It is perilous to be a pedestrian in mainland China. Drivers won't slow down for them and will even swerve to avoid slowing down for them. Drivers will even use the mass and size of their vehicles to force pedestrians to yield right of way to them. I witnessed this latter practice on a Thursday morning. The situation: Green pedestrian light. I proceeded. Ahead of me was a couple of locals. A black SUV making a left turn pulls in front of the couple. They stop. I don't. I pass the couple and make the SUV yield to me. I was glad I did. But I wonder why the local pedestrians put up with such rude behavior on the part of drivers.

Don Cherry, Broke, Jeffrey Epstein, Despair, No Community, No Friends

• Don Cherry is a great Canadian. I supported what he said about immigrants and poppies. Being a second generation immigrant, I made a point of wearing one. And even if you could argue that he said was wrong, he still didn't deserve to get the sack. One of my great life memories was being able to get Don Cherry's autograph. He was at a Brandon Wheat King game. My brother Ron & I walked up to him and he graciously signed our program: to Andis and Ron from Don Cherry and Blue. (Blue was his dog.) For that, he will always have a place in my heart. To those who are offended by what he said: get a hold of yourself. You are destroying in the name of tolerance.

• If I return to Canada, I will be basically broke. So, be it.

• SPC Topic: Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself?

• When on the subject of Tony's education, I fall into despair. My wife Jenny and I have irreconcilable differences. She wants to go whole hog Chinese, tiger mother, torture kids so they don't have any time to themselves. I want Tony to go to school during the day, learn what he has to learn so he can write and be numerite, and have time on weekends and the evenings for the other aspects of life.

• No community in China for me. There would be the Wuxi Expat Community but it is not a real community in that it doesn't provide for the social and spirtiual needs of Expats. Being the vagabound, gypsy, fly on the wall that I have been, I have lived less a life than I have wanted. I spend my time, sitting with my head in my hands, regretting, how Tony isn't having the childhood I had.

• No friends either. Which must mean that I am a very unlikable guy. But, it can also mean that I only seem to meet unlikable people. I could leave it at that, but there are so many other reasons for my loneliness: my moving around a lot, my now living in what is essentially the boonies of Wuxi, my aloofness, my purposely being aloof, the decisions I made in my life that proved to be isolating like marrying my wife and choosing to be an English teacher, my living among species of humans different from myself, the fact that I had trouble making friends when I was younger and have never feel comfortable around people as a result, my choosing it as the cross I have to bear, and my laziness.

Tony Wants to Go to Houston and Colorado; Whingeing Student; Berlin Wall Fall was a Fiendish German Trick; Being Eye-Raped by the Locals; Why AKIC Is Like Don Rickles & John the Baptist; Assholes Just

• How long does it take to get Houston? Asked Tony. I told him that we could drive there in a day from Brandon. He thought about it and said that he wanted to take the plane there. He has got his heart set on seeing the Rockets, Astros and Texans. He then asked me how long it took to get to Colorado. He likes the Houston teams because of Yao Ming. He wants to go to Colorado because of South Park.

• I had a one-on-one class with a student named Tim. He is a feminine sort, of high school age, but not going to school, just getting ready to take tests so he could attend school in the USA, or something to that effect -- that was what I was able to get out of him. In the class, we worked through discussion questions from part three of the speaking portion of the IELTS test. The kid could talk when I asked him a question, but he spoke in such an indirect way that I had to ask him after he answered the question: so do you agree or disagree with the propostion put forth in the question? We were to have a second class, two days later and he came to school but when I came to take him to class, he made a face and said he had a fever and couldn't have the class. I felt immediatlely that he was whingeing and this suspicion was confirmed because a colleague told me that he saw the boy, sitting in the library, during our scheduled class time acting like he was good as new. If the kid doesn't want anything to do with me, well, that just fine. For there is only one thing worse than being rejected by these sort of people and that would be being able to appeal to them. And it is nice to get paid for two hours of non-work.

