Thank You; Some Latvian; Don't be a Tiger; Interim; Foot Shortages; Metro Line #3; US Election interest; Jaws;

Thank you, very rare reader, for visiting my blog.  I hope you will read this entry to the end.

Es esmu Andis.  Es dzīvoju Ķīnā.  Es studēju latviešu valodu.

Don't be a tiger.  You may think that is the way to deal with a problem or something going wrong, but ultimately, people walk on eggshells around you.  As Doctor Johnson said, someone may think that walking around and be mighty and screaming at people earns them respect and high esteem, but in fact everyone acts like they are around a tiger who will bare his teeth at any moment.

For some people, happiness is the brief interim between periods of temper tantrums.

I read a story on the Internet that China was going to have food shortages.  This was because being communist it was unable to feed the people they ruled and thus had to rely on exports from western countries to do so.

Later at a Speaker's Corner (I resumed doing them again), I had a student tell me that Chairman Xi saying something about not wasting food caused panic buying of rice among locals.

I learned from a student at the Speaker's Corner (SPC) that the third line of the Wuxi Metro was entirely underground, so there was no point to riding it for sightseeing from it.

The students at the SPC were very interested in the US election, though from what I could gather, for entertainment.

My son Tony asked me to download the film Jaws for him.  He found out somehow that the movie was very popular in the 1970s.  I remember that I was in Quebec when the film came out and listening to classmates who were eager to tell others that they had gone to the cinema to see the film; and that sharks were really cool.  I had a poster of a shark from a magazine that I "lent" to someone and then had the hardest time getting them to return it.  I even bought a book about the making of the film, though I never did get around to seeing in the cinema.

The bakery, where I always buy the bread, we put in our fancy German toaster, was selling baguettes: those long tube-shaped pieces of crusty French bread.  When I saw them, I immediately decided to give it a try.  So, I bought a baguette and three packages of the bread we use for toasting.  When I went to the counter, the clerk put the three packages of bread in the normal bag.  I noticed that as she did that, she was hesitant about what to do about the baguette.  My toast-bread then in the bag, she made a slicing motion to me.  I shook my head in the negative.  It seems that the locals want the baguettes sliced into smaller pieces because they find their length to be an inconvenience.

Thank You; Writing in Latvian; Morning Family Drama; What's Wrong with Defensive NFL games?; Canada and the Covid; Go Trump Go!; Being Called Racist; Fourteenth Anniversary

Thank you for visiting my blog.  I don't know if I have many readers.  Perhaps you are the only one.  Still, I am glad that you have taken the time to read my blog.  If I have only one reader, I am thankful.  That is more than none.  Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!

I should try writing in Latvian, which is my mother tongue which I was taught when I was young.  And also find a Latvian penfriend who I can practice my Latvian with.  First, I will try to write an introduction about myself in Latvian.  Next entry.

I drove my wife Jenny to work.  Twenty minutes later she phones me.  I tell her I am on the train now heading to work.  She says that in that case she would have to phone our son Tony.  Why?  I ask.  She broke the heel on her shoe.  For Tony, this means he is going to spend an hour walking to and fro Compound Kaulins.

Tony was talking to me about the Super Bowl whose final score was 13-3.  They are saying, he told me, that it was a boring Super Bowl because it was so low-scoring.  I said that there was nothing wrong with a low-scoring game and that sometimes a high-scoring game with no defense was boring in its own way.  Tony agreed.

The Covid news from Canada is depressing.  The powers that be are determined and are scaring the population into going along with one of the biggest elite blunders since World War One.  My mother who lives in a house by herself in Manitoba is not enjoying being cooped up in her house and being by herself.  My brother who is essential is working all the time and unable to enjoy the 2000 dollar a month subsidy that many less essentials are getting for staying at home.

I hope Trump wins the election.  And it is not because I think he is a God.*  He is boorish and all that, and in a saner time he would never have become president.  But we don't live in sane times, and in this day and age, he comes across as thoughtful, full of probity and considerate.  I was asked last week, by a Trump-hater, what I would have to do to give up on Trump.  My answer would be someone better running for the presidency.  And right now, there isn't.  The Democrats are all beyond consideration, as are most of the Republicans.

