Move over Rover! AKIC is moving in!
- As I type this, sweat pours profusely down my forehead.
- Walking through the apartment complex with Tony, I hear "Laowai, Laowai!"
- Tony is older in months than I am in years. That became official on July 23. Tony will be four on August 23.
- As I type this, I have only one pair of reading glasses left! The other pair dropped on the floor breaking the frame. The lenses are fine. Tuesday, I hope to get a new frame for them.
- As I type this, I must say that a period of 24 hours separates the previous bullet from this bullet. I got new frames for the glasses.
- I was able to go a favorite Muslim restaurant of mine because it was across the street from a dental office that Jenny had to go to.
- While Jenny was at the dentist and then getting me new reading glass frames, I took Tony to a playground. As he played, I was reading books on the Ipad. I read chapters of 1984, Homage to Catalonia, Ulysses, and Wealth of Nations. I then read a Playboy interview of Marshall McLuhan which I comment on in a following bullet. All the books and the interview I was able to download for free off the Internet. Hours of fun for me it would be if Tony and Jenny didn't demand the Ipad as well.
- Tony, at the playground, spent his time sitting in a toy car. He didn't mix much with the other kids except to jump on a trampoline with them. But then he would get upset if someone else sat in the toy car, and rode away with it. There was one time when Tony was holding the hand of a boy bigger than him to get him to follow which was strange.
- The K family then had supper at a nearby Pizza Hut. Tony had to have both the Ipad and Parmesan Cheese container to play with. He couldn't have both so we took the Ipad away -- the Ipad was at least stopping Tony from running around the restaurant.
- As I type this, sweat again pours profusely down my forehead.
- Time to put some short Latin phrases in my blog entries!
- I went downtown today, cum uxoribus et liberis.
- I publish blog entries una voce -- not uno animo.
- AKIC comes to you, ex dono dei.
- After supper, I had to catch a taxi to get a company class I was to teach in the Wuxi New District. It being about 530 p.m., the competition to catch taxis was stiff. I had to walk a bit to find a place where I wasn't part of a group. I thought I had found a spot on Zhongshan Road, but this group of people ran in front of me as I was trying to wave down an oncoming taxi. They basically stole the taxi from me. I was pissed, but not pissed enough to whack them. I gave them a stiff middle finger that left no doubt what my attitude towards them at that moment was. They responded by saying sorry! sorry! sorry! in a manner, that I think of it now, was of people who were in a desperate hurry to catch a train. But then it also reminded me of the way locals trying to cheat you respond when you have caught them. I will have to satisfy myself with fantasies of having tackled them and then taken the taxi from them.
- After the class, I took a taxi from the company to European Street so I could catch a bus a home. It was just my luck that two minutes before the Taxi got me to European Street, it began to rain torrentially. It was the heaviest rain I had seen all Summer. The place where the taxi dropped me off was already ankle deep in water. A huge puddle already formed at a nearby intersection. Some people riding electric bikes decided to pull to shelter to wait the storm out. At the bus stop I was at, everyone clung to the sheltered parts of the stop. Riding the bus home, I was treated to scenes of rain puddle carnage. Some intersections were a foot deep in water.
- I enjoyed the Marshall McLuhan interview. I will probably read it again to gain a better appreciation of it. I was interested to know that he was an admirer of Pound, Joyce, Chesterton, Eliot, and Yeats; and that he was a fervent Catholic. McLuhan said many interesting things though I think some of his predictions haven't been borne out. I do think it is true, as he says, that the media has changed our perceptions of the world in radical way, though really one doesn't have be a genius to realize this. McLuhan, however, provides striking depictions of how radical our perception changes have been. There would have been no industrial revolution without the printing press he insists.
- McLuhan said something about the Kennedy--Nixon election that I thought wasn't true. He latched onto the narrative that Kennedy gained a big advantage by looking more telegenic in the televised debate. If this was so, why was it that Kennedy apparently needed crooked means in Chicago to win what was a squeaker of an election?
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