She's Humid, She Is; Tony is going to Hangzhou; Being a Speaking Contest Judge; Podcasts that AKIC likes; Locals Hate Covid Mask Wearing; DBF

June in Wuxi and the humidity is increasing in ferocity. I sweat so much that I can smell my own perspiration. Either that, or some gland is being set off by the change of seasons...

My son Tony will be going to Hangzhou, one of the places on Earth that approach Heaven they say, for some sort of baseball camp which will last about seven days.

I went to some company or school near the Livat (Hui Ju) shopping centre to judge a speaking contest. But when I got there, what I had to do was quite vague. I first had to watch three group of students have a discussion about a question and then offer them some sort of evaluation f their English. The question had to do with countries and their prioritizing of environmental protection. A rather staid topic. Anyway the first group didn't so much have a discussion as make statements. It wasn't till halfway through the exercise that someone asked someone else a question. The second group had one student actually take charge. I commended him for this but he didn't delegate questions very well and the rest of the students ended up sitting silently as he wrote the group's final statement of what they agreed on during the discussion. The last group was best, talking, arguing, questioning but without a chairman. 

After these group discussions, I had to judge some individual students talking about a question they had chosen from a list of a question. One student simply read her notes. One student read from notes and I was able to give her a good evaluation. The next student forgot all he had to say and I had to tell him that it was okay to have notes with him. The final student tried once, said she didn't have time to prepare which she then went to do, before coming back and only being marginally better.

Podcasts which I listen to regularly these days: The Daily Decade Podcast; Radio Derb with John Derbyshire; The Z Blog Power Hour; Revolutions by Mike Duncan; The Kunstler Podcast; The Delingpod, London Calling with James Delingpole and Toby Young, The Cotto Gottfried Podcast and the Don Cherry Grapevine Podcast. There are also podcasts which I will listen to if an episode or part of an episode interests me: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast; The Culture Wars Podcast, The Rebel News Daily; The New Discourses Podcast; The Gerald Celente Podcast, The Richie Allen Show; The Republic of Mike Graham, the Patrick Coffin Show, Poem of the Day, Myth of the 20^th Century; Counter Currents Podcast and Our Interesting Times.

I was walking on Zhongshan road, the main drag of Wuxi city, and I saw an older man playing with a baby that was placed on a mat on the sidewalk. Seemed a strange place to be doing that. But the infant didn't seem to mind and looked quite jolly.

The retired teachers at the SPC told me that the most annoying thing about the Covid panic was the mandatory wearing of masks. I was surprised that they said this because I thought that the locals were accustomed to wearing masks and were all in with it. It seems that these older women and I all think that wearing masks is usless. And it will feel very useless in the intense humidity of a Wuxi summer as one of them also pointed out.

Dragon Boat Festival. I eat some Zongzi.