*(He may be a King David figure. But that's another story.)

In the same conversation, I had with the anti-Trumper, I was called racist.  He was relating his black American friends, including some expats here in Wuxi, telling him about their being exposed to constant racism.  I responded that if it was so bad for them, why didn't they go to Africa where surely this wouldn't be a problem.  That I was told was racist.  Whatever.  It sounded to me like these friends complained too much, and were trying to play King Victim.

The truth is that if a white person sees a black person, he is worried about offending the black and being called racist or suffering some other bad consequences.  And thus, since many whites have to walk on egg-shells around blacks all the time.  Obviously black people sense this when they are around many whites, and it is understandable that they feel aggrieved.  However, there is something that Blacks can do to alleviate this tension, and that isn't to go BLMish.*** They can tell the white person to be cool and first assume that the white person is trying not to be "racist"**, and that at the same time, they are black and the other is white, and they will just have to together both be aware that there is this racial thing going on, which is hard for anyone not to have on their mind, no matter how good they are.

**I put quotes around the word racist, because I am not happy with that choice of word.  "Racist" is a hard word to define exactly.  Is some ways, the word can be used in a way that the person described is not full of bad intentions; in other ways, it can be.

***BLM from what I understand is Blacks portraying themselves as king victims while at the same time not offering Whites any hope of redemption or even acknowledging that many Whites have made efforts to deal with Black grievances.

I end this entry by wishing myself and my wife Jenny a happy fourteenth Wedding anniversary.  Yes, fourteen years.  I am happy to have someone put up with me for fourteen years; I only wish my wife would be happy that someone has put up with her with fourteen years.  I suppose the majority of husbands have this complaint.

Latvian Independence Day; Good & Bad Moments; Traffic Accident; No More SPCs?; Stay Away; Nuremberg Trials for Who?; Moronic Stopping; Wuxi Metro Line #3 Now in Operation

Note to myself.  Latvian Independence Day is November 18th.  Make a point of remembering it this year!

This is further to my intemperate behavior at a Car Wash (See previous blog entry).  Having finished re-reading the Boswell's Life of Johnson, I saw that the great Doctor had great moments and some bad moments where he was intemperate as I was at that Car Wash.  But, not being great, and being too timid of character to not feel remorse for my intemperance, I can at least say that in my life, I have had my bad moments, my selfish moments and some good moments, but nothing more.

I forgot to mention a traffic accident I witnessed while riding a bus home after work on a Saturday evening.  Traffic was heavy and I saw this big white boat of a sedan, driven by a woman, trying to make a right turn from a side road across three full lanes of traffic.  Moments before the accident I noticed the car because it made itself very conspicuous by its feeble attempts to get onto the road.  I thought it was strange to see it being forced to back up, or retreat you could say, to the side street from which it had come. Then, I looked back inside the bus.  An instance later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the car attempt a quick dash across the lanes, before hearing a crunch as the car ran into the side of a car.  I see a lot of accident scenes in Wuxi as I go about the city but this was one of those rare instances where I noticed the car before it got into the collision or even seemed in danger of getting in a collision.

On a Tuesday, someone at our school made a decision to cancel all the Speakers Corners for the week.  For me, it meant having even less work to do than I already had, that all the classes I would have would be with children, and that I would have no way of getting the pulse of the Chinese people by talking to adults.  Why was the decision made?  I was told of the decision by social media by someone who didn't make the decision, but talked to them that did, and this someone told me that they no idea why the decision was made.  I suspect that one reason was the appearance of these old ladies at the Speakers Corners.  These ladies hadn't paid the school any money for coming to these open classes and so the school perhaps wanted them to scat. 

I was able to read a notice that the school made announcing the cancellation and it said that the SPCs were cancelled for a week so there could be planning and organization, whatever that meant.  It would be sad if these classes that I have done since 2004 suddenly came to an end.