• November 9^th was the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I posted something about it on WeChat. I didn't, as maybe my rare readers would have expected, make a stab at the Chicoms and Ugly Stone-Faced Fuck. I instead made a stab at the Germans and stated that maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall was a fiendish German trick that was part of their plot, through the EU, to make a third attempt to destroy/conquer Europe. The Berlin Wall fall seemed a glorious thing at the time it happened. But as the years have gone by since that time, I have observed events and trends that made me question if in fact, the West and civilization had won the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall seems to have lead to Justin Trudeau, Greta Thurnberg, Barack Obama, Brexit being blocked, EU trying to get more power, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, that occaisional cortex congresswoman, the popularity of Bernie Sanders, woke corporations, Climate Change hysteria, Gay Marriage, LBGQT plus, men competing in women's sports, the promotion of diversity, a belief that there is such a thing as color blind racism, men going into women's bathrooms, reverse intolerance, and a stupid belief in government cheese. So you can see that sensible and normal people can't help but be discouraged by the way events have proceeded since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The question is who and what is to blame? Many conservatives spiked the ball after the Berlin Wall and let their guard down. Many really believed that history had ended. Many wanted to keep fighting the Cold War and ignored the new form Marxism had taken. There was a glorying of individualism. There was the further decline of Christian belief. There was a tolerance for libertinism. There was an ignorance of the fact that many people in the world have ideas not at all in conjunction with Western values. So, it seems the ending of one big stupidity resulted in the emergence of many other stupidities. Or maybe it is just that the world will always be insane.

• In a WeChat group, a laowai complained about being stared at, eye-raped as he put, while sitting on the Metro. It was a complaint that I didn't have and I had to wonder why. Maybe, I didn't notice anymore. Maybe, this was because I don't ride the metro as often as I used to, instead taking the bus where I always sit at the very back. Maybe, I was occupied with reading something on my Ipad or Iphone while on the Metro. Maybe, I am in "my own world," as many have told me, as I go about the world. Maybe, I have blended in, for there have been times when I seen people look at me and do a "Oh, he's a laowei!" double-take. Generally, it seems that the locals ignore me. So the laowai's complaint seemed strange. [I tried to advise the complaintant to read a page-turning book. I should have said riveting because it didn't read right later, I realized.]

• What do I say that my role models are Don Rickles and John the Baptist? On WeChat, I do one of two things, I take trollish digs at others or post reactionary memes and quotes.

• Feminsits are females who think women can be assholes just like men.

Ladies Nights?; Role Models; Traffic Signals Going Out; Man Scares Tony; Highlight of My Day; One More Thang

• With this transgender stuff going with would-be women competing in female athletics, one has to wonder what will happen to Ladies nights at bars. Will the institution have to be scrapped to prevent men from pretending they are women to get drink discounts? Funny, how I haven't come upon any news stories about this.

• My role models are Don Rickles and John the Baptist. Seriously!

• Every once in a while, traffic lights stop working at intersections in the area of Stately Kaulins Manor. What this says about the state of infrastructure here, I have no clue. Suffice to say that it is Chinese in its quality. Now when the traffic signals stop working, the traffic gets massively snarled. It gets all stalled out because none of the local drivers know about four-way stop or uncontrolled intersection procedures. The traffic can only start proceeding again with the arrival of the authorities bearing temporary traffic lights. One morning coming from Tony's school, I swear I came upon an intersection just as the traffic signals failed. I was making a left turn and got through, but it was by the skin of my teeth. Traffic was quickly getting snarled as traffic came from four directions simultaneously.

• My son Tony took the bus home from school on a recent Thursday and he told me that he saw a man that scared him. I immediately thought of perverts or people trying to kidnap him, but when he provided more details he told he saw a man who looked grotesque with his face having been all burnt. I told him to felt sorry for the guy and not to be visibly wierded by the man's appearance.

• I take the 25 bus to school and when I get off, I have a ten minute walk to get to my school. The walk is actually one of the highlights of my day because I walk down a narrow street shaded with trees and bustling with Chinese street life. On a recent walk, I saw a street vendor selling pancakes that my son Tony would have loved and then down the street, I saw a man dressed as monk reading palms.

