Homebody Chronicles Continued; Cancelled Flights; Old Movies; Case for Trump, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Bendict; Water off a Duck's Back

• For AKIC, the current crisis has been completely experienced in Casa Kaulins. To while away the time, I have been downloading, reading, watching video, doing some household tasks, waiting for my cold to go away, doing a few things on social media, praying (not out of desperation but observing the habit I have told myself I should have), watching my wife Jenny tiger-mother tutor Tony, thinking, and doing this: blogging.

• The news of flights being cancelled to and from China doesn't really affect me. I was going to be stuck here any way. 

• I have been watching old movies. One day for the duration of the crisis and my being a Casa Kaulins homebody.

• I finished reading VDH's Case for Trump which has reenforced my feeling about the president. Trump is flawed but better than everybody else there. The best part of the book was VDH drawing parrallels between Trump and many characters from famous Hollywood Westerns. Trump has gotten himself in a situation where he has to save the day in the manner of Shane or the John Wayne character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Trump is the hero who will never get the credit he deserves.

• An even more impressive book I read was The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Bendict. It is a book about the Japanese written after World War Two by an anthropologist. Never have I read a book that so showed how profound cultural differences can be. I now have to change my assumptions about the locals and have more tolerance for the things they do that I find so baffling and annoying about them. They really are much different animals from me. ( And now if only I can get my wife to appreciate our cultural differences. I also wonder if Asians could write such a book, an anthropoligical about Westerners. I know my wife couldn't. )

• There really isn't much for me to do stuck in the apartment. I am trying to keep myself busy but I am on egg shells with my wife Jenny being around. There is always a chance that something will suddenly set her off. All I can do is wait for these tirades to burn themselves out. So, in the meanwhile, I will have to deal with all of Jenny's criticisms, which will come sure as the sun rises and sets, like one for whom everything is water off a duck's back. But there is going to be a lot of water. Heck, it will probably be a flood. For as I blog this, there is going to be at least ten more days of this.

The Homebody Chronicles; AKIC Spring Festival Start; Xinjiezhen; In the Nick of Time; Back in Wuxi; Garbage Picker; Panic or Pandemic?;

• In the midst of the biggest crisis in Chinese history, since the last crisis in Chinese history, I have been a homebody. I have experienced the Coronavirus saga via social media, which in China is WeChat. Still having the annoying cough I blogged about in the previous entry, I have avoided going out and interacting with people.

• What started out as the Spring Festival began with the Kaulins Family (that be my Chinese wife Jenny, our son Tony, and I) driving to the Taizhou area to spend a couple of nights with my in-laws. To get to Xinjiezhen, a part of the Taizhou district where the in-laws reside, we took a different way from last year's Spring Festival (where we took a ferry to get across the Yangtze river) and from previous Spring Festivals (where we would use the Jiangying Bridge and thus endure annoying traffic jams). This year, we took a route where we took the Taizhou Bridge across the Yangtze. This route, though a little longer in distance than the Jiangying Bridge route, was much smoother sailing because there were no traffic delays. (The Taizhou Bridge is north of the Jiangying Bridge. It as long as the Jiangying Bridge and more impressive a structure, but it doesn't seem to offer as amazing a view of the Yangtze.) Jenny, for the first time, did the driving. Much as I wanted to drive, I didn't want to take the risk of having a coughing fit that would temporarily incapacitate me. (As I said, this cough I have is annoying!)

• We spend two nights in Xinjiezhen. I only left the in-law's compound twice. The first time, to do a little bit of shopping; and the second time to go to a public shower. Because of my cough, I spent most of my time in the guest bedroom, only coming out for meals; and I had to refuse all offers of cigarettes. It also didn't help that the weather was gray, cold and damp. All I did was finish watching the first season of the Witcher (A Game of Thrones like series with overwrought dialogue and many moments where I was confused about the narrative and who the characters were.); watch the 1940 film Philadelphia Story (which I found more enjoyable than the Witcher) ; and read a short book entitled Happiness and Contemplation by Josef Pieper where he made an elegant argument to support the assertion that "the ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation." (An assertion that I hope is true and is in tune with a past assertion of mine that happiness is centered between one's ears.) I couldn't wait to leave the Xinjiezhen, but when we did, I did so with a tinge of guilt because I had behaved like a null entity towards my in-laws who are sweet people.