[Two days later]  I don't know why I never thought of this sooner.  The reasons for the SPC cancellation may be political.  That is, the powers that be don't want to have public forums where babbling, loose-cannon foreigners, like yours truly, may say something that shouldn't be said.  In fact, I can say that every SPC, I say things that would not be allowed to be said by Chinese citizens.

Sometimes, the best way to be nice to someone you admire is to stay away from them.  You can't assume that your company is worth anything to most people.

There should be Nuremberg Trials for the people who decided to implement lock-downs.  There should be Nuremberg trials for Trump because he must have done something wrong about Covid because he is Trump and evil and bad and lying....   Two viewpoints I have been exposed to.

Far too many locals don't exhibit consideration for others when they stop or park their cars.  I probably have reported, to the very rare readers of this blog, of times when I witnessed people parking their cars so that they trap previously parked cars.  What I have been witnessing the past week is inconsiderate stopping of cars right in front of the entrance to our apartment complex.  At least five times, there were these cars which were side-road stopped right in front of the entrance, blocking the path that cars would take to exit or enter the complex.  Why they don't stop on the side of the road away from the entrance area is beyond me.  It never seems to occur to many locals (who are Chinese!) that where they happen to be standing or stopping, they are in the way of others.  Another manifestation of this is the local who steps off an escalator and stops right in front of it blocking others behind them on the escalator.

And if the blocking I had already seen at my apartment complex wasn't bad enough, some genius local found a way to make it even more egregious and selfish and blindingly stupid.  What did this "Einstein Wang" do?  The driver of a white SUV, after driving out of the complex, stopped practically in front of the entrance gate causing other exiting cars, like the one I was driving, to make a wide turn to get around them and so get into the path of cars trying to enter the complex.  As I drove around this SUV,  I blared my horn at it and my wife, who was in the passenger seat, gave them the what-for.  

And a day later, as if to reinforce my point, I saw another example of inconsiderate parking; this time at our school.  What did a driver decide to do?  On the narrow side-street near our school, someone parked their car on the opposite side of the road from which all other cars are usually parked and thus created a winding gauntlet through which to navigate for other cars.  In addition, this side-street often is the scene of standoffs between cars trying to go in opposite directions.  The car parked where it was would make that situation is more of a gong show.

Wuxi Metro Line 3 is now running.  I decided to check the Blue Line out on the day I heard the news.  So, coming back to Compound Kaulins from work, I got on the #1 Line (the Red) at the Nanchang Temple Station.  I transferred to the #2 Line (the Green) at the Sanyang Station (one stop from Nanchang).  I then rode the Green train for three stops to the Jianghai station where I transferred to the the #3 Line (the Blue).  I then farted around the Jinaghai station, taking a video of an incoming blue train, and then taking the blue train a few stops in the opposite direction, before getting off and boarding a train going to the direction of the Wuxi Train Station Station.  This station was two stops from Jianghai.  At the Wuxi Train Station, I transferred to the #1 Line and took the red train to Yanqiao from where I could then walk home.

I could see that many locals were checking the new line out.  I saw numerous people taking photos of the station and their signs with their phones.  

But beside witnessing this, the experience of taking the line was rather hoo-hum.  Other than the color of the train being blue, the riding experience was no different from taking the green and red train lines.  I will have to find out if the Blue line ever goes above ground; for it would be worth riding it more than for the few stops I have ridden it.  If it doesn't go above ground, I need not take it unless it can get me somewhere that I have to go.

Tony's Dirty Roommates; Goose-Stepping; Poems Every Child Should Know; Tony's Current Music Listening Habits; What Do They Know? You Never Know; Hate-Haters Think They Don't Hate; Who's Being Bad; Behaving Badly Again; Censoring the Hunter Biden Story

The problem with Tony's international school is that it has too many Chinese parents involved.  This in turn means that Tony has Chinese roommates in his dorm.  I was having my daily conversation with Tony on the phone and I asked him about the arrangements he had to make with his roommates when it came to taking showers.  His roommates he told me don't take showers.  Oh!  