• One more thing. I like to make six points for each blog entry and now, I impatiently want to publish this entry and get on with what checking off my work day to do list which includes reading, praying the rosary, studying Latvian and Chinese, my Canada plan, doing some blog work, downloading podcasts and torrent files, and preparing for my classes. So in telling my two readers this, I have done my one more thang!

Similar Traffic Complaints; Shanghai More Western Than Hong Kong?; Just Assholes; 25 Bus; Praying the Rosary; No Jacket

• Bill Burr has similar complaints about L.A. Traffic that I have about Wuxi traffic. Go figure. And it was a similar complaint to mine about selfish assholes sticking the ass of their car into the other lane.

• I was listening to the Dennis Miller Option Podcast. H announced that he had visited Shanghai and he said it looked like Blade Runner at night. His co-host who had visited Hong Kong and Shanghai made a comment that Shanghai seemed more western than Hong Kong. I don't know what the hell he was talking about. That wasn't at all my impression. I thought Hong Kong had a western feel to it. Just goes to show you that many casual observations are just that: casual and not at all serious.

• Rich people are just assholes with stuff; poor people are just assholes without stuff. [These are the opening lines of a free verse poem I am doing entitled "Just Assholes"]

• I take the 25 bus to school because it is cheaper than taking the train and it gives me lots of time to read and pray. Currently, the bus goes through a bunch of construction. An elevated road is being built on a road that passes downtown Yanqiao and takes one to downtown Tianyi (which is nowhere near Tianyi School). I will add that it is my habit to sit at the very back of the bus. I don't like the locals standing behind me. I also don't like sitting among them.

• I pray the Rosary everyday with the help of Iphone Apps. Sometimes, I do the prayer twice a day and read the prayers in French or Spanish. What effect does it have on me? Hard to say. It is meditation so it does have a calming effect up to a point. I still have a hard time keeping calm when I have been unexpectedly provoked.

• Is is early November in Wuxi, and I still go outdoors without a jacket, still just wearing a short sleeve shirt.

Ten Minute Wait?; Head-On Collision; Busy Streets and Ghost Towns, New Red Lion Location; Rome and Moronland; Stone-Faced Who?

• My wife Jenny was telling me that our trip to the local motor vehicle branch, to pick up stickers to put on our windshield to show that we were insured, would only take ten minutes. Turned out when we went to the place, there were 103 people ahead of her waiting to be served. While she waited in the branch, I sat in the car. We were there for over an hour and a half. Turned out that people getting these stickers were in the same queue as people paying traffic fines. At least, I wasn't experiencing this waiting at a tourist place like say, Shanghai Disneyland. There it would have been more annoying because I was paying for it.
• Driving back from having dropped off Tony at school, I took my longer-distance but saving-time route. I was driving down this wide six lane road with light traffic, when I passed an accident scene. It looked like these two cars had had a head-on collision. I say "looked like" because the accident scene was in a place where a head-on collision just didn't make any sense. The half of the road we were on was a one way for a long distance without any places to make turns. The nearest intersection was about a kilometer away. I was thinking that maybe one of the cars had spun but from a quick look at the scene, one could see that it couldn't have happened. These cars were grill against grill and there were no skid marks. So, I had to conclude that one of the cars had driven been driving the wrong way. The nearest intersection where the wrong-way car could have turned was big and wide enough that one distracted or short-eyed driver could have turned into the wrong lanes. The next question was about the actual collision. Even if the car was going the wrong way, the vehicle going the proper way should have seen the car coming. The road was long and wide enough without anything to block one's view. (Of course, the wrong way car could have been blinded by the rising sun.) The vehicles must have slowed down enough before the collision because they weren't totaled if they had been going at 50 or 80 km/h. Anyway, it was very strange. But this was not the first time, I had passed an accident scene where it just didn't make any sense what had happened given the position of the vehicles.
• Walking around my area one evening, because I couldn't put up with Jenny tiger-mothering my son Tony, I passed busy thriving streets as well as ghost-like places where the buildings had been built but had not yet seemed to have found tennants to occupy them. There was the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza which seemed to be thriving. Then there was the area around the Times Square Plaza, which is across the street from Wanda, which was full of interesting looking but unoccupied retail units. As well there was the fenced-off Times Square extension behind the main Times Square, that seemed foolish to have been built when it was being built given that the place was then losing business to Wanda.
• The Red Lion which used to be the Blue Bar which used to be the True Blue Bar has re-opened in its third location since 2004. I know this via WeChat. Whether I will actually go to the new location remains to be seen. I have heard the place has further jacked up its already notoriously high prices. Also, the logistics of me going there with someone else, say Tony, is maybe something I won't be able to pull off. Sill, never say never. (When the Red Lion reopened, someone put a Wechat Moment asking if anyone knew where he was. Because he said something about an old place reopening, I guessed Ronnies. I don't know if the guy would have gotten the joke. (Ronnie's used to be the Blue Bar's competition and was the first real expat bar in Wuxi.))
• Filler thought (because I want to sent this entry off and nothing else is happening in AKIC that can be blogged about): They say that when one's is in Rome, one should do as the Romans do. But one should one do if one is stuck in Moronland?
• Another filler thought: I shall refer to someone famous these days as Stone-Faced Fuck. Who do you think am I talking about? Email me with your guess.

