A left turn into the right lane.

• As I said before and I will say now and I will say again, my bike ride to work will be a constant source of material for this and my other blog. Tonight, I had a near collision with a three-wheeled self-propelled wagon. The driver of said vehicle made a left turn into the right lane that I was proceeding down. He was going the wrong way and he darn well saw me coming but he continued with his stupid maneuver anyway. And he keep turning leftwards, not giving me, as I was trying to go to my right, any room. Because everyone breaks the rules here in China, you can never be sure what someone who is going the wrong way is going to do when encountering approaching traffic. Sometimes, these drivers won't go to their right. Sometimes they may try to get around you on their left. What the wagon driver did tonight was so bizarre, I had to wonder what the hell he was thinking. I wonder also if he understood the meaning of the word "fuck!".
• A couple nights previous, I saw a near collision in front of me as a woman leisurely decided to turn leftwards from the center of the bike lane. Another scooter trying to pass her at that instance almost collided with her. In Chinese bicycle traffic and in car traffic, turn signals are never used or heeded.
• I definitely have a conservative temperament. I happened to find a book of grammar that was published in 1947. Leafing through the book, I found some quite useful information. Other teachers laughed at the book because it was published in 1947 saying it was way out of date. I don't think the rules of grammar have changed in 61 years. In fact, I don't think there has been any real innovations in grammar teaching in that time. I know if anything that the teaching of grammar was far more rigorous at that time than it was in when I was going to school. I spent my years after high school being ashamed of my grammar because I had never been rigorously taught about it. I had to go out and find books on my own to learn about it. Also, teaching English I have had to think about it. And typically the older books I have come across, to me, seem to do a better job of explaining grammar, as well as emphasizing its importance. There has been an approach to teaching it, in recent times, that has lead to lazy thoughts like those Orwell complained about in his seminal essay Politics and the English Language: an essay that is still relevant even though it was also written around 1947.
• The conservative temperament, however, does not automatically assume that everything old is necessarily better than something that is new. The Internet, for instance, is an absolutely wonderful thing because it allows one access to so much knowledge. But the conservative is justly suspicious of supposed progress and modernity. This time in history is clearly not a good time for poetry and painting and music. Modern poetry and painting and music are terrible. You would have to be a charlatan to even try to say otherwise. Movies, today while technically superior in many ways, have forgotten the discipline of plot and story telling. Watching the Dambusters, I was amazed at the quality of the acting and so could forgive the primitive special effects. The story was also told straight-forwardly with economy and I was never bored as I watched it. The only thing dated about the movie was the special effects. I have seen movies made in the 1980s that are much more dated because they were made at the moment, if you know what I mean. The actors look absolutely ridiculous in whatever the latest styles they had for clothes and hair. It may well be that people dressed better in old movies as well as took a more professional attitude to it.
• To be conservative, I think, is to be more open-minded about the past and appreciative of it. Coming to China, I have seen people operate in ways that are directly opposite to anything I had experienced in Canada. Some of what they do here is better and to be commended, while much of what we do in Canada is reprehensible. The same goes for people of different ages.