I then asked Tony if they stank.

I asked a woman in my SPC if she was studying German as she had told me before that she was about to do it.  As I asked this question, I did an exaggerated John Cleese, Fawlty Towers goose-stop as I put two fingers under my nose.

From Project Gutenberg, I have downloaded Poems Every Child Should Know.  I am reading and enjoying even though I haven't been a child since the previous millennium.  If this volume was published today, it would in fact be entitled Poems Every Dummy Should Know or Poems Every Idiot Should Know.

Tony was home Friday night after a week at school.  He was listening to music on his computer.  He started listening to the Jam (not to be mixed up with Pearl Jam, the Jam were a British Punk Band with a The Who aesthetic).  Then he was listening to Public Enemy.  He said he didn't like rap but for whatever reason he liked Public Enemy.  And finally, I heard him listening to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.  I teased him about it, but he said that it was Led Zep's most popular song and that he liked it very much.

And later:  I was driving Tony to his school and he asked me to play songs by ABBA.

One of the frustrations of teaching is that you can never assume what the students will know or won't know.  So best made plans can be frustrated by student's ignorance or knowledge.  

I did a class where the students' ignorance made the class better for me.  What didn't the students know?  These young children didn't know how to write their names in English.  This surprised me, but it made the exercise I had students do to run out the clock necessary, which was to have them write their names on the board.  I saw that the little kids were looking at names that had already be written on the board for guidance in writing their names and this really surprised me because they could easily say their names in English and it never occurred to me that they wouldn't know how to spell them.

Haters hate.  Hate-Haters hate hate.  Hate-Haters hate Haters.  Haters love or like things that they don't hate.  Hate-Haters love things that don't hate.   Hate-Haters think they don't hate.  Since it is impossible to not be a Hater, Hate-Haters actually hate more that Haters.

I hope you can follow my logic because I find the Hate-Haters are logically-inconsistent.

I was behaving badly on a recent Sunday and Monday.  I couldn't deal in a stoic way with the driving habits of the locals, and went crazy honking at them or giving them a middle-finger gesture for trying to cut me off, using their horns because they were impatient, or neglecting to use turn signals.

But the piece de la resistance of bad-behaviour I did was when I went to get the K-Family Car washed on a Monday morning.  My wife Jenny had a coupon in the car that was for a free car wash in an automatic setup.  I drove by myself to it.  To actually use the car wash, I had to scan a QR code using the WeChat app in my phone, enter a phone number and our vehicle license plate number.  The problem was that I didn't know Jenny's phone number by heart though I had recorded somewhere on my phone.  As well, as I was a dumb idiot about using the car wash interface because it was in Chinese. I was further an imbecile in that I resented very much the staff trying to help me.  Because the staff did the awkward, nervous Chinese habit of laughing when dealing with a foreigner,  I seized on this as a pretext to lose my temper and swear at them and call them the foulest of names.  The staff, instead of being rude back, repeatedly assured me that they meant no offence, but I was still full of rage to acknowledge it.  I was, after ten minutes of farting around, finally able with the staff's assistance, to get the car washed.  As the car was being washed, I became full of shame, and realised that I had to apologise to the people to whom I had been so rude.  So, I pulled out of the carwash, parked the car, and walked back to apologise to them.  I told them that everything I had said that they were was, in fact, what I was.

There is a lather-rinse-repeat to this incident.  This was not the first time that I behaved abominably and then apologised a few moments afterwards.  It happens a lot.  I could say it is better than being forever angry about something and never questioning myself.  But the fact is I have a short fuse at times and I lie to myself afterwards when I think myself a good fellow for apologising afterward.  It would be better if it never happened at all.  

But why is it happening?  Am I in a situation that is difficult?  Am I afflicted with an aspect of my personality that I can't control?  What is that I am not doing that I should be?  Should I living with people who are so much different than me and with whom it is hard to have meaningful relationships?