Exposnationals Win the World Series; Local Road Rage; Bill Burr Podcast; I Quickly Stop Listening to Some Podcast Episodes; Long-Term Planning

• Despite what you may have heard in the news, it was the Montreal/Washington Exposnationals who won the 2019 World Series. My son Tony won't be happy about the result. Because of the Houston Rockets, he chooses the Houston teams as his favorites in the other major sports. So, though the old Expos won, it would have been better for me if Tony was cheering for them.

• It looked like I saw someone other than me having road rage. I was returning from having dropped off Tony at his school, when I saw a car make a wide right turn without looking. The turn was so wide that the car managed to take up more than one lane. So, a nearby car that had swerved into the left lane to to avoid the turning car still had to put on the brakes. Down the road a ways, the car that had made the wide right turn was making a left turn. The car that had been cut off was stopped besides the now left-turning car. The driver who had been cut off had her window rolled down and seemed to be giving the other diver the business. Passing that scene, I was feeling impressed by what I had seen till my car nearly got hit by a car that had quickly swerved into my lane. So, I got full of rage, passed the car, blared my horn at its driver for a good five seconds while doing so, and then made a swerving maneuver in his lane. Chinese drivers are reactive and never think to slow down when they see an obstacle. As I keep saying, Chinaman travels around without consideration for others. Everybody just has to avoid him. And fluck you if you protest.

• I have so many podcasts to listen to these days. I just listened to the Bill Burr podcast in which he talked about the Montreal/Washington Exposnationals winning the World Series and how f***ing strange it was that every game of the series was won by the visiting team. I suppose I will listen to the Bookworm Room podcast next. Burr also made comments and jokes about how the athletes were overdoing the celebrating and even celebrating insignificant things like three yard gains. Burr was thinking that maybe he was just being an old man, and I had to disagree. There is something wrong with the ways the younger ones are acting these days. And Burr also mentioned how it was that the Nats used to be the Expos and how for a few Expos fans, the 2019 World Series was bittersweet. And a lot of the Nats fans are deep-state Trump-hating Trump-sabotaging bureaucrats.

• I got to do things that are essential and completely enjoyable. So there are some things that I should stop doing like posting on WeChat and following what is happening the WeChat groups of which I am a member. [There I was just trying to not end a sentence with a preposition.]

• Because I have so many podcasts to listen to, I will quickly stop listening to a podcast if I quickly see what the point, the takeaway, of it is and if I don't need to be familiar with the particulars of some subject. Case in point, there was a podcast about the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein. I got the point that the autopsy was suspicious and decided I didn't need to listen to the expert telling me why.

• I can't help but feel that I am squandering time on my looking into and my preparing for a move to Canada in 2020. I have to find a job and sources of income. I do have the luxury of having time to plan it out, but it is a overwhelming thing to think about. What am I going to do when I take Tony to Canada?

