The Duke of Wuxi gets married. I hate my office downstairs.Fiddling around with Facebook. Coolest Movies of all time. Pregnancy Update. Wuxi English TV News.

This is an exclusive to AKIC blogspot.  Simon, the Duke of Wuxi, is officially married.  Last week, He and Nicole went to Nanjing to get their wedding license.  I won't announce it in AKIC live spaces because it would be tantamount to making a public announcement about it.  Instead, I do it here because it constitutes giving hints about it.

Simon tells me his in-laws want him to bestow more gifts and money on them than he has.

I hate my downstairs office.  I want to move back upstairs.  The office has a bad smell and my duties have me more upstairs than downstairs.  Also, the office does not have a lock on it so I always have to lock up my laptop.

The past two weeks, I have been playing around with Facebook, adding friends and reacquainting myself with people I knew in what I like to call my prehistory.  I have learned some of the following things:  a manager I knew at DHL is now working at an Automobile dealership; a person, who was a bombadier (an artillery corporal) at a militia regiment I was a member of twenty years ago, is still a bombadier (he is the one person I know who looks like Bubbles in the Trailer Park Boys); and another friend of mine has been a mother for seven months.  My network on Facebook is extending from China to British Columbia to Manitoba.  Cool Stuff.

An American conservative talk show I listen to over the Internet did a segment about the Coolest movies of all time.  I have to admit I am a sucker for these movie lists but theirs really disappointed me.  The criteria for a movie to be cool, it seemed, was that Quentin Tarantino had to make it.  So  Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction made the list.  Pulp Fiction was said to be the coolest movie of all time.  The list did not have anything in it with Steve McQueen.  And it listed the most nerdish and adolescent movie of all time, The Matrix, as being cool.  My criteria for cool comes down to the actor.  None of the movies mentioned on the list had any cool performances in them like Steve McQueen in Bullit and Clint in the Spaghetti Westerns.  Strangely enough, a movie called Out of Sight was put on the list.  I had not heard of the movie till the day before yesterday.  I just happened to come upon across a copy of the Elmore Leonard novel that the movie was based on at school where a cache of 100 pulp English paperback novels was discovered in a locker.  I am reading the novel now.  So it was an interesting coincidence.

I also found a Robert Ludlum novel in the cache and I will be reading that once I finish Out of Sight.

Dennis, a fellow HyLite trainer, agrees with my way of counting the amount of time my wife has been pregnant.  Helen does not.

Wuxi is hot and muggy.  And so the next two months will be hard on my pregnant wife.  Last night, we went out to eat but our mobility and thus choice of restaurants were reduced because she was not at all interested in going far.

The wife and I watched English Wuxi News Sunday at 1020 PM.  It was the first time either she or I had seen it.  What was the big news last night?  Government bureaucracies and Construction companies were going about their work:    was what I could make out from the dull administrative words being used.  Wuxi government officials went to Moscow to make deals with the Russians (evil Russians I would say); cultural projects are being completed with urges being given to redouble efforts to complete them faster; the Chinese are interested in the traditions of the Dragon Boat Festival; preparations are being made for possible flooding in the Wuxi area; and more electrical power is now in Wuxi's power grid in preparation for high Summer electricity demand.  The Commies  have a fetish about talking about electricity.

The Kindergarten under our bedroom window is silent these days.  Thank God.