The Andis Kaulins in China Weekly: November 11 to November 17, 2013

Gratitude:  I am thankful for the times the truth is revealed to me.

Acknowledgement: I have to stop living in my mind and grasp the things that I know I need. No one is going to give them to me.

Requests: Since I can't expect anything to be given to me, I shouldn't request it. I pray for the welfare of others, and that my enemies will see the light. I do hope I can have the good fortune to meet some good people I can befriend. But even then, you got to create your own fortune.

The AKIC Week in Brief: Another boring week in Akicistan. I was driven to a the administrative center of the new Wuxi CBD in a black Audi. A highlight of sorts I'd suppose.

About AKIC: If you want to learn what Andis & AKIC are all about, you can visit here.

An AKIC Glossary

If there are things about AKIC you don't know about, like places and people I mention in the entries below, you can go here to find out what they are all about.

AKIC Weekly Features:

I in in China!  我的家有两个卧室。我孩子的拼音是不好。我孩子是不好的学生。

I am Canadian! I still don't want Rob Ford to resign. Toronto should be thankful for the attention.

I am Latvian (sort of)! My middle name is Edmunds.

Reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag, I realize I should thank my lucky stars that my parents were able to get out of Latvia in the 1940s before the Russians came in.

Wuxi Peach Maoists Update: Visit here to find out how if your Peach Maoists (1-8-1) can get a winning streak going.

Politically I am Conservative/Reactionary! Better to have a conservative who smokes crack as your mayor than a Leftist. Rob Ford was at least drunk when he smoked cracked. A modern progressive/leftist/democrat(U.S.)/socialist smokes crack when sober.

I teach English! Is there a way, I can make the headline of this section appear ironic?

Really, I talk to the students hoping to educate by entertaining them. Beats me if they learn anything.

I am not a freak! I try hard, in a monkish sort of way, to not be one.

I like to Read! Here is what I had been working my way through the past week:

Don Colacho's (Nicolas Gomez Davilla) Aphorisms.  There are 2,988 of them in this book that I compiled for myself.  I try to read at least one aphorism a day.  I cut and paste the better ones -- they are all profound actually -- and I put them in the AKIC Weekly. (See below)

The Niomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Now that I have finished the Catechism, I will read this and then begin to read the Summa.

Ulysses by James Joyce.  I am following along with Frank Delaney as he slowly guides podcast listeners through Joyce's hard-to-read novel.  Delaney figures he will have the whole novel covered in about 22 years.  Delaney completed episode #179 this week and is working his way through the chapter that introduces Leopold Bloom. I am getting ahead of Delaney as far as reading the book.  I will be finished my reading of it, I figure, in a year. I read the novel despite its many blasphemies. It is best to be aware of this stuff because the world is full of it, and the world will always find a way of slapping you in the face with it

The Holy Bible (RSV-C2E version, aka the Ignatius Bible, and Douay-Rheims version).  I will read the two versions in conjunction. Last week, I was reading the Book of Genesis.

Mao Zedong: Man, Not God by Quan Yanchi. A Hagiography given to me by a local. [The Chinese who protested against Jimmy Kimmel's six year old child by posting a picture of Kimmel with a Hitler moustache, could also have put a Mao mole on Kimmel's face while they were at it. Hitler never killed any Chinese that I know of. Mao did however. In fact, he killed a lot.]

Gulag by Anne Applebaum. Many Balts, from whom I am descended, were taken to the Gulag. I thank my lucky stars that my parents, who were born in Latvia, were able to get out before the Soviets came in.

I like to take photos

I publish them in the following blogs:  AKIC wordpress , TKIC blogspot, TKIC wordpress, Views of China from Casa Kaulins Blogspot and Views of China from Casa Kaulins Wordpress. It is my habit to take a least one photo of Tony a day and publish it in TKIC wordpress. I also try to capture interesting things that pass by the Casa Kaulins apartment, either on video on still image, and publish them in Views of China from Casa Kaulins.

I like to make videos

Here is my Youtube Channel and my Youku Channel.