Joe Biden Denied Communion; What Happens When An Intersection Has No Left Turn Signals; Tony's Current Sports Interests; Halloween; Canada; What It Is Like to Pick Up Tony from His School

• I was ecstatic to hear that Joe Biden was denied communion. It was good to hear that some Catholic priest somewhere had balls. The only defense I have heard of Biden is that his views on abortion weren't known. But they weren't known because he was being a politician. This is no excuse for not expressing Catholic teaching on such an important matter. Again, great to see that a politician gets punished for trying to have it both ways. One wonders what the consequences of this will be. Will Biden go to the Pope and ask for an apology? Will Biden, the so-called Catholic, change his ways? Will the story be ignored by the left-wing media? Will the priest be removed from his position? Will something big come from it? On the last question, one can only pray.

• I swear if the Chinese aren't herded or forced to be civilized, they won't. A case in point is what happens at controlled intersections that don't have signals for left turns. Left-turning cars driven by locals will immediately try to turn left as soon as the signal turns green. Sometimes this is not an imprudent maneuver because they can get through the intersection without impeding the progress of oncoming traffic. But I have seen local drivers make left turns even when prudence would dictate that the oncoming traffic is coming on too fast. So, I have often seen the oncoming cars either have to come to a quick stops or swerve around the left-turning cars; with the result being near collisions and unnecessary traffic jams. One morning, I was driving Tony to school and trying to get through an intersection when an oncoming car tried to make a left turn in front of me. I forced the car to come to stop as I had no choice but to swerve around him. I then made a point of slowly going around the left-turning car to impede its progress and hopefully teach the driver a lesson about not making left turns when traffic is oncoming. But I could see from the driver's frantically turning his steering wheel that the realization of his doing anything imprudent had not crossed his mind. A chinaman truly doesn't take into account others when trying to make his way about the world.

• Tony follows all the leagues it seems. That is, the NHL, the NBA, the NFL, MLB and the CFL. He has been asking me to find video of the Houston Rocket Akeem when he played in the NCAA.

• I won't be doing anything Halloweeny this year for which I'm happy. The reason? Chinese lameness. However, Tony told me that he wished he could trick-or-treat. That saddens me. I think he will be too old to do this by the time I get him out to Canada. What I have done for him is download some slasher horror movies that he requested from the Halloween and Friday the 13^th series.

• I am thinking of going back to Canada. I've been in China since 2004 and I am getting bored of it. And I don't want Tony to spend his whole childhood in the PRC. For as he told me, China is boring. And as he asked me, why did I move here?

• Sitting in the car Monday afternoon by Tony's school, I thought of something about which to blog: what it is like when I go pick up Tony from his school. Frequently, I have blogged about the bad drivers I encounter in the mornings when I take Tony to his school, but I know I have had little to say about Monday afternoons when I pick up Tony. Everything one does when one has to go out in China is fraught with anxiety. And usually it's because there are far too many people and most of them, given the chance, will do something stupid and selfish that impacts on others. It is because of this that I try to arrive at Tony's school at least an hour before he finishes his classes and comes to the school gate to meet me. I go early to ensure I get a decent parking spot before they are all taken. And when I park on the road, I parked at an angle to the curb because if you parallel park, there is a good chance that some late-coming driver will double park and block you. (I had this happen once when I parked near a school. I came out to see that I was blocked by a double parker who didn't come out for thirty minutes. And when she did, I swore at her and she had this strange look on her face like she couldn't believe that someone would actually get mad at her for double parking. This happens to a lot to other drivers in China which is why most locals angle park their cars when coming to pick up their children. What a low-trust society, China has for this to be happening.) And when I sit in the car, I worry when I see cars park near me. (Once, a car angle parked next to me but left so much space between us that other drivers thought they could park in between, but not enough that they could actually do so.) Other sensations are hearing someone speaking on the loud-speaker at the school's sport field and thinking this what it must have sounded like during the cultural revolution.