It is curious that Twitter was censoring the Hunter Biden email story.  They tried to justify it by saying it had to be fact-checked. Why hadn't they fact-checked all the lie-tweets about Trump like the ones that said he was a racist, a Nazi and the ones that pass on the lie about what he said about Charlottesville?  Hmmm?

Trump is no more or less a racist than the "Saintly" Barack Obama.  In fact, Trump is probably less of a bigot that Obama, Biden and Harris.  As I said earlier, it is Hate-Haters that do the most hating.

Seafood Buffet; Canvas Shoes and Flood Pants; Tony's English Homework; Things I Must Do Every Day; Got to be More Outgoing; My Caffeine Habit; Donald Trump & King David; Tony School Trouble; Turks Selling Jewelry

Went to the Amazon Seafood Buffet in the Wanda Mall that is close to Compound Kaulins.  It was crap.  Which is surprising given that the restaurant has been open since the Wanda Mall opened how ever many years ago that it did.  Restaurants come and go in the Mall on an almost weekly basis.

I was crossing an at intersection, looking towards the ground in front of me as I am wont to do, and I saw two people wearing canvas shoes ( that seem to be the fashion these days), ankle socks, and pants that went down to about three inches above the ankles.  When I was young, a person would get teased if their pants rode so high, but now it is the fashion, not only for women, which I am fine with, but men, which I think is a bridge too far.  Anyway, from the bottom of the pants downward, I thought I was looking at the ankles of two females; looking above the pant bottoms, I saw that one of the persons was female and the other was a male.

This text has something to do with Tony's English homework:   I present the students with a Project Based Learning task. This independent or small group task is designed to provide the students with an opportunity to apply their knowledge to a real-life project that can inspire and contribute to the greater community. Although designed, they are meant to be authentic and celebrate the students understanding and creativity while encouraging skills like time-management, organisation, research, teamwork, problem solving, communication skills and more. These attributes are essential for 21st Century learners.  Gobbledygook! is all I can say.  I want Tony to be reading.  All this other stuff that the teacher is talking, which can Tony as far as studying, will follow

Taking the bus to my school, I saw a person sleeping on the sidewalk.  There seemed to a mattress and some adequate quilts in the sleeping arrangement.

Now sure what to talk about so I will list the things, I try to get myself to do every day.  Every day, I must pray the rosary, study Chinese, study French, study Spanish, study Latvian, read a poem, read literature, and write something for my blog.  I also try to do the normal things like take a shower and eat.  Ha ha.  I should write an email that to someone that is important to me.

I am getting old and I still need to change.  I've got to really be more outgoing.  I have assiduously avoided people for too long.

I drink a lot of caffeine in the morning.  This morning (October 14th), I drank a cup of tea and a cup of coffee.  I write this after hearing the Z man say he drinks tea all the time.  I wonder if he uses tea bags or makes his tea in the correct way that Orwell wrote about.

They didn't like it at my SPC when I told them that Donald Trump has been compared to the King David of the Old Testament.  This was in an SPC where the subject was Jews.  The students said the Jews were smart and good at making money.

Tony didn't hand in some Chinese homework.  I got a message on the school portal telling me as much.  My first reaction was that his mother was going to be peed.  I asked Tony what happened and he hemmed and hawed and said something about not knowing what was happening.

The next day, he was upset about some incident he had with a roommate.  What Tony told me happened was that the roommate hit him because he had used another roommate's towel to wash his hands. Either that or Tony used the roommate's towel.  Tony was so upset by this that he didn't eat anything for dinner and told me that he wanted to move to another room to get away from that roommate.  I told him first to calm down and not get mad about this incident; and that in life he had expect that many of these disagreeable incidents would happen.  I also advised him that whoever was at fault, he shouldn't be an asshole.  If he was in the wrong, he should not do it again.  If he wasn't, he shouldn't go out of his way to be an asshole as well.  Whether that made him feel better, I couldn't rightly say.  Whether he will heed my advice, I couldn't say either.  I suspect he won't.  I'll just have to repeat myself and hope that it sticks eventually.