• But it turned out that we left Xinjiezhen in the nick of time. I learned that the next day that the authorities closed the road we had taken to get back to Casa Kaulins. It wouldn't have been nice to have been in stuck in Xinjiezhen for the Coronavirus crisis with just two days change of clothes.

• Back in Wuxi, I have mostly stayed in the apartment. Our first full day back, I didn't leave the apartment and recorded only 249 steps on my walking mobile phone app. There was nothing to do but monitor news of the crisis and read reactions to the death of Kobe Bryant (on WeChat, many of my Chinese contacts posted tributes. I broke my moratorium on posting to WeChat moments, to post photos of Kobe with Yao Ming which were appreciated by these contacts.). I got an email from my supervisor telling me that I wouldn't be going back to work till February 9^th, thus extending my holiday by ten days. My one Canadian contact in Wuxi told me that the grocery stores in his area had empty shelves and advised me to stock up on supplies which I did, the next morning. Then, I drove through mostly empty streets and rode on mostly empty buses. I attribute the lack of traffic to the fact that most people in the area had left for the holiday and not so much to the crisis. Tony's return to school was also delayed a week. Discussing this with Tony, he told me he wished his teachers would get the virus. (That's my boy!)

• Despite not seeing many people, I did see one local do, what I thought was, a strange thing. On the second morning after our return to Wuxi, I took out some garbage, including that from the bathroom (TP is not flushed down the loo in China). I put this and other garbage in a fancy box, with string handles, that could be folded into a easy carrying state. Because I was then going to do some grocery shopping, I returned to the apartment to wash my hands. When I went out again, I saw a man walk past me with what looked like the box I had just thrown away. Passing the garbage area, I saw the box I had thrown out wasn't there, thus confirming that the man who I walked past was a garbage picker. It just goes to show that garbage sorting need not be made mandatory – it is already being done.

• One last thing I want to mention about my return to Wuxi was being able to listen to the latest podcast of John Derbyshire, a reactionary opinionator, a former Brit turned American citizen, a husband of a mainland Chinese woman, and a bit of sino expert. His take on the Crisis was that it was more of a panic than a pandemic, which I found reassuring for I also listened to a podcast where the possibility of 65 million people dying on account on the coronavirus was raised. As Derb said, we do live in an hysterical era and the Chinese are an hysterical people. And the Chinese system of governance being what it is, there is incentive for many Chinese officials to take advantage of the crisis.

Scrunch!!; Spring Festival Sucks!; Bad Cold; Coronavirus; Burn the Canadian Flag, Please!; Andy Warhol was a Catholic

• As I have been saying often in this blog, the locals will park their cars anywhere. The authorities try to battle this tendency with bollards, pylons and whatever other obstacles they can stop to the parkers. But the local drivers slash parkers persist and will do whatever they can to maneuver around the bollards. Walking down Zhongshan Road one day last week, I saw a small compact car trying to drive through a pair of huge stone balls with satisfying results to this onlooker. A series of these large balls, instead of post-type bollards, had been placed on that stretch of road to stop the driver from doing from he was trying to do, which was to drive from the sidewalk onto the e-bike lane. The driver thought that by driving through the big heavy balls at an angle, he could get the car through. Any onlooker seeing the driver try to do this would have known that the driver was doomed. Yours truly, an onlooker just happened to walk by as the driver was trying this maneuver. This onlooker saw the side of the car dented by the stone ball. These was a Scrunch sound which resulted in a distressed look on the driver. I could only laugh the poor schmuck. I did think a little later that I should feel sorry for him – he was a local and perhaps couldn't help himself. But the locals thoughtlessness when it comes to parking and dealing with obstacles is so prevalent that I have lost patience with it. I was on my way to school when I witnessed the scrunching and immediately told one of my colleagues. He related a story of a time he saw another local, a female, do the same thing. Only thing different was this woman tried to drive straight through the bollards. She got to a point where the bollards were wedged against the front doors. The woman could only get out of the car by getting through the back doors so she then could stand helplessly and foolishly wondering what she was going to have to do to get out of her predicament. (I never did see how my driver got out of his.)