Sandwich Maker; Food porn, Gun Porn; Animal Cruelty; Friends with Chinese?; American Foreign Policy; Bleak House

• My wife Jenny bought a sandwich maker slash waffle maker. I used it on the first morning after its purchase to make Tony a ham and cheese sandwich for his breakfast. He enjoyed it.

• On WeChat moments, I don't like to post pictures of my life. I prefer to post memes, pictures of food, interesting gifs and pictures of guns. I should label them ____ porn. For example, food porn and gun porn.

• I posted a photo of it on my AKIC photo blog of what I thought was an act of animal cruelty. I was walking around the local shopping plaza when I saw that someone had put a fairly big dog in a cage that was meant for small puppies or kittens. The dog was yelping in protest against its tight confinement. Its yelping could be heard quite a distance away. I have to wonder what the story behind this was. Were the people who put the dog in the small cage prohibited from keeping it on the leash? Was it a merely temporary measure? Whatever the cause, the people who did should have been ashamed of themselves. [In China, no one is ashamed of themselves unless they lose face. That is, they can happily go on doing a selfish thing and only feel bad if it is pointed out to them. Or in other words, you have to wonder if the locals have consciences.]

• Spengler says that no one can really be friends with China. He was speaking at the geo-political level. On the personal level, I wonder if anyone can be friends with Chinese. I will say that I can't. I find their company boring. Not there aren't any nice Chinese. In fact, there are lots of nice ones and they are capable of acts of generosity that put me to shame. But at a certain point, I find myself, while with them, wanting to escape. Something about being with them is so confining.

• When it comes to American foreign policy, I came to the conclusion years ago that I can only shrug my shoulders about it. Generally, Americans have been a force for good in the world, but they have been well-meaningly naive at times in their dealings. This is because Americans have a problem unlike other nations, in that they possess a lot of power when it comes to dealing with the world and they also have a generous streak. And so Americans have tried to deal with foreigners in many ways. They have been isolated and they have been involved. They have been imperial to some and great partners with others. They have used their power for imperial reasons and for causes in which they have nothing to gain. They have done the wrong thing many a time. And yet I am glad they possess the power they have. Better they have had it than the Russians, the Euros and the Chinese. But as to the question of what America should do with its power, I have no strong feelings. America would be the best possible policeman the world could hope to have if it really had the stomach for such a thankless task. However, they would be well within their rights to get out of places like the Middle East and Asia. There are too many shithole places in the world that really can't be fixed by outsiders.

• On the reading front, I have gotten around to reading some Charles Dickens. I say "got around" because my cousin's husband is a big devotee of Dickens, as he was a devotee of Frank Sinatra who I am proud to say is my favorite singer. So, I have started to read Bleak House and so far, the writing is wonderful.

Shoving Locals; John Cleese; Dominos Pizza Wuxi; Proud Right Wing Troll; What Canada Doesn't and Does Need; Judging by Quality of Character

• Taking the bus home one Saturday afternoon, I had to shove a man who had sat next to me because he had fallen asleep and had teetered over so that I couldn't rest my elbows. Earlier in the day, I had an encounter getting off the subway train where I wish I had shoved an older male local or at least had kicked his two-wheeled tote bag. Far too many locals don't seem to have the patience to let others get out of elevators or trains before they enter. Saturday morning, the older male trying to get on the train basically blocked my way off with his two-wheeler. I did give the two-wheeler a bit of a nudge but it was an unsatisfactory nudge from my point of view because it didn't stop my anger at the man from increasing. I immediately wished that had given the two-wheeler a good kick and the man a good shove so that he would have been pushed backwards.

• I listened to an interview that Adam Carolla did with John Cleese. Cleese laughed in an offputting way that made himself seem insincere, admitted that he was going on a tour as a way of paying off a divorce settlement, said nothing that was funny, and made shrill comments about not liking Trump supporters. It was all rather sad. Cleese is in the unfortunate position of being an older John Cleese forced to live off his laurels gained over a quarter of a century ago. Kind of like, Marlon Brando having to spend the latter part of his life being Marlon Brando.

