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.