On the streets of Wuxi, I see that men of Turkic appearance walking the streets trying to hawk jewelry.  I assume they are from Xinjiang, but maybe I am wrong.

Lots of Flags; Extra Walkway Thoughts; Get Me Out of Here!; The Chinese Don't Have Opinions; I Don't Have a Prediction; Patriotic Speech Editing; Married to China; Naming My Guardian Angel; Beard and My Resemblances

At the first Speaker Corner's Class following my six-day holiday I asked the following question:  Is it just me or I did see more five-star Chinese flags than ever before this National Day holiday?  Many of the students said it wasn't just me.  When it came to the why of the so many flags, one student said that some factories had nothing to do but make flags during the lockdown; another student said it was to do with China's response to the Covid.  I wonder if the reason for so many flags was a need of the powers that rule China to try to increase a nationalistic feeling.  Why this need?  Are they going to war?  Is the economy going to the tank because of decoupling?

One thing I observed when I walked the walkways of Wuxi (see previous blog entry) was the unevenness of Wuxi development.  I walked past neighborhoods that seemed old and well-settled, and then I would walk past empty lots and then I also saw an unfinished and seemingly abandoned high-rise building.  (I took a picture of one and will publish it in my photo blog.)

The end of Tony's holiday of drumming (see previous blog entry) was a test he had to do.  This test was not where he had been having classes but, in the area, sort of, of the Qingyang Road Carrefour.  I had to wait for him for an hour or so, but the wait was not at all enjoyable because there was no place to sit and no places to walk in the area.   I ended up walking up and down the street in front of the building where Tony's drumming was put to the test.  At one end of the street, the corner offering no interesting prospects; just more roads besides apartment buildings.  The same boring prospect was at the other end.  Along the road in front of Tony's drumming test building were nondescript shops, offices and restaurants. So, I waited a long hour till Tony got his thing done.

I read an interesting article by David Goldman entitled Why the Chinese Don't Have Opinions.  The article said that the Chinese don't have opinions because of China's top-down structure of political control. A small elite makes all the decisions and the structure is so rigid that everyday Chinese don't find it practical to buck it by having opinions of their own.  The fact of this rigid structure also explains why there aren't very many famous and compelling Chinese individuals.  All ideas have to come from the top in China, so individuals can't stand out.  Any person in China capable of being brave enough to advocate for political freedom is quickly turned into a non-person, or as Goldman writes, an organ donor.

I should think of a way to talk about this in my speaker's corner.

Who's going to win the upcoming U.S. presidential election?  I won't predict.  During previous presidential elections, I had certainty of who was going to win (I was certain that Clinton would lose the '96 election), and I read articles full of certainty of who was to win (one said Romney would beat Obama); and so being burned, I nary make predictions, and merely pass on those that I have read from sources I trust.  Derb thinks Trump will lose; and Z-man thinks Trump can win again.  David Warren thinks Trump will win in a landslide.  The mainstream media thinks (or hopes) Trump will get crushed.  I hope Warren is right.  I fear Derb will be proven correct.  

In 2016, I wasn't shocked that Trump won.  I had been reading some articles just before the election saying that Trump had a chance.  But I crossed my fingers election day while keeping my mouth shut.

Sometimes I am called upon to edit the text for English speeches that young students have to make.  The last one I edited was full of patriotic fervour over China's "wonderful" response to Covid.  It is a narrative that the powers to be in China want the citizens to learn.

What would I say to anyone who asked me what I thought of China?  I'd tell them I'm married to it.  And as a husband, I get exasperated with the way my wife thinks and acts.

What name should I give to my guardian angel?  (Mother A says we all have them, and I'll take her word for it.)  Nothing readily comes to mind.  Though I can say, I should be very thankful to my guardian angel.  That I have made it so far into life, having done the stupid things I did, having made the stupid decisions I made, I have to thank more than dumb luck.  

Perhaps, I could call my guardian angel Sancho Panza, for my journey in life has been quixotic.  Although, I'd like to think that my guardian angel, being far more intelligent than me, would not be as passive as Panza.