• I took Tony to a Dominos Pizza that had opened in Wuxi. Tony liked its pepperoni pizza and told me that he wanted to go back. I can say that the pizza did seem like Dominos pizza. I was never a fan of Dominos Pizza when I was in Canada. So, I was only expecting to grade the Wuxi Dominos on authenticity, which I can say it had.

• I will state that I am proud that I got called a Right Wing Troll on a WeChat Canadians in China group. Social groups like that are not the best places to have debates. They are good places to post memes and gifs, and to make stupid jokes, which I love to do. People who think these platforms are supposed to be only for so-called serious discussion pooh-pooh this sort of thing and so they call me a troll. Good.

• Canada doesn't need more immigrants, doesn't need to do anything about climate change, and doesn't need to make its presence known in the world or just the United States. What it does need is to be Christian again and more conservative than the United States. That was it raison d'etat. That it turned in a more "progressive" country than the USA is a betrayal of its founding principles.

• "Judge a person by the quality of his character and not the color of his skin." When MLK said this, it was not like people weren't already doing this, even the people he was railing against. What these railed-against people were doing was judging groups of people by their character. How these groups were classified was not only by color of skin, but many other factors as well such as dress and manner of speaking.

Put to Shame; Put to Shame Again; More Bigotry; Tossing Coins; Parking Garage Flooding; Benny Hill

• Sometimes, the locals put me to shame. The man who runs the small shop, I always go to, chased me down a hundred meters because I had forgotten to take a bottle of water with me that I had purchased. I had left the bottle on the counter of the shop and didn't put it in my backpack. When I saw him chasing me down. I was embarrassed. I also wondered how I would make it up to him. Or maybe it was just a privilege of being a regular customer.

• And a lot of Wuxi Expats put me to shame as well. Some actually are interested in the local culture. Some take the effort to learn to speak the language (I just book study it.), some do some charitable work, and talk to the locals while I have ceased to bother about it.

• What the world needs is more bigotry, not less. Why would I say such a thing? Because, I have a low view of humans in their entirety. I am aware that they are different. I am aware they are grouped along many lines. I am also aware that they are all very flawed. Some of these flaws rest with the individual; some of these flaws are from the group that individual belongs. Apparently, saying the latter is the cause of individuals' flaws is bigotry. And to this, I would say: So what! Prove to me what I said isn't true. (How I wish people instead of shouting racism or bigotry would say something is not true or a over broad generalization!! At least we might be getting to the truth of the matter.) If what the bigot says is true, that the individual confronted should find it within himself to fix the flaw. If it isn't true, the individual confronted should not shout bigotry and try to end the conversation. Humans are all flawed and we need bigots and the like to point out our flaws to us. Chances are, the flaws are real. Again, I say humans are all flawed after all. So when you see a bigot thank him. When it comes right down to it, he is judging you by your actions and the actions of people of your group that he has seen before. And if you can exceed his expectations you will stop him in his tracks and he will be forever grateful.

• I was teaching some children. The lesson plan with which I was supplied had the students play a board game where they had to toss a coin. Tossing coins is something I have done a lot of in my time. I don't want you thinking that is because I am a very indecisive sort. But when I was young I developed this solitary activity where I would create sports leagues and tournaments based on the results of tossing coins. So, I spent a lot of time tossing coins up in the air. But I never thought of the tossing coin action as something that was hard to do. No one showed me how to toss a coin and catch it. Tossing coins seemed naturally easy. But the children in this class were so uncoordinated. Every time they tossed a coin in the air, they couldn't catch it and it landed on the floor. Why was this? Had I developed a talent of being able to toss a coin two feet in the air, with a quick tight end over end spin that most people can't easily do from the start? I find it hard to believe.

• I saw basement flooding at Ming Du Da Sha, the tall apartment building near my school. I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't decided to walk a slightly different way to school from the bus stop on October 25^th. I first saw a bunch of locals gesticulating around a manhole cover that had been pried out of the hole in which it normally rested. Walking past the men, I was able to look down the entrance ramp to the apartment building's underground parking. A big stream of water was flowing down the ramp and parked cars were immersed in about a foot of water. Some sort of plumbing problem.

