312 Collapse, How it Affects AKIC, Not busy, My Current Podcast Listening Habits, Li Xiao Ming, A Victim Was from NKCS

• The 312 road where the Highway Collapse happened was empty on the morning of the 11^th. Usually, these days, I take the 25 bus to get to and from school. The 25 bus does go under another stretch of 312 overpass. In fact, the intersection where the 25 goes under looks a lot like the intersection where the collapse happened. I had a shift at school on the 11^th, but I choose to take the train which goes over the 312 instead because I was curious to see what the traffic was like. I recorded what I saw using my Iphone.

• The collapse affects me because going to the Ikea Mall and getting our car serviced will not be so easy for however long it takes to repair the section of road.

• I am not at all busy at school which is why I have been blogging on an almost daily basis.

• I have also been listening to a lot of podcasts. I like to say I am downloading them in a manual manner. I am not using a podcast app, but instead use my Feedly rss reader which alerts me to when new podcast episodes are available. I then download them using a browser (Safari on my Mac, Brave on the PC I use at work), and put them into my VLC app to listen to them. My favorite podcasts include the Dennis Miller Option, Radio Derb, the Z Blog Power Hour, The Delingpod, London Calling, GLOP, Patrick Coffin, Contra Krugman, and the Kunstler Podcast, to name a few.

• Interestingly, Li Xiao Ming, the Wuxi communist party chairman was at the scene of the collapse. I mock this chairman for his ubiquitousness on Wuxi Metro video screens and his comb-over hairdo.

• Sadly, I have a connection, though very very tenuous, to one of the victims of the highway collapse. A kindergarten teacher from Nanwei King's College School was driving home from the school and had the horrible misfortune of being under the section of highway when it collapsed. She and her daughter were killed. Last spring, Jenny & I looked at the possibility of having Tony attend that school and visited its campus. NKCS is located near the Coastal City Shopping Mall in an area which I would otherwise have had no reason to be at. Jenny was still getting updates from the school and received the news that the woman's car was seen in the video of the collapse.