In 2020, I have been sporting facial hair.  During the lockdown, I wore a beard.  I shaved off the beard, and then grew a goatee.  I then shaved that off and am now growing a full beard.  One of my students said I looked like Karl Marx.  Another said I looked like Vladimir Lenin.  I supposed they hadn't heard of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist.

In my life, I have also been told I looked like the husband on the TV series Bewitched (played by Dick Sergeant and Dick York), Morrissey the singer, and James Dean (Yes!  Really!)

Holiday Gone; Space and Nothing; Boring Libertarians; Re-Landscaping; Etiquette; Sportsball: Big Panic; Not Much; Jenny Holiday Plan; SPC Changes; Can't Watch Fargo Season Four; Wuxi Walking; Biden ; Courtesy; Tony; Trump, Bad Drivers

The holiday came and gone.  Six days of meh!  I did things but nothing really excited me.

Can there be space if there is absolutely nothing, or does there have to be something in order for space to exist?  In other words, is space only possible in relation to something?  It is mystery that I think has never been solved.

When listening to podcasts, I have to admit that libertarian style talk about markets can become boring after a while.  These rightists really need to talk in a politically economic way with markets playing one part in the jockeying among groups and individuals for power.  Markets are great except for the fact that people cheat.  Markets are great except for the fact that people will do anything to make money.  Markets are great except for the fact that different groups do it in different ways.  Markets are great except for the fact that those with power will try to rig it.

One of the government compounds near Casa K seems to be undergoing a bit of re-landscaping.  All the bamboo trees, that had been placed as an extra buffer between the exterior compound fence and the parking and building area of the compound, have been taken down.  I will have to wait to see with what the bamboo will be replaced.  An interesting detail that I can report is that I saw some local residents taking the twenty-foot-long bamboo trunks back to their apartments.  However, what they would do with them is beyond me.

Listening to a Southern Nationalist podcast about etiquette, and I became more aware how crudely modern I am in many ways.  I dress for shit.  Just way to casual.  My bearing is too relaxed.  I am lacking in manners and consideration for others.  

Oh well.  It still isn't late, even at my age, to reform.

I was talking about sportsball with Tony when he was phoning us (that be his mother & me) from his dorm.  We talked about the latest results from the NBA, NHL and MLB.  When we talked about the MLB, I was surprised to see how closely he was following the standings.  He knew for instance that the White Sox, who are in the same division as the Minnesota Twins, had lost six games in a row the week previous.

I think that was has happened with Covid has been the biggest panic in human history.  The Covid is nothing that unusual.  It is one of those more severe viruses that hits the world every ten or twenty years.  What is unprecedented has been the publicity it has garnered.  Thanks to the communication technology we have now, Covid-19 is the most publicised virus in human history.  The near constant publicity has caused an unprecedented panic and typical overreaction on the part of politicians.   Previous viruses with the severity of the Covid-19 happened and life went on as normal.  And there is the fact that we also live in a overly cautious age.  Things I did like my childhood like walk to primary school by myself, ride a bicycle without a helmet, or wander for hours on my own without adult supervision or even my parents knowing where I was -- these are all crimes now because they aren't "safe."  

I don't think that this Covid-19 thing can be labelled a plandemic. But I won't deny that are people who are using this "crisis" to gain themselves some power.  These people furrow their brows and then use emotional arguments to defend over-precaution.

Hope, I didn't trigger anyone excessively by saying this.

The big mystery of the Covid-19 is what happened in China where all the whole Covid-19 affair started.  One suggestion I heard was that panic started because the Chinese are hypochondriacs.  Combine this with China's totalitarian form of governance and you can explain the overreaction, which was then publicized enough to make the world panic.

With the national holidays coming up, I won't have much to do at work.  Many of the kid's classes will be cancelled as well as the company class I do.