• Via torrent, I downloaded an episode of The Benny Hill Show from about 1970. One of the sketches in the show featured an Indian (from India) going to a Chinese restaurant. The Indian was played by one of the show's cast members whose skin had been painted brown. Benny Hill played the Chinese waiter with coke bottle glasses, crazy accent and a black hair wig. It would be simply audacious if such a sketch was performed today.

Canadian Election I; Stupid Things I Saw Local Drivers Do; Taking the Bus to Pick up Tony; Tony Wears His Latvia Hat; NBA Tip-Off; Canadian Election II

• I was disappointed by the Canadian Federal Election results. I have come to the conclusion that people who think like me are never going to see a government to their liking for a generation. The conservatives had a golden opportunity. All they had to do was to knock off a PM who was an absolute putz. But they couldn't do it. I supposed Conservatives were doomed when the putz got elected in the first place. Stupidity can be very pig-headed. Canada is, sadly, a left of center nation bent on killing itself. [I see that the Conservatives actually got more votes, nationally, than the Liberals. That is, they won the popular vote. Well, I won't shout election reform. That's the way the system works though one has to wonder how gerrymandered the electoral ridings were. But it would be interesting if the Canadians who crowed about Trump not having won the popular vote, will ask Justin Trudeau to give some of his MP votes to the Conservatives. Ain't going to happen!]

• Stupid things I saw local drivers do on the roads. I often, either aloud or to myself, exclaim "what the fuck is that idiot doing?" when observing the locals in cars trying to make their way around Wuxi. Recently, I saw a car come to a stop on a road when he should have pulled over. I saw another car stop in front of the exit gate through which he just gone, blocking it. I saw a guy who couldn't back into a narrow parking spot, drive straight into it. I saw another guy have to make a three-point u-turn on a road that was four lanes wide. The last guy could have gone over to the right and increased his turning radius. F**ing morons!

• Instead of driving to school to pick up Tony, I decided to take the bus and meet him there. Firstly, I wanted to avoid dealing with the chaos of all these coach buses dropping students off after a school outing. It was school outing week at the school. Secondly, it came to me later that I could show Tony how he could take the bus back to Stately Kaulins Manor instead of walking as he had been doing. Thirdly, the showing of the bus way home would make Tony just a little more independent.

• On his school outing, Tony choose to wear a Latvia hat. He could have worn his Raptors championship hat, his Winnipeg Blue Bomber hat, his San Jose Shark hat, his Winnipeg Jet hat, or his Houston Rocket hat, but he went with the one probably no one else would have wanted to steal.

• My son Tony is happy that the NBA season is tipping off. I, for my part, am curious about it for sociopolitical reasons. I took a screen shot of an image published on the NBA China site, proclaiming the oncoming tip-off of the new season, which showed six NBA star players, none of whom was James Harden. I wish Tony wouldn't watch the NBA given that is a league of craven people who don't have the courage to tell the chicoms to boil their heads, of players who don't have the decency to marry the mothers of the children they have fathered, and of hypocritical progressives. But who am I to deny my son his pleasures? As far as I can tell, he doesn't pay any heed to the league's shit. He's in it for the sports.

• The Canadian Election results are not good. Somehow despite losing votes, the Liberals, and the NDP who are basically Liberals on Meth, still control our government. The stupidity that Canada has endured with Justin will only get worse as he will have to heed NDP policy demands with which he is probably in agreement with anyway. (The only reason his father was not NDP was that it couldn't win elections.) Who is to blame for this? The Conservatives are for having run a squishy campaign. Leader Andrew Scheer trying to dodge the question of his having been against gay marriage, which I witnessed when I was in Canada, was what ultimately caused me to vote for the People's Party. Cuck!!! The Maritime provinces are to blame for being so third world and living off pogey and thus voting Liberal. The City of Toronto is to blame for voting completely Liberal. Toronto should not be part of Canada. It should be annexed by the State of California. I can see that I have always been correct to look down on expatriates who come from Toronto.