• I hate Spring Festival. The foreigners who can get out of China during Spring Festival have it good. Unfortunately, I am stuck here for it. I would happily stay in Wuxi and be a homebody, but sometimes Jenny & I feel obligated to go to her hometown at Spring Festival when it is over run with all these other people who have to go there as well. I wouldn't mind so much going to her hometown if I didn't have to do during a Chinese holidays. Chinese holidays are the worst!

• For nearly two weeks, I have had a bad cold. Symptoms are a bad cough and a runny nose. The runny nose is not so noticeable given how phlegmy my cough is. When I walk up in the morning, I have a long bout of coughing because of the phlegm that has built up inside me during the evening.

• Having this cold during the hype about the Coronavirus is a coincidence, I hope. I don't have the more serious symptoms associated with the virus. The cough I have is embarrassing to have when I have a big bout of it during a class, and I wonder if people are thinking.... Other than that all I have to report is that I have seen more people wearing masks. I did see a foreign man, with child, at a crowded subway station; and they appeared to be making their way through the crowd of locals with trepidation while wearing the thickest of masks. On the local Wuxi expat wechat group, I have seen a lot of traffic about the virus. A couple commentators made jokes about the virus name and Corona beer. Many others have commented that the news about the virus is pure hype and that for most people there is nothing about which to worry. I have had one person outside of China ask if I was wearing a mask. I was surprised to see one of my favorite bloggers, the Z Man from Baltimore, write a post about it.

• I did a Speaker's Corner, topic Anger. One student, with a precocious manner of speaking for a middle school student, attended. I asked him what made him angry, and he talked about how seeing the Hong Kong people desecrate the flag of the People's Republic of China made him angry. I responded that the people of Hong Kong were expressing their anger at the Chicom government. Later, I thought about how I would feel if the flag of Canada was burned in protest by Chinese or other foreigners. I couldn't see myself getting upset about it, because in a way it would a back-handed compliment. Canada would, in that case, be in the small league of country importance as say the USA, the PRC and the old Soviet Union. So it would be a wonderful thing because Canada was mattering. The reason our flag isn't getting burnt these days is because Canada's official ideology is one of soft power pussydom. If Canada's flag was burnt, it would meant that Canada had balls again. (I pray that Meng Wanzhou is deported to the USA and our flag gets burnt big time.)

• I learned that the artist Andy Warhol was a faithful Catholic attending mass as often as he could.  I picked up this info while listening to a podcast from a Catholic who knew him and thus had praise for him. Her interlocutor added a thought that there was a certain type of Catholic that was very Protestant in having an attitude that we can't interact with the modern world. I then almost immediately came upon another article about Warhol that said that while Warhol was a faithful Catholic, his art was terrible and he didn't seem to stop the cultural rot that the sixties had brought on and actually seemed to be an ally of it. So what to think? While it is nice to know that Warhol was a Catholic, he was no saint, and it would be better for me to get inspiration from the likes of Mother Angelica and Rick Santorum. These two don't hide their faith and have endured the arrows and barbs that their professions of belief in Jesus Christ bring in this modern world.

Everyone is an A-hole

The rich are just assholes with stuff.

The poor are just assholes without stuff.

The middle class are just the assholes in between.

Socialists are just assholes who are stupid enough to think that redistribution can change this.

The broke are just assholes without money.

Politicians are just assholes who want power.

Activists are just assholes who think that being annoying is a good thing.

Criminals are just assholes who hurt other assholes.

Celebrities are just assholes known to all the other assholes.

Feminists are females who think that women can be assholes just like men.

Children are just little assholes.

Idealists are just assholes who believe that assholes can stop being assholes.

