February 2017 Notes

They always say that anything a Republican does will provoke Muslims and turn them into potential terrorists. How come they never say that anything a Democrat does will provoke people into joining the Ku Klux Klan? What is with the Democrats and their belief in the inherent weakness and irrationality of people who aren't conservative or Western?

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I made another student cry. What I did to make this boy cry was to separate him from another student with whom he was constantly talking as I was trying to do my class. It was a thing that I have done before in classes without an outpouring of tears. The crying came as a sort of a surprise to me because I noticed a tear in his eyes followed by an a seeming waterfall of them after the moving of him had escaped my thoughts.

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The results of a physical exam taken of yours truly for insurance purposes: I have high blood sugar levels. I am going to have to cut back bigtime on the sweets and sweet drinks.

Fine I say. It was something I had been thinking I should be doing anyway. Now, I have been given impetus.

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Saturday, February 4^th, I am at school and I am listening to loud fireworks. Some business is opening for the new year.

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I had to retake the blood test. We drove to the Hongqiao Hospital on ChangJiang Road to do so. Parking around the hospital building was horrific. Pathways through the parked cars had been whittled down to the width of a car. There was lots of double-parking. Cars trying to enter and exit the parking area were in each other's way. We were lucky because we stumbled upon a mostly empty parking lot that was across the street from the hospital, at the B&Q home decorating center. It seems that the locals have this mentality about parking as close to a place as possible and don't like having to walk anywhere.

I eagerly await the results.

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In China I was able to watch, on live TV, the Super Bowl, between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, going into overtime. Was it the greatest Super Bowl of all time? I don't know. The actual OT period was an anti-climax. In fact, as soon as it was certain the game would go into OT, I stopped watching.

It seemed to me that this result was destined to happened. I am happy at this stage of my life to stop watching any sporting match if I think the winner is certain. But in the back of my mind, I have this feeling that the games are fixed and the winner is never at all certain It seems that when these games are played, things just always happen to make a lead collapse like referees calling holding penalties and teams with leads making own-goal type mistakes.

What was far more interesting for me about the game was Tony's watching of it. I had a hard time explaining to him that New England was not a country but a region of the United States and so it didn't have a flag. Tony more interestingly proclaimed that he wanted to be a football player. I suppose he found the helmets and gear that the players were wearing to be quite attractive.

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Don Quixote and and his squire Sancho Panza, Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves. What is it about these pairings that I find so profound and the basis of great literature and comedy?

David Warren in a blog entry I have just read said that the Wooster and Jeeves characters have been responsible for some conversions to Catholicism. Warren and I find this interesting because Wodehouse was not a Christian. I recall reading that when Wodehouse was asked about his religious inclinations by Malcom Muggeridge, he replied that he didn't have any.

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I had a student who was born on December 24^th. Niel's not a Dragon like I am, however.

As I like to say, I am born in the year of the Dragon like Bruce Lee, and am a Capricron like Jesus Christ.

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Subject of my SPC: Words that start with the prefix Ex.

What does the prefix Ex mean? I ask the students.

One of them said "former." So I went on to give the following example: "Obama is now an ex-president. President Trump has two ex-...." The group then said "wives" and laughed or smiled in amusement.

It was a good bit and I am proud of it.

Then I made a joke about how one student who respond to those who said he was lazy and just sat on the sofa all day. "You should tell them you are "ercising."

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Here is what I should have said when a pretty female student told me she didn't have a boyfriend: "You know, I don't have a boyfriend either. How nice is it to have something in common with a pretty girl."

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I ask the students if they got lots of hongbao (red pocket money) during the Spring Festival. I then ask them if they can give it to me. This gets them to laugh.

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I passed the second blood test. Those four days of avoiding sugary things must have helped.

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My feelings about Trump? I am inclined to like him now but I feel slightly uneasy about doing so. I can only defend my liking him by saying I like the paradoxical aspects of his whole being. He is a bullshit artist who doesn't put up with the bullshit of his opponents.

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So Trump meet the Canadian Prime Minister. I was disappointed to hear that there were no fireworks and nothing untoward happened. I had this fantasy that Trump would look at the Canadian PM (who is my PM, whether I like or not) and ask "who is this pretty boy?"

I first learned of the visit of the PM to Washington from a Donald Trump tweet. Accounts I scanned of it said the PM did a wonderful job. Of course, this was the Globe and Mail: a left wing rag the last time I bothered to check. More interesting to this Canadian was the fact that the PM's meeting Trump was reported on the Wuxi Metro's video screens.

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Abandon your prejudices! This is an imperative sentence for left-wingers to heed; not right-wingers.

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The first few days of taking Tony to primary school in the new term, I can report that the traffic that I have encountered is worse than ever. The only moment of satisfaction I have had was when I stopped a driver from a BMW from cutting in front of me while I was part of a long lineup trying to get through a light. I lustily crept forward and honked my horn at the woman who was driving. Of course, the woman drove BMW further along the lineup and cut in front of someone else.

In every local jam or traffic delay, there are always more than a few drivers who try to cut in line.

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Tony & I are going to visit Canada in August. We hope to spend some time in BC and an equal amount of time in Manitoba. I hope I can get Tony out to a Canadian Football League game as well as to a baseball game. I also like to get him to the USA for a day so he can say he has been.

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Tony loves watching the film Hacksaw Ridge. He saw it in the cinema and I then saw him watching it on the computer.

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Twelve years, going on thirteen years in China, and I probably speak the language worse than Bill Gates. What an embarassment!

The best that I can say is that I am familiar with the language and some of its written characters.

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Crossing the street, I like to make the cars stop or slow down for me. I have to do this because in Wuxi and everywhere else in China, the drivers show no courtesy to pedestrians and will never ever yield to them unless they absolutely must, to avoid a collision which would damage their car. Having grown up in the West where yielding to pedestrians is mandatory, I just can't accept the Chinese practice because it strikes me as being the height of rudeness.

I know one foreigner who says that he never slows down as he crosses the street and can always gets the cars to stop or slow down. I wouldn't go that far in fighting the Chinese practice because some cars are going a little too fast and I feel it would be suicide for me to try and get them to yield to me; but I often find that when there is a group of pedestrians, all locals, who are waiting to cross the street, I am the one who is taking the initiative and I find myself leading this group of pedestrians to walk across the street because I forced cars to come to a stop or slow down.

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One February 2017 morning, I was crossing the street at the crossing near the entrance to my school. I walked aggresively and forced cars to slow down in order to yield to me. One car did try to stop me by honking its horn at me, but had to slow down which gave me no end of satisfaction. Even more gratifying was the fact that the driver of this car had forgotten to turn off his right turn indicator. I enjoyed how this gaffe gave me anecdotal evidence to continue in my belief that local drivers are both rude and stupid.

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I stopped adding to my February notes sometimes before Valentine's Day. So, I am sad to report that I didn't do any blogging for two weeks. I will try to compensate for this by giving you a quick summary of these two or three weeks: It was the start of the grind where I had get up at 5:50 AM to drive Tony to school every morning, I taught classes to the brats at Big Bridge Primary School, I did not have not much free time on my days off because I had to drive Tony to extra classes and I had other chores imposed on me by my wife Jenny.

Sigh.

Comments?  Email me at andiskaulins@qq.com or andiskaulins@hotmail.com