I like to cut, paste, and sometimes give my take on quotations:

Nicolas Gomez Davilla

497 To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discrete life among intelligent books, loving a few beings. [That is the life!]

498 A sentence should be hard like a rock and shake like a branch. [To be honest, I am not sure what that means even though I like the sound of it. If I do ever figure out what this aphorism means, I wonder if I will be able to apply it to the sentence making the students do for me.]

505 To educate the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration. [Get rid of envy and you should cease to be a Leftist, a progressive, a Communist, a Socialist, and so on....]

509 Society tends to be unjust, but not in the way the conceited imagine. There are always more masters who do not deserve their position than servants who do not deserve theirs. [I am part of the servant class. No way I could be a master.]

510 Resistance is futile when everything in the world is conspiring to destroy what we admire. We are always left, however, with an incorruptible soul, so that we might contemplate, judge, and disdain. [I like this quote because it ends with the word “disdain.” But I wonder about the state of my soul. I like the word “disdain” for the wrong reasons: pride.]

519: Happiness is that state of the sensibility in which everything appears to have a reason for being. [This is only true if souls exist.]

David Warren:

1)We are small & squalid & statistical, perhaps not even worth punishing. Our men are not men & our women are not women. Look at the vacant faces in the streets, blindly clutching their mall purchases. What god, what demon, could be bothered to regard our “public opinion”?

The debt crises in Europe & America, the omnipresence of “the NSA,” the conspicuous failure of schemes like Obamacare, the smug look on politicians’ faces, frustrations associated with longer commuting times & diminishing real wages — these are all little triggers. We are like union members in a company whose managers are too obviously incompetent to sustain their arrogance. And we are tired of obeying their innumerable, fussy little rules. My hunch is that there is going to be a strike.

2)Our very Anglo-Saxon, gliberal answer to our own racialism is “reverse discrimination.” This reverses the polarity, but on the same magnet.

Indeed, the election of the inexperienced, foolish, unqualified, excessively vain & deluded, obviously incompetent Barack Obama as President of those United States was, to my mind, not an indication that America was putting racialism behind her, but rather that it could not be overcome. He was elected because he was black, & that made the whites voting for him feel good about themselves. Had he been superficially a white man (as he might have been, had the Mendelian genetic dice rolled the other way), he would never have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate. [I had thought that the only way a Black could be elected U.S. President would have been if he was a Republican with the ideas of a Thomas Sowell. That, the first Black U.S. President is a Democrat shows I was too much of an optimist. Racialism seems stuck with humans like death and taxes. Sad.]

Excerpt from Anne Applebaum's Gulag:

Thinking about his arrest before it happened, Innokenty had pictured to himself a duel of wits to the death. For this he was ready, prepared for a high-principled defense of his life and his convictions. Never had he imagined anything so simple, so dull, and so irresistible as this reality. The people who had received him were petty-minded, low-grade officials, as uninterested in his personality as in what he had done. [I am kicking against the petty-mindedness and dullness of my reality. I suppose I could survive in the Gulag.]

Said about Flannery O'Connor:

She was always suspicious of her own motives,  [Believe it or not, I am suspicious of my own motives. And I do find myself checking many things I imagine I would say if I could. I am what I am.]

GK Chesterton:

“The Lord said to love one's enemies. He didn't say anything but not having them.” [I am typing this quote from memory. A distinction that is not often thought of by people who aren't Christian and many who say they are.]

Theodore Dalrymple

In the Anglo-Saxon world at least, there seems to be a law of the conservation of prudery: If we are not prudish about one thing, we are prudish about another, the total amount of prudery remaining constant.  [I think this law of the conversation of prudery can be applied to more than just prudery and the Anglo-Saxon world. Whatever tendencies there are in the human race, they are constant over time. For example, the callousness about the fate of people who weren't our own kind has been replaced by a callousness about the fate of the murdered unborn.]