Communists are just assholes who believe that one day we will stop being assholes, but in the mean while assholes should be killed off to bring this glorious day when there will be a dictatorship of assholes who aren't assholes.

Comedians are just assholes who can make a living by talking like assholes.

Philosophers are just assholes who think too much.

Gurus are just assholes who can fool other assholes.

Do-gooders are just assholes.

Wise guys are just assholes who should be punched by other assholes.

Christians are mostly just assholes except for the saints who were nonetheless assholes as well but were able to overcome it in some aspect.

Muslims are just assholes who pray five times a day and lord it over the other assholes if they could.

Jews are just assholes, only more so.

The Chinese are just assholes who think they live in the asshole kingdom.

An asshole in a car thinks that just all the other assholes in all the other cars are assholes.

Victims, these days, are just assholes who were lucky enough to have had bad luck.

If you want to be thought of a real asshole, just point all this out to the other assholes.

Five Incidents of Local Boorishness

• I took the train home Friday evening. This local man sitting beside had to rest his leg against a pole used by standing passengers. I imagined asking him if he was a peasant.

• I got off that train and was walking home when I came to this intersection where I dutifully waited for the green pedestrian light. It came on and I was halfway across the intersection when a car making a turn gave me a fright. It came straight towards me at a high rate of speed. Instinctually, I pulled down my umbrella and used it as a shield. The car slowed down and went around me. It didn't come close enough so I could pound my fist on it; I was only able to hit it with my umbrella. I had to wonder if the driver was expecting me to yield or if the driver just didn't see me. It was the sort of thing to raise in me a permanent ire at the locals and their drivers and their manners.

• The next morning, I was at the subway station, I laid my bag on the belt going through the X-ray machine. A women, who was behind me rushed ahead of me and stood at the other end of the machine waiting to pick up the bag she had placed behind mine. She was blocking my way. I swore at her. I heard many a foreigner in China complain about this sort of local behavior.

• On a bus ride back in the evening, I sat across from this old woman who was sleeping. She had placed a big bags of vegtables on each of the two seats beside her. Selfish.

• Walking home even later that evening, I saw a man park his SUV at the end of a side street so that it was blocking the sidewalk. An e-biker having to come to a complete stop so she could wedge her way through the narrow gap the SUV had availed her, told off the driver as he stood by his vehicle. I joined in and said "Nice parking asshole!" I don't know if he understood me or even picked up on my tone but it felt good to say this. The man was middle-aged.

• The range of ages of the locals behaving badly was from about 25 to 70.

R.I.P.

Spring Festival Plans; ESL Grifters; An Analogy for Pelosi; 699, Teaching versus Stand Up; The Silent Treatment

• We plan to go to the wife's hometown for Spring Festival, but not for long, which suits me. Spring Festival, as it is currently, is a waste of time. A holiday with no spirit or soul or purpose.

• Grifters. The Z Man had a blog entry about grifters on the Internet. The Internet is a great place for them to thrive he says. The China ESL game is a great place for grifters as well. The people who own or manage them have created a racket. Many of the foreigners who come here to teach are also grifters as well. And having been here in China for too long in this racket, I should know because I have meet many of them. Sadly, the locals can often be taken in by them. I have been taken in by a few of them myself, I will admit. I should have beaten these cons with a baseball bat, but I left it at just having little to do with them as possible. The most pathetic of the grifters are the obese ones. And then there are the Sexpats....

• Pelosi, the speaker of the house, tried to make a analogy where she said that Trump killing that Salami guy was akin to the Iranians killing a ranking member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and thus the killing was so terrible. I think Trump was doing the Iranians a favour. Getting rid of that terrible man would be akin to the Iranians getting rid of the Democrat members of congress or more specifically, Pelosi herself. The Iranians in that case would be doing the Americans a favour.

• Ma Yuan's 699 idea (six days, 12 hours of work per week) was necessary for China development said one of the students. Fuck off! I didn't say.

• Teaching akin to stand off comedy? Perhaps. Sometimes, it sucks and you want to get it over with. And your audience are mostly morons: perfect marks for grifters.

