Sit in
There are lots of government buildings near our apartment. Every once in a while, I have seen a citizen staging a sit-down protest or demonstration by security gates in front of these buildings.
On Wednesday, I saw a man, his crutches lying on the ground beside him, staging such a demonstration. The guards looked at him with annoyance -- they had to do some work. And a crowd was gathering.
I don't know how the stand-off was resolved.
Themes for the 2010 AKIC Canadian Odyssey
In the spirit of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, with its theme of "Better City, Better Life", I have made a list of possible themes for our June 2010 Odyssey to Canada:
- I didn't get a cheap sex-change operation!
- I don't know how much a sex-change operation is!
- Mmm! Beer!
- My lungs are fine.
- Sorry! I have been away in China for nearly six years!
- Look at all the Laowai!
- Wow! Solid construction!
- Wow! What attention to detail!
- A Wuxiren surveys the Great White North.
- Mmmm! Bread and bacon and smarties and crunchie bars and cottage cheese and Crown Royal and....
- Returning to the Big Quiet
- Blue Skies!
- My! How you have grown!
- Nothing changes!
- Ignorant Buffoon! That is why I moved to China!
- Meeting Old Latvians.
- Who is our P.M.?
- Better Food. Better Life.
Why Lady Gaga is like a duck
The students think of the current pop fashion queen as being something of a duck. For in China, ducks go "ga ga!". In the west, ducks go "quack quack!".
Lady Quackquack!?!
They know not what the words on their shirts say
I saw an old women board the bus. She was wearing a shirt with sentences, emblazoned thereon, about the latest punk street fashion.
A Chinese Road to Damascus?
No such stories in Chinese legend and history, if what the students said when I asked about it in a recent English Corner is true.
I was told that converts from the KMT to the C's in the civil war would have been shot, by the C's.
New Mosquito-killing Racket
The one that my wife just bought is really deluxe. It comes with a light. Soon, it will be an application for the Ipad.
East of Eden
I bought the DVD for this movie for two rmb at Nanchang Market. The trouble with this movie is that it stars James Dean, which is paradoxically why I watched it. Dean certainly was good-looking although his face does reflect the hardness of growing up in the thirties and forties. But I don't know what to make of his acting. In a way he was performing, not acting -- if you understand my distinction (he was showing off; not depicting). At its time, I am sure his performance was different; now, it seems dated, like Freud.
Hating Stop-and-Chats
Walking with Tony, I find I am not interested in chatting with passers-by who want to ask all sorts of questions about Tony. The questions are all the same.
And the beautiful girls that take an interest in Tony -- I don't know what to say to them.
A look of contempt
Man turning his van near us gives Tony and me a look that seemed to be other than curiosity.
The world is full of yahoos.
I was listening to a recent podcast from Econtalk about psychiatry. Psychiatry like Economics is in the midst of an existential crisis. People wonder what practical things these two fields have to offer the world. Both seem to be verging on pseudo-scientific by pretending to make empirical and measurable observations about what is ultimately subjective and non-isolatable.
Psych and Econ have both influenced and concerned me. I studied, if you could call whatever it was I was doing, Economics at University of Winnipeg. I also wasted years thinking I was suffering from depression when really I was reacting, naturally but pathetically, to some mediocre circumstances. I took anti-depressants because it was a fashion. It was only Rush Limbaugh and a hard-headed Irish cousin who saved me from a life of imagined neuroses and being an armchair Keynesian hoping for more help from the government.
I just finished reading the Journey to the West on pdf: 1400 pages, a chapter a day. The book ends with these lines:
Let anyone who sees or hears
Cherish the enlightened mind.
May all be reborn in the Land of Bliss,
To end this present life of retribution.
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