Public transport is the great theatre of the world, which is why I always take it (whenever I can) in preference to that frightful contraption, my motor car. You learn so much on public transport; in a car you just lose your temper. [Actually, I lose my temper on the bus in Wuxi sometimes. But I would lose my temper all the time if I drove a car in Wuxi. And there things I see on the bus that I would never see in a car: lower and lower middle peasants, for instance.]

The AKIC List of the Week: AKIC's Top Twelve Americans

1. Rush Limbaugh [Warts and all, I thank Limbaugh for the fact that I am a conservative and on the way to being a person of faith.]
2. William F Buckley [A Catholic who represented all that was fine about America.]
3. Clint Eastwood [How could he not be included on this list?]
4. George Washington [Under Chairman Mao, he didn't die in office. He retired to his estate.]
5. Frank Sinatra [The greatest singer of all time.]
6. Gary Carter [He was my favourite baseball player. A true American golly gee guy who'd be called a phony by Socialist sophisticates. With two outs in bottom of the ninth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, no body on base, his team down by two runs in the game, his team down 3-2 in the best of seven series, Carter got a hit that sparked the greatest rally in World Series history. Hearing of Carter's premature death brought the best and saddest memories of my time following the Montreal Expos from 1979 to 1983.]
7. Andrew Breibart [David Warren, on my list of top ten Canadians, said Breibart was a happy warrior in the war against the Left. Hearing of his premature death filled me with immense sadness.
8. Thomas Sowell [He is no token black on this list. Along with Rush and WFB, Sowell provided the intellectual proof I needed on my path to becoming a reactionary.]
9. Ronald Reagan [The greatest president of my lifetime.]
10. Jimmy Stewart [A tall and thin man like myself. He was the rare combination of movie star and decent human being.]
11. Anne Coulter [A gutsy broad. An American Margaret Thatcher.]
12. Sarah Palin [I still have hope that she can become the first female president of the USA. The woman is salt of the earth. No sage, she is, but she is fill of more common sense that Obama, Biden, or any of the Clintons.]

I fashion myself to be a 21^st Century Pepys

Here is my diary entry for November 11 to November 17, 2013.

The Andis Kaulins in China Diary: November 11 to November 17, 2013

Monday [November 11]

[Home Laptop]

I don't work today.

It is Remembrance Day in Canada. I have marked the day by posting pictures of poppies on some of my websites.

I woke up this morning at about 6:30 AM so I could take Tony to where we meet the car that takes him to school.

I have spent the rest of the day on my laptop and Ipad. I published a bunch of things on my blogs. I finished watching the movie Peeping Tom. I tried uploading a bunch of movies, via Torrent, on my computer.

I also did a little bit of vacuuming. I hung clothes to be dried. And I waited for Tony to come back from school.

I got to get back into the habit of taking photos for my Views of China from Casa Kaulins blog.

I almost forgot to mention that I phoned my mother last night. She lives in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada where the temperature was sixteen degrees below zero when I phoned her.

I was surprised by my brother Ron answering the phone. He was in Brandon for the weekend, doing some work for Mom in the house – basically tearing down shelves that Dad had put up through the years.

Ron told me that the two Winnipeg sports team sucked and that his knowledge of the current popular culture was less than mine – he doesn't have the access to the free stuff that I do in China.

Tuesday [November 12]

[Home Laptop]

I'll work 13:00 to 21:00 today.

Last evening was Daddy and Tony time as Andis took Tony out of Casa Kaulins. They went to the Wuxi Hui Shan Wanda Plaza to visit their usual haunts: the arcade, the Apple shop, the toy sections, and McDonald's. At the arcade, Tony played the “truck” game – a highway driving game, with steering and pedals, whose object is to race through streets as fast as one can while at the same time colliding with many vehicles as one can. The game is visually stunning and Andis is happy to watch while Tony plays.

Others find the game fun to watch as well. When Tony & Andis went to the game machine, there was no one around. Playing the game, they didn't notice a crowd of twenty people had built up around them. When they did notice the crowd, Tony did a double-take and Andis pulled out a camera to take a photo and video of all the spectators. (Andis showed the video to Jenny later and she laughed.)

