First plans for 2009. 2008 reflections #2

The Chinese don't celebrate Western New Year's Eve. For them, their Spring Festival slash Chinese New Year is more important. My survey of the students indicates that most Chinese won't stay up to mark the end of 2008 and the start of 2009.

Wuxi Expats will be celebrating. The odd few like me won't be. My wife being Chinese, my son being 16 months old, and the logistics of going to parties downtown while I live in the burbs, with no car, mean I am at my apartment blogging the final moments of 2008 away. It is all for the best. I will be blogging away at midnight (which is now 45 minutes away).

My wife has already determined my first plans for 2009. In the afternoon, I will be looking after Tony while she gets a new hairdo.


I was thinking about who was the person of 2008 and I will have to second David Warren's choice: Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin. She annoyed the right people. Palin is a decent woman who worked herself into her position. She had more experience than all the other candidates on the two major party tickets. She was also the only one of the four who could claim to have actually performed a productive day of work before. The hatred that the left had for Palin could have best been directed towards real bad people like Chavez, Al Franken, and many of Obama's old associates. But we don't live in a perfect world but any stretch of the imagination.

Obama doesn't get any consideration as man of the year for 2008 since his election was essentially affirmative action on masse anyway.

Bernard Madoff doesn't deserve any consideration either.


Someone is blowing off firecrackers to mark the beginning of 2009!


So ends what was an interesting year for China. 2008 for China saw a snow storm, a revealing to its' citizens that the world didn't like its government, a major earthquake, the Olympics, and the Financial Crisis.