NBA – chicom Kerfuffle, Tony, Opportunity Missed, One Student, A Report from Hong Kong, Motorcycle Cops

• The NBA – chicom kerfuffle has me visiting NBA sites more than I ever would have otherwise. The NBA's popularity in mainland China, which I have been aware since I came to Wuxi in 2004, has always disappointed me. I always wished that the Chinese could have liked Baseball, American Football and Ice Hockey more. Of the major sports leagues, the NBA is the one I least follow. But the kerfuffle which had political and cultural ramifications has interested me greatly.

• Returning to Stately Kaulins Manor on the evening of October 9^th, I found that my son Tony didn't seem fazed at all by the NBA and South Park kerfuffles. He was keen to tell me about the performance of some player in an NBA exhibition game. Whoever he was, he had gotten 34 points. And when I showed him the China Band South Park episode, he found it funny without seeing the controversy.

• When the Kaulins family was in Shanghai, we saw a big video board advertising the NBA exhibition game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets. I thought to get a photo of Tony standing beside it because he had expressed an interest in seeing the game. But I changed my mind about it, and now I regret it, especially, since I read that all that advertising has been taken down.

• I was keen to talk about the NBA controversy with students but only one showed up to my evening Speakers Corner. And the student was a woman.

• I did have a student, a doctor at a hospital nearby our school, who had spend five days in Hong Kong. She told me that there weren't many shoppers in Hong Kong and that the store owners were regretting it.

• In the area around Stately Kaulins Manor, I see lots and lots of police. They wear all sorts of uniforms and can be seen driving in all manner of vehicles including cars, vans, pick-up trucks, e-bikes and motorcycles. Recently, I have been seeing these slickly dressed motorcycle cops riding round in groups of four motorcycles (I say this because the ones I had seen before were paired on one bike.) They wear combat boots, tightly padded cargo pants, and florescent yellow jackets with all sorts of pockets for radios and other equipment. They often are stopped at intersections and I have seen them harassing the the operators of e-bikes and other small vehicles. On the evening of October 9^th, I was walking home from the subway station, and came upon the four cops standing around an e-biker who had an umbrella attached to her e-bike. They didn't so much look to be giving her the business as just standing around, I thought. I walked as close to them as I could and stared at them, and one of them said hello to me, in what I thought was a prissy way – that is, in the way most Chinese greet passing foreigners walking down a street.