At the McDonald's, Tony wanted and got a happy meal so he could get the transformer/ultraman type toy. When he got home, Tony had to rummage through all his toys to find another toy, from the series, that he had gotten a month earlier, ignoring his parents plea that he take a bath.

[Home Laptop]

I took the 25 bus to work.

I got my lunch money.

So, I can tick off blog on my todo list.

The Wuxi Peach Maoists may win their first game of the year and end their nine game winless streak!

For lunch, I walked 8 meters outside the school entrance and went to the Characteristics of Beef Noodles Restaurant and had a plate of fried noodles: Chao La Mian (炒拉面).

Wednesday [November 13]

[School Laptop]

I work 13:00 to 21:00.

I ran into a couple of foreigners on the 25 Bus this morning. They were both older male teachers from the Jiangsu Xishan High School. One of them was Bill from San Diego and the other, whose name I forgot, was from South Africa. They were going downtown to see the dentist.

The South African had been in Hui Shan for three years. He was quite familiar with some of the sights of Hui Shan including the White House and the ghost town shopping mall that has a ferris wheel.

Using a government building, even a big one, isn't very helpful when trying to tell me where something is in Wuxi. Wuxi is chalk full of big government buildings.

I had a young male student give me his impressions of America. He expressed annoyance at the Jimmy Kimmel Show for showing a six year old child say kill all the Chinese. All I can tell him that it was comedy and that no one seriously wanted to kill all the Chinese. I should have added that it is so easy to be offended in this world and that America generally doesn't get worked up about all the bad things said about it.

I asked the student if he wanted to move to America. He told me that he was worried about all the gun violence in America. I told him that he was being ridiculous and that most Americans have probably never witnessed any gun violence in their lives.

Most Americans wanted guns I told him because they wanted safety.

While the young man admitted that much about China wasn't great, he did have the desire to be offended, that the government was feeding him, by getting mad about a late night comedy show sketch that most people would have forgotten about save for the Chinese having made a fuss about it.

For lunch, I went to a restaurant, near the Nanchang Temple Market, that serves a delicious dish of beef fried rice (niurou fan 牛肉饭). I can't go to Characteristics of Beef Noodles everyday now, can I?

Thursday [November 14]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 21:00 today.

Just for the sake of mentioning it, I will mention something about my morning routine. The podcasts I subscribe to will, for the most part, automatically update themselves on my Ipod. However because I am behind the Great Firewall and because the Wifi signal on my side of the bed is weak, I always have to make a point of checking my Ipod to see if in fact my favorite podcasts have been downloaded and sometimes I have to press some buttons to make sure that they do get downloaded.

Sometimes the buses I ride will come to very quick stops because other drivers and cyclists in traffic will do very unpredictable things and not look where they are going. This quick stops can jolt the passengers. Particularly quick stops can knock some passengers to the ground. This morning as I rode the 602支 bus, I experienced my worst quick screeching to a halt stop ever. I was riding in the back seat of the bus which is the highest point in the bus's interior, and I was studying Chinese on my Ipad. The bus was making a right turn merging into another lane when it very suddenly came to a halt – I'd say it went from 40 kmh to 0 in no time flat. The passengers screamed, gasped and a few, near the back exit door, were jolted so that they tumbled in a pile. As I looked up from my Ipad, which I clutched like it was Tony, I saw the bodies fly. The bus driver actually had to leave his seat and see if the passengers were alright. One passenger, a woman, he had to pull up from the ground. He talked to her, with a pleading and guilty look in his eyes, and then returned to his seat to drive the bus. The woman was clutching her head for the rest of the trip. When the 602支 stopped in front of the 101 Hospital, the driver got out of seat and walk back to talk to the woman again – they exchanged phone numbers.

This morning, I listened to an EWTN podcast – a Mother Angelica podcast.

AKIC Health Update: Last week's heavy cough is gone. Now, I am just stuffed up and need to blow my nose a lot.