I knew it!  I knew it!  I knew it!  I knew that my wife Jenny was going to throw a wrench into my October Holiday plans.  On the day before the start of the holiday, she told me that Tony had a drumming class every morning during my six days off.  So, I will have to get up early every morning of my holiday and either be driving him downtown for the classes, or be accompanying him while he takes the bus.

The old women who come to our SPC's do so because it is free.  Management of our school is getting annoyed at this.  They have instituted a policy where people, who have never paid for classes at our school, can't come to SPC's on Saturday and Sunday.  (I learned of this when a sign was posted in the SPC area and I then had the old women translate it for me.)

I was excited that a new season of the Fargo TV series was out.  I downloaded the first episode and I was thinking that finally there was a series I could watch, but after ten minutes, I had to abandon the series like I had just abandoned the first season of Ted Lasso.  I abandoned Ted Lasso because of all the people being divorced and having one-night stands.  It was becoming a soap opera and I was hoping to see a series about soccer.  I abandoned Fargo Season Four after ten minutes because it was obnoxiously woke.  There was a young black girl, smart in a Lisa Simpson like way, being discriminated against and oppressed by white people who were stupider than her and couldn't accept her being accomplished.  Z Man, who must have stayed with it longer, said the series now had an all-black cast.

The only good thing that has come out of taking Tony to his drumming class downtown is that I discovered some great places to go walking.  Tony's drumming class is in the BMC compound which is down the road from Bao Li, the abandoned Wuxi shopping mall. (Older Wuxi Expats would know about it.) The BMC sits right by a canal.  Now I am not one to give much credit to the government authorities in China, but I will admit that the canal going through the downtown of Wuxi has a long and extensive network of canal-side walkways that are great for taking a stroll.  I walked along these walkways and had wonder why I hadn't walked them before -- old Wuxi hand that I am.  

To me it shows that many things are best stumbled upon than actually systemically looked for.  My discovery made my sojourn in Wuxi a little more tolerable.

With Biden said to be staying in his basement for the 2020 election campaign, I can't help but think it is analogous to Hitler sitting in bunker in Berlin in 1945.  Of course, the people who like to think of Trump Hitler analogies would have thought up my analogy if Trump had hidden in his basement which he didn't.  Trump was too busy not hiding.

Courtesy in a style choice in China in that there are no practical benefits to exercising it.  It would never enter a Chinese person's mind to be courteous to some they don't know and from whom they couldn't extract a benefit.  If a courtesy is extended to them from a stranger, they would think it strange and never think to reciprocate it.

The Chinese are mad at Trump because they think he doesn't like them.  I have responded to this by telling them that it isn't Trump's job to like them, he is working for his people.  I should have also asked them why anyone should like the Chinese.  What have they done for any other countries?  Or do they think they should be liked because they have been victims?

My son Tony disappoints me as I am sure I disappointed my father.  What drives me crazy about Tony is constant playing of computer and phone games.  I wish he would read more.  I don't think as yet that he has ever tried to read an entire book from front cover to back.  When I tell him this, he ignores me.  And just now, he asked me to add funds to his steam account so he could buy another game.  I brought up my expectation that he would read something, and all he could do was glare and become unresponsive to asking for action on my expectation.

Back to work I was on October 7th, on the way there, I was a pedestrian at a crosswalk where a car swerved instead of yielding to me, so I was able to pound the back of the car's trunk.  I hope I scared the shit out of the driver.  It gave me some satisfaction to do that.

Trump since contracting Covid-19 has behaved heroically.  It gives me great satisfaction that he is annoying the bed-wetters.

There was another driver who annoyed me and seemed remarkable enough for me to blog about him.  I was driving down this road that takes me from the downtown of Wuxi to Compound Kaulins and back.  This icehole driving a white sedan, a cigarette sticking out the driver window, tried to change lanes in front of me without a respectable distance and without turn signals.  I blared the horn long and annoyingly at him.  I pulled up beside and gave him a glare.  He was male in his thirties and forties, with a shaved head and the look of a warlord wannabee.  A real piece of human filth and the type you hoped would get killed in by anyone having a war with China.