Sunday Night and a day to go....

I took the photos below as I was coming home from work this evening, about seven p.m. or so. I used the dusk/dawn feature on my pocket Nikon and I am not at impressed with the results. My camera works best in sunlight or with the flash on Tony. You may be able to see couples dancing, ball room style, at the square near the complex containing Casa K, the official residence of the K family in China.

Kaulins Family Vacation 2009 will begin in less than 24 hours. Yours truly has one more day of work before it is off to the races or rather, off to the slowdown.

The heat that I hate has hit Wuxi. It doesn't seem like we had a spring. Some have said we had a long spring. But I don't remember it ever being comfortable. I must have missed this long spring they talk off. It was chilly in the mornings until all of a suddenly the mornings became hot with the sun shining down on you like a torch.

This evening I would describe as steamy. The first of the year. Taking the bus home, I saw some of the local men had taken off their shirts, draping them over their shoulders. I saw another man rolling his shirt up to reveal his belly. Yet another rolled up the legs of his pants to his knees. These practices would smack of a lack of class in Western countries, but it is acceptable here. I am thinking to take off my pants if it gets hot enough and wear nothing buy my B.V.D's.

I told Jenny about the hit-and-run I saw this morning (see previous entry). She told me that cyclist that fled was a bastard. I was under the impression that this action was though of as a necessary evil.

Students told me a ponzi scheme in Wuxi a few years back that fleeced locals of four billion yuan. It was run by a 50 year old woman promising 20 percent returns.

I can't have cold drink now with out Tony whining to have me give it to him.

The Canucks, I am sad to say, lost a big game to the Black Hawks this morning.

The poet laureates of America and England are 50 year lesbians. Whether they are really poets is another question. It leads me to wonder if Canada has a poet laureate and if so is this person a lesbian also. Right now, it seems we have a man in the role. I can find no mention of his sexual orientation. I suppose the parliament of Canada felt it safe to have a male since it already has had a female poet laureate. (Aren't they supposed to mention if the poet is married or not in the biography. I see no mention of her dividing her time between being a poet and a wife). This female was also a francophone - a double whammy for the Canadian Parliament. So, I suppose Canada will have to wait a while before it has its' own lesbian poet laureate.

John Derbyshire on the Arts/Sciences divide. That is, in Western Culture there came a point in the early 19th century where it could be said that Literary Intellectuals knew nothing about science and Scientists knew nothing about literature. I know this divide well. I was hoodwinked into going on the Arts side of the divide. In high school, I had done well in math and sciences. But somehow I missed out on the wonder of these fields, thinking it was all so nerdy and that poets and writers did cool things. What a dolt I was! Now in Wuxi, I see the engineers are the ones making the money. The literary types, if there are actually any, have become poor English teachers. Others may be refugees from sub-intellectual flim-flam pseudo-disciplines (Derb says this in the article). Anyway, this arts/sciences divide says Derbyshire is becoming a thing of the past as Science has routed Art. (Stuck in the boondocks, the divide was already stale when I became aware of and straddled it) The developments I have seen in my life time have been in science. In Art, there has been nothing new under the sun. To me an artist is the man I saw in Winnipeg who defended his vulgar behavior during a movie viewing by inisisting that he was "an artist". Furthermore, says Derb, there has been a shift of cultural and scientific hegemony from Europe to Asia. Europeans don't seem interested in having children and want nothing more than to work 30 hours a week and indulge themselves lazily on four day weekends. The Asians are taking up the strenuous intellectual activity....