Lunch: Chao La Mian. Again. I know.

Friday [November 15]

[School Laptop]

Sad news from Jenny's hometown. The brother of her adoptive father is dying of cancer. The brother isn't staying in a hospital; he is staying, dying, at home.

Tony took a Pinyin Test yesterday. He failed. He was one of the three or four students in a class of 52 who did. While I was disappointed to hear of it, I wasn't surprised. I had been given word, last week, that his progress was not very good; his teachers being mad at him for dropping the class averages down.

I got to do a lunchtime speakers corner at the Wuxi government administrative center in the new CBD.

The attendees at the corner were good and I very much enjoyed talking to them.

However, it was the building that interested me the most. It was massive and gigantic in a way that Chinese state buildings can be. It had wide corridors like the Hen Long Plaza. The ceiling in the carpeted conference room was thirty feet high. The windows, as tall as the ceilings, gave one an amazing view of the surrounding area. Looking out of the windows, I could see endless columns of the building curving gradually and uniformly into the far distance. The building I was told, could hold 6,000 civil servants.

The building is so massive that at lunchtime, workers can get exercise by walking a circuit of its hallways like others who would walk around a running track at a sports field.

The most interesting feature of the building was a garbage can I saw in hallway outside the bathroom. It was numbered thus: 12号楼3F北. Someone had taken the time to make labels to affix to the garbage cans so that they were put and kept in the proper place in the building.

Just as I left, I was asked by one of the civil servants if I was a Christian. I told her I was, in the sense that I wish I could truly call myself one, and that I leaned towards being a Catholic.

Should I mention it? My first reaction was not to. Now, I have an urge to, but I will suppress it. Perhaps, I will mention it tomorrow. For now, I will be cryptic. There was a Sarah Palinish aspect to it. (Good luck, trying to figure out what I mean by that. For I am being very cryptic.)

One more thing. I had some conversations with the civil servants about the jurisdictions in Wuxi that left me confused. There is a Wuxi super area comprised of three cities: Wuxi, Jiangyin, and Yixing. Wuxi is administratively higher than Jiangyin and Yixing. Wuxi city is divided into seven districts including the Hui Shan District in which I live. I assumed that the Hui Shan District was subordinate to Wuxi City and lacked the independence of a Jiangyin City, but I was then told by a second civil servant that Jiangyin is administratively on the same level as the Hui Shan District. Some jurisdictional vocabulary was missing. What!!!?!

Saturday [November 16]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 18:00

Policy. Don't talk. Keep to yourself. As much as possible, of course. [LECTOR: Why? ANDIS: I said I wasn't talking.]

It is going to be a day to get through. Sad thing to say when life is short and one's days are numbered.

[Home Laptop]

I hate Saturdays at our school. Too many Beavis and Butthead students come to our school. Saturday is their one day off during the week and you can tell they'd rather be somewhere else.

Not all the public school students who come to our school are bad. I had a one-on-one class with one student who goes to Tianyi High School and he was telling me about his day. The class topic was “A Day in a Life,” and so I grilled him on a typical day he had at school. It was quite regulated from 545 AM in the morning to 630 at night, and he had little free time.

After school, I meet Jenny & Tony at the Suning Plaza where we had supper. We would have had a perfect meal at the Grandma's Restaurant if they hadn't forgotten to have brought out the fried potatoes I had ordered. They came ten minutes after we had finished all our other dishes, and of course when I finally got them, I could see that they were cooked hastily. [That's been happening a lot lately when I go to restaurants. Three weeks ago, they screwed my order at Pizza Hut and when the pizza did come, the toppings were all piled in the center of the pizza, leaving me with a four inch crust edge. It was another case of a cook hastily preparing a late dish. This morning, I was mistakenly given bean milk instead of coffee with my take away McDonald's breakfast.]

We then went to the Baoli Carrefour to buy some margarine and some ground beef – it was sold out.

We then took the taxi home [A rare thing.] and the driver didn't know the way.

China has a lot of people and a lot of mediocrity.

