Gratitude postponed.

The K Family won't go to the Big Buddha tomorrow. We will go on a day where we can go for cheaper, or free; and tomorrow can't be that day. We will have to be grateful in other ways.

So, I can sleep and play with Tony tomorrow; I don't have to carry him about.

My wife says Tony has quite the temper if he doesn't get his way. So his parents are going to have to develop the patience to win the battle of wills.


This morning on the bus ride to work, the video screen showed President Oprah's announcement of the removal of the ban on stem cell research. It looked like the rally of a team just having won the Super Bowl. Cheering and Whooping it up on a controversial decision like that certainly isn't transcending politics or being bi-partisan.


I bought a English language book about the Long March that was published in 1978 (in China) at one of the used book stalls mentioned in a previous entry. I read the first few pages of it tonight. It tells me Chairman Mao had the correct views of military strategy in the battles before the Long March, unlike the the Left opportunists who made the mistake of fightism. Thankfully, the book has pictures to break the monotony and bombast of the prose.

The book is definitely an artefact.

The book comes with a pull-out map of the Long March in which Jiangsu is spelt Kiangsu, and Anhui is spelt Anhwei. The spelling of Chinese place names differs from book to book because there have been several systems of spelling and representing Chinese word sounds. I had assumed that the pinyin system that the Chinese use today was adopted in the Communist era. So it seems odd to me that a book published in China in 1978 would not use the pinyin system of spelling.