• The silent treatment. That's my way of dealing with people who annoy me. I don't even tell them why they have pissed me off. I let them form their own stupid theories.

Mosquitoes; Getting Local Drivers Mad; Trump Kills Salami; Iranian Funerals; 63 “Canadians”; Company Drives To and Fro

• Lots of mosquitoes in our apartment. Have no idea why. Five a night have kept me from sleeping by buzzing in my ears as I am in bed.

• Every once in a while I get a local driver mad at me. They seem to think that they can go very fast without consideration for others and when I block them off, they don't like it. I have had a few then try to cut me off after my blocking them. Revenge is sweet.

• What do I think of Trump having that Salami or whatever-his-name-is-Iranian-wacko killed? I am conflicted. I like the idea of the Americans having the most powerful military in the world. I also agree with the idea of the Americans not using it to advance an American empire. I have come around to agreeing with them not using it to advance the neo-con agenda. What Bush Two's war in Iraq showed was that the people of the Middle East are a bunch of barbaric cretins and it was rash fantasy to think that they were capable of Jeffersonian democracy. But I have no problem with the Americans using their military might to tell others not to fuck with them. So the Iranians arranging an attack on an American Embassy deserved a counter strike, and I clap one hand for Trump having killed this Salami fellow. But ideally, it would be nice if America got out of the middle east. Let the tent-living, camel riding, boy-diddling Arabs and Persians to their own perverse devices.

• Thirty five people killed at the Salami funeral. The Iranians are as good at arranging funerals as the Chinese are as driving in traffic.

• 63 "Canadians" killed in the flight that crashed (or was shot down) in Iran. All these "Canadians" whose names I have heard have Iranian names. Because you have to wonder what so many "Canadians" were doing in a country with which Canada doesn't have diplomatic relations.

• I was driven to and from this company in the Hui Shan District in an area far from Casa Kaulins. I did a class there. The class was the usual; it was the drives that gave me some material for which I could blog. On the drive to the company, of which there are many possible routes, I was taken down a stretch of road I had never seen before. It was like I was driving in the downtown of some district, as I passed many hotels and restaurants and shops. The driver told me that in this area there were knock-off restaurants that took the names of popular chain restaurants but only changed a letter. So for example, if there was a chain called SJW, the knock-off restaurant would name itself SWJ or JWS, keeping the logo and color scheme of the restaurant it was copying. On the drive from the company to my home, I saw my driver do a maneuver that would grit my teeth if I was in another vehicle. There were three cars waiting at a light to make a left turn. My driver, seeing that the light was about to change, "gunned it" so she could pass all three cars by driving around them on the left. She giggled as she made this maneuver, indicating she had an attitude of "Yeah, it is wrong but WTF!" I said nothing. She then told me that her plan for the upcoming Spring Festival was to fly with family to Beijing. She was going, she told me, because her parents had never been in a plane before, and her father wanted to see the corpse of Chairman Mao in Beijing. I said nothing. (Sometimes, when I am in a prickly mood, I like to tell the students that Chairman Mao is responsible for the death of more innocent human beings than anyone else in history.)

Books AKIC Read in 2019

Here are the books I read in 2019:

Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories by Elmore Leonard

Famous Men of Ancient Times by Samuel G. Goodrich

The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal edited by M Auguste Molinier

The World According to Rick by Rick Sanchez

The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosphers by Diogenes Laërtius

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Tucker by Louis L'amour

Steve McQueen: The Conversion of an American Icon by Greg Laurie

Answers, Not Promises by Mother Angelica

The Pleasure of Reading edited by Antonia Fraser

Steve McQueen: A Biographyby Marc Eliot

Manual for Spiritual Warfare by Paul Thigpen

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

India: A Million Mutinies Now by V.S. Naipaul

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alastair MacIntyre

The Liturgical Year (Volume 4) Septuagesima by Abbot Prosper Gueranger

Patton: Blood, Guts, and Prayer by Michael Keane

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Selected Poems by Ezra Pound

Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E.M. Berens

Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Rambles and Studies in Greece by J.P. Mahaffy

The Liturgical Year (Volume 5) Lent by Abbot Prosper Gueranger

Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock

The Crimean War: A History by Orlando Figes

The Liturgical Year (Volume 6) Passiontide and Holy Week by Abbot Prosper Gueranger

Rediscover Lent by Matthew Kelly

Russian History: A Very Short Introduction by Geoffrey Hosking

The Betrothed/ From the Italian of Alessandro Manzoni by Alessandro Manzoni

Mother Angelica's Private and Pithy Lessons from the Scriptures by Raymond Arroyo

Praying with Mother Angelcia: Meditations of the Rosary, the Way of the Cross, and Other Prayers

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Grifters by Jim Thompson

Nightfall by David Goodis

The Getaway by Jim Thompson

The Hollywood Book of Death by James Robert Parish

Economics in Minutes: 200 Key Concepts Explained by Niall Kishtainy

The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks translated by Benedicat Ward

The Life of St. Teresa of Avial by Herselftranslated by J.M. Cohen

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

An Invitation to Faith by Jospeh Ratzinger

The Baltimore Cathechism of 1891

The Proud Tower by Barbara W. Tuchman

Lament for a Nation by George Grant

We are Doomed by John Derbyshire

What's Wrong with China by Paul Midler

What's Wrong with China by Rodney Gilbert

The Spirit of Catholicism by Karl Adam

Leisure the Basis of Culture by Joseph Pieper

The George Grant Reader edited by William Christian and Sheila Grant

The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution (1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Sezkine

The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

50 Things They Don't Want You to Know by Jerome Hudson

The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII

Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert O. Paxton

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

God's Untaker: Has Science Buried God? by John C. Lennox

The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly

The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority by Patrick J. Buchanan

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

White by Bret Easton Ellis

The Devil's Alliance: Hitler's Pact With Stalin, 1939 – 1941 by Roger Moorhouse

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly

Peace of Soul by Fulton Sheen

City of Bones by Michael Connelly

The Crisis of the Modern World by Rene Guenon

Lost Light by Michael Connelly

The Liturgical Year (Volume 1) Advent by Abbot Prosper Gueranger

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Sinatra's Century by David Lehman

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

Something Beautiful for God; Mother Teresa by Malcom Muggeridge

Magnificat Rosary Companion

One with Jesus by Paul de Jaecher

Nothing More Than Murder by Jim Thompson

A Year with the Angels by Mike Aquilina

A Year with the Bible: Scriptual Wisdom for Daily Living by Patrick Madrid

365 Inspirational Quotes – A Year of Daily Wisdom

Don Colacho Aphorisms by Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

I have been keeping track of the books I've read since 2014. Here are the links to those lists:

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

Any comments on my reading? Send an email to andiskaulins@protonmail.com.

Video and Movies that AKIC Watched in 2019

Here are the movies and TV shows that I watched in 2019. I have rated them on a five star scale.