I was listening to a Dennis Prager Podcast (from the American Conservative University series of podcasts that can be had at the Itunes Store) and it really struck a never with me. Prager was doing a Happiness Hour episode about how happy people choose good people as their friends. I listened and I thought I now had a reason to justify my friendlessness – I have met few good people out here in Wuxi, among the foreigners. [The good ones I have meet are Steve Wall, HM and the Fritzs. And there are a few others.] Of course, I can't claim to be a good person myself. I feel I am in a situation where there isn't much to be done but keep to myself and make efforts to seek out some good people.

Prager also had two calls from listeners that eerily reminded me of things in my life. One caller, sixty years old, phoned to say he didn't have any friends because he lost the ones he did have in Vietnam and because he had a solitary character. His best friend was his wife. Prager told the caller that unfortunately his call wasn't really relevant to the idea of this particular Happy Hour which was that having good people as friends can make you happy. I was struck by the foolishness of the caller for another reason. The caller saying he was a solitary type conflicted with his need to declare on public airwaves that he had no friends. Clearly, the man had issues and had lead a lonely life.... And I was like that caller. A second caller, a female, talked about about a group of female friends who worked together and had been very close till one of the women married a man of questionable character. The others in the group tolerated the woman's husband, because they loved the woman so much. But the husband caused a conflict which involved his filing a lawsuit against some of the other women in the group. The woman took her husband's side with the result that the friendship the group had had was put to an end. And because they were still working together, the relationship became gut-wrenching to deal with – they had to interact on a solely professional level. Prager told the caller that her story was a tragedy. I have had a few of those tragedies in my life – there is nothing that can be done about them.

This afternoon, Jenny went to visit some acquaintances in the New District. These people were living in a 90 square meter apartment with two other families. So altogether there were ten people living in this apartment! The Chinese Family Kaulins, three people, lives in a 89 square meter apartment which, while not big, is cozy for the number of people there are. With ten people living in the 90 square meter apartment, there is no living room! The rent, which is split up among the three families, is about 1300 rmb per month.

Sunday [November 17]

[Home Laptop]

Not working today. Thank God.

We went to a restaurant at the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza for lunch.

I downloaded three helicopter apps from the Itunes Store.

Boy oh Boy! What an exciting day!

Most of my blogging today is being done for the AKIC Weekly and the Andis Kaulins Anti-Blog.

The Andis Kaulins in China Weekly for October 21 to October 27, 2013

Gratitude:  It was my 7^th Wedding Anniversary on Sunday and so I have seven years of marriage to a strong willed woman for which to be thankful.

Acknowledgement: I thought I would be a better husband than I turned out to be. No! I am not an adulterer. That isn't the problem. I thought I would be a more take charge and attentive husband. I have instead be passive and a witness to the marriage than a fully pledged participant.

Requests: I will make this request to God. GAR is supposed to be a prayer anyway. I pray that I will have the rest of my life will see me have more opportunities to be a better husband.

The AKIC Week in Brief: It was Jenny and Andis's 7^th anniversary this week. That is, the 7^th anniversary of getting their wedding license. Andis spent the week looking forward to it. Other than doing this, Andis suffered through long bouts of boredom and ennui.

About AKIC: If you want to learn what Andis & AKIC are all about, you can visit here.

An AKIC Glossary

If there are things about AKIC you don't know about, like places and people I mention in the entries below, you can go here to find out what they are all about.

AKIC Weekly Features:

I in in China!  一个星期，我学的中文五六小时。我和jenny结婚了七个年。

I am Canadian! I hadn't heard, till this week, that the lead singer of the Bare Naked Ladies, the seemingly cute huggable Canadian pop band, was arrested in 2011 for possession of cocaine. To try to redeem himself, this singer has become something of a socialist activist. Every time I contemplate going back to Canada, I hear stuff like this. Canada is half free, half moronic.

A chubby reporter turned Senator, Mike Duffy made a big speech in the Canadian Senate. Who knew anything interesting happened in the Canadian senate.

