Friday!

I have a blank screen staring me in the face.  Let's see what I can type.

For the second morning in a row, it is wet outside.  Today, I don't mind because I am scheduled to do an outdoor Olympic English event this evening (at my apartment complex on Wu Ai road, actually).  I wouldn't mind if it was canceled.

Yesterday, my wife was out at the new apartment till nearly eight o'clock because of a hole being too small and workers not wanting to do a job properly.  The washing machine is in the kitchen under a counter.  The washing machine my wife purchased is loaded from the front (instead of the top).  The plug-in and tap are  directly above the machine and the counter.  So we need to have a hole in the counter for a hose and electrical cord to run to the machine.  When workers installed the washing machine, we learned that the hole was too small and then the wife called in other workers to fix it.  So yesterday, they enlarged the hole  but  the work was ugly-looking, forcing my wife to insist that they do it properly.  And she had to fight them before they would do it.  So, what I have been told about apartment decoration is true.  The workers will do as little as possible, mediocrely as possible if you are not vigilant. 

The Toner was awake at 530 AM this morning.  Why?  I have no idea.  I look forward to a time when I have to kick his ass to get him out of bed.  It is the early-to-rise that lead.

What does 3.14 mean to you?  To me, it means the number "pi" that is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius (or do I mean diameter?).  Yesterday afternoon, I did a speaker's corner about numbers and what they mean to us:  For example, in China, four means death; to me, four means Bobby Orr, one of the greatest hockey players of all time.  When I put the number 3.14 on the board, I expected at least one student to tell me about pi.  What instead happened was that all students talked about Tibet.  The riots this year took place on March 14.  I lamented that I didn't want to talk about Tibet but the topic came up anyway.  So it seems that 3.14 was China's version of 9.11.  One student then mistakenly said that 3.14 was Valentine's day.  I said what about pi, and they went "oh!".

I also learned, in that Speaker's corner, that is traditional for Chinese in their animal years (that is when they are 12, 24, 36,...) to wear red underwear for the whole year.  So the next time, Wuxi Expat, you see a bar girl you may be able to deduce her age by looking at her underpants.  If you are married to a Chinese women, she will make you wear red underwear when you are 36, 48, 60, 72, 84...  And you will learn something about the occupants of an apartment when you see their laundry hanging.

There really isn't much I can say about the U.S. presidential election that hasn't already been said.  My opinion is that the three remaining candidates in the race are mediocre.  I think less and less of Obama by the hour.  He is now as divisive a figure as Bill Clinton was and may soon become more so because of the identity politics element that he mistakenly promised to transcend.  This has been said ad nauseam on the corners of the blogosphere I inhabit.  But I did read of a new way to describe Obama in this Evan Sayet essay that I am sure to become fashionable about right-wingers like me:

But Barry (Barrack) ... had a plan. He would run as the Seinfeld candidate — the candidate about nothing. He’d use meaningless bromides that would soothe the one side but not offend the other. His speeches would be packed with empty words like “hope” and “change,” knowing that what each side hoped for and the change they envisioned would be diametrically opposed, but neither side would know which one he meant.

Barack is the Seinfeld Candidate.