Thugs of Hindostan (2018) ****

Watership Down (2018) *****

Bumblebee (in the cinema) **

Annilihation (2018) ****

Letterkenny (Season 1) *****

El Chapo (Season 1) *****

Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans (2015) *****

Isle of Dogs (2018) ****

Deadpool 2 (in the cinema) ***

The Sand Pebbles (1966) *****

The Magnificent Seven (1960) *****

The Getaway (1972) *****

Cannabis (Season 1) ****

Breathless (Jean Luc Godard, 1960) ****

Nevada Smith (1966) *****

La Jetee (1970) ****

Junior Bonner (1972) *****

Papilion (1973) *****

The Wild Bunch (1969) *****

To Be or Not to Be (1942) *****

The Naked Gun 2 (1991) ****

The Naked Gun (1988) ****

Le Mans (1971) *****

Roma (2018) ****

Brian Regan: Nunchucks and Flamethrowers (2017) ****

Seinfeld (Season 1) ****

Letterkenny (Season 6) ****

The Wages of Fear (1953) *****

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) *****

Standup and Away with Brian Regan (Season 1) ****

Cold War (2018) *****

Red River (1948) *****

Cool Hand Luke (1967) *****

The Set Up (1949) *****

Serpico (1973) *****

The More the Merrier (1943) *****

Road to Utopia (Crosby & Hope, 1946) *****

Halloween (1978) ****

The Professionals (1966) *****

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) *****

Five Easy Pieces (1970) ****

Dumbo (2019) (in the cinema) ***

The Highwaymen (2019) *****

Blue Jasmine (2013) ****

A Place in the Sun (1951) *****

The Mechanic (1972) *****

Shaft (1971) *****

The Passion of the Christ (2004) *****

White Lightning (1973) *****

The Outfit (1973) *****

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) ****

Bosch (Season 5) ****

Conversations with a Killer The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) *****

Buck Privates (1941) *****

Notorious (1946) *****

Sorcerer (1977) ****

The Harvey Girls (1946) (Judy Garland) *****

Charley Varrick (1973) *****

Lunatics (Season 1) ****

Huge in France (Season 1) *****

The Silent Partner (1978) ****

Coup de Torchon (1981) *****

Return of the Bad Men (1948) ****

Never Look Away (2018) *****

Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (Season 10) *****

Dave Chapelle: Sticks and Stones ****

American Factory (2019) ****

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019) *****

Bill Burr: Paper Tiger (2019) *****

The Comedy Central Roast of Alec Baldwin **

Burnt by the Sun (1994) (Russian: Утомлённые солнцем, translit. Utomlyonnye solntsem0 ****

A Confession (Series 2019) *****

Succession (Season 1) *****

Succession (Season 2) *****

The Thing (1982) ****

Seinfeld (Season 6) *****

Mogambo (1953) *****

Our Man in Havana (1959) *****

Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (2015) *****

The King (2019) *****

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) ****

The Hurricane (1937) *****

Seinfeld (Season 7) ****

Joker (2019) ****

Great Events of World War II in Color ****

Ken Burns Country Music ****

Jesus of Nazareth (Part 1) (1977) *****

A Very Murray Christmas (2015) *****

The Sting (1973) *****

Sergeant Rutledge (1960) ****

Sullivan's Travels (1941) *****

True Grit (1969) *****

The Mandalorian (Season 1) ****

Here is what I watched in 2018.

Trump is Black; Wittgenstein; 2019 for AKIC, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Now; New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, Chinese Elevator Behavior, Things I Would Like to See in 2020; My Feelings about Chinese Drivers Would Get Me Arrested i

[This entry is an amalgamation of two blog entries. I started each on different computers and I forgot to transfer them to the other computer till both were practically finished. Best then I thought to just put them together.]

• The case for Trump's impeachment is silly. They want to impeach Trump because of what he is. The attempt to impeach Trump would be like the Republicans trying to have impeached Obama because he was black. The Democrats in trying to fight prejudice are doing so on the basis of another sort of prejudice.

• Wittgenstein, the philosopher. Homosexual, not good. But he had Catholic inclinations and he insisted on having a Catholic burial even though he never attended Church. His philosophy or thinking or whatever what he was doing came down to something very simple: the paradox of our existence. Did he ever come upon the writings of Chesterton?

• Most of 2019 for me was the anticipation of my son Tony's and I's trip to North America. The trip itself was okay but could never live up to every hope I had for it. But it did effect Tony in some ways for which I had been hoping. Tony really liked seeing all the sporting events and seeing America. I then spent a lot of the year thinking about how much I was hating mainland China and the mainland Chinese. I prayed the rosary throughout the year but it didn't do much to diminish this very un-Christian attitude. And so I spent the latter part of the year with the mindset that Tony and I would flee to Canada in 2020.