I am Latvian (sort of)! I am reading Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain. I am one of the sort who was forced by circumstances to dump his ethnicity. But I have never fell tempted, even with my many failures in life, to fall back on it.

Wuxi Peach Maoists Update: Visit here to find out how if your Peach Maoists have finally won a match-up.

Politically I am Conservative/Reactionary! I might as well do a rant about Obama this week. He is a symptom of the modern disease.

I teach English! First, it seems to me, the students have trouble with their fluency. That is, their speed is not up to snuff. If they get over this, they exhibit vocabulary problems and cannot think of the words they need to use. If they then acquire a sufficient vocabulary, their grammar mistakes stand out more to the native English speaker. This is how I reason when it comes to grading students. At our school, we give excellent grades, sometimes, or we tell the students that they passed but they must work on vocabulary or their grammar or their fluency. If they are awful, we may tell them to repeat the class. Seems easy enough in theory but some students don't fit these molds and they have English weaknesses that defy our classification system. I wish I could grade them from A to D. With A being good and D being a bare pass.

I am not a freak! I sometimes wish I was. As it is, I just another plug living a life of quiet desperation.

I think my despondence is that of the one lone lunatic in the asylum who knows he is a lunatic stuck with other lunatics.

And then there is this quote: Only a complete lunatic or a Democrat could believe otherwise. Is there a need to provide context for this quote? Lunatics and Democrats believe in stupid things. I like to insinuate in the blog that I would never stoop to being a Democrat. And yet I have just said I am a lunatic. Am I contradicting myself? (I would love to contradistinction myself actually.) Well, a Democrat is a person blind to his lunacy. I am a loonie stuck among self-described middle-of-the-roaders.

I like to Read! Here is what I had been working my way through the past week:

Don Colacho's Aphorisms.  There are 2,988 of them in this book that I compiled for myself.  I try to read at least one aphorism a day.  I cut and paste the better ones -- they are all profound actually -- and I put them in my weekly blog entry. (See below)

The Niomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Now that I have finished the Catechism, I will read this and then begin to read the Summa.

Ulysses by James Joyce.  I am following along with Frank Delaney as he slowly guides podcast listeners through Joyce's hard-to-read novel.  Delaney figures he will have the whole novel covered in about 22 years.  Delaney completed episode #177 this week and is working his way through the chapter that introduces Leopold Bloom. I am getting ahead of Delaney as far as reading the book.  I will be finished my reading of it, I figure, in a year. I read the novel despite its many blasphemies. It is best to be aware of this stuff because the world is full of it, and the world will always find a way of slapping you in the face with it

The Holy Bible King James Version.   I have finished The General Epistle of Jude and am now reading the Book of Revelations.

Mao Zedong: Man, Not God by Quan Yanchi. A Hagiography given to me by a local.

Quo Vadis by Henrik Sienkiewicz. One of the first Catholic novels if my source on the Internet is to be believed. I put the book on my Ipod, thinking I would read it when I didn't have access to my Ipad, but now I am reading it on my Ipad.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. I found this book on the Internet after I had read Ferguson's nice little scribe against Paul Krugman. In this book, Ferguson compares developments in the West since 1500 with the rest of the world.

Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum. How did the Iron Curtain come to be? Applebaum discusses this in this history. Suffice to say, anti-communism was no vice.

I like to take photos

I publish them in the following blogs:  AKIC wordpress , TKIC blogspot, TKIC wordpress, Views of China from Casa Kaulins Blogspot and Views of China from Casa Kaulins Wordpress. It is my habit to take a least one photo of Tony a day and publish it in TKIC wordpress. I also try to capture interesting things that pass by the Casa Kaulins apartment, either on video on still image, and publish them in Views of China from Casa Kaulins.

I like to make videos

Here is my Youtube Channel and my Youku Channel.

I like to cut, paste, and sometimes give my take on quotations:

David Warren:

Ms Palin is herself a mass-market politician, & neither genius nor sage. Yet I admired her for common sense, & a refreshing detachment from the cynicