Friday Thoughts about the week and life in general.

• Shanghai is either holding or has just held the first ever Gay Pride Festival in China.  Now, I will try to be careful in what I say.  After once mentioning that I spanked my son Tony, once mistakenly attributing the creation of Hopalong Cassidy to Louis L'Amour, and several times questioning the morality of people who wrongly, in my sensible opinion, like the wild card in baseball, I can receive strange comments.  But, what the hay!  The worst readers are the one who don't read you.  Anyway, I asked some students here in Wuxi about this Gay Pride Festival.  Most of them hadn't heard about it though it had made the front page of the China Daily, English Edition.  Most didn't have an opinion about it, which I suppose is sensible if you don't know what exactly a Gay Pride Festival is.  The ones who understood the phrase "Gay Pride Festival" thought it was strange.  The best comment came from a student who said that it must have all the foreigners in Shanghai who were running it.  I responded in the manner of "touchez!".
• It is just me or does the China Daily, English Edition, seem tailored to people who vote for the Democrats in the U.S?
• I asked Harry Moore if he would prefer living in a Hollywood Musical or a town where everyone was three inches tall (relative to other normal things on earth) and had squeaky voices.  He immediately choose the first option by living in the land of Oz where the workday was short and everyone laughed all day, ha, ha, ha.  But I eventually sold him on the idea of the second option when I told him that these small squeaky-voiced people had missile defence systems to thwart Cat and Dog attacks.
• I went to a Subway sandwich shop in Shanghai (in the Nanjing shopping street area).  The counter person was friendly enough but his pronunciation needed some practice.  Still, it was charming, in a way, to ask the man to confirm if he meant "cucumbers".
• I often try to get my students to identify that there was an missing article in Neil Armstrong's famous  pronouncement "This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.  I found it interesting that David Warren, a must read on the Internet, mentioned that a study has determined that Armstrong had not said the missing article "a".  The controversy about this missing article is niggling, but there is a lesson to be learnt from this.  According to Warren:   "A wealth of detail lies in small things; how rich is the world, and how little of it we master."  How true.  It was quite a feat to get to the moon, and yet to omit the simple article.
• I have heard that the curry at Kevin's Curry House (which can be seen from my school) is mild and bland.  But I will have to check it out for myself later this afternoon.
• Photos taken in Shanghai to come soon!
• Thanks to the person who, out of the blue, volunteered to take a photo of the K family in Shanghai.
• Shanghai Expats asked me where Wuxi was.  Oh boy!