• I recently finished reading a book entitled Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The author claimed to have a lot of experience in the IT industry. He started out well with a question that I will ask the students for the rest of my teaching career about whether they would be a cat or a dog if forced to make such a choice. (I prefer to a cat because of their independence and inability to be herded.) However, he then went to computer tech talk gibberish when presenting his ten arguments. When he was understandable, he managed to show that he knew he was an incurable leftist anti-Trumper while still being unable to transcend it. He talked about how hyper-partisan Fox News was without mentioning CNN and MSNBC. He showed he believed in the Russian conspiracy theory as well as nefarious conspiracies on the part of Social Media to advance arguments for White Supremacy and anti-Abortion. What I concluded from the biased screed was that all Leftists should cancel their social media accounts and let normals keep theirs.

• New Year's Eve, I didn't do anything. Not such a bad thing since really New Year's Eve is a b.s. celebration. But it would have been nice to have refused invitations, but none were forthcoming.

• New Year's Day, I, my wife Jenny and my son Tony went downtown. We didn't drive which was good because traffic was terrible. (At one point, we saw these drivers who thought they could avoid the snarls on the big roads by going down side streets, which in fact were more snarled.) Still, the pedestrian traffic was also annoying and I had to conclude and resolve forever more that the best thing to do on a Chinese holiday was nothing, stay home. I did see one interesting thing: there is some elevated road construction going on a road near Casa Kaulins. Part of the project was finished and these twin bridges were opened for traffic. One of the features of the bridges was a wide lane for bicycles and e-bikes. And of course these cars and vans and SUVs decided to drive on them to get around the heavy New Year's Day traffic. But the lane was dead-ended at one end.

• I got on this elevator with two deliverymen who were loaded down with things. We were all to get off at the same floor. As the door opened these two females stood right the entrance, waiting to get on. I was the first to get off and the females couldn't wait for me to get off and they tried to get on; so I adopted a wide posture and blocked the way for the delivery guys, but that didn't stopped one of the girls from still trying to squirm around me. As I have blogged repeatedly, the local Chinese have this horrible habit of not yielding to people who are getting off trains and buses and elevators. This girl was an extreme example of this.

• Things I would like to see in 2020: Re-election of Trump, Xi Jing Ping's conversion to Roman Catholicism; The Dallas Mavericks lead by Kristaps Porzingus winning the NBA championship; and the Winnipeg Jets winning the Stanley Cup.

• The feelings I have when driving among Chinese drivers, if expressed aloud and recorded in Canada, would get me arrested. A Chinese women driving like a Chinese person in Canada and possessing Chinese manners, stole a parking spot from a local in Hamilton, Ontario. The local Canadian got so pissed off that they went on a rant, which was recorded and the local subsequently got arrested.

• Friday morning, I went downtown early so I could get a haircut before I went to work. The salon I was to go to was open at ten, so I decided to get downtown around nine so I could have breakfast at McDonalds. At about 9:10, I got off at the Sanyang Plaza station where I knew there to be a nearby McDonalds, but it turned out that the McDonalds, which was part of a department store food court, didn't open till 9:30. So I wandered around Sanyang Plaza and got to the entrance of the department store at 9:25. I waited till 9:30 and when the doors opened I immediately went to the McDonalds. However, I saw that their menus showed hamburgers and french fries. I said to the clerk there: "Meiyou zaofan?" She confirmed that there was no breakfast, with a laugh. I sighed and I walked away. I ended up buying a sandwich at a nearby Subway sandwich shop which didn't have a breakfast menu either, but I was able to get them to make a bacon, cheese and tomato sandwich. I took that to a nearby Starbucks where I had a cafe mocha. It was better than nothing. But I had to wonder who would have a Big Mac or french fries so early in the morning.

• Saturday Morning, I took the 602 bus to the Xi Bei Canal Subway Station. At the Xi Bei bus stop, there was a van pulled up loading or unloading passengers. The bus pulled up alongside it and opened its doors for passengers to deboard. The van driver, having done whatever it was doing at the bus stop (where it shouldn't have been at in the first place), instead of yielding to the passengers getting off the bus, drove past the bus blocking the way of passengers getting off the bus. I swore at the driver and then punched the back of the van. I was angry like that woman whose parking spot was stolen by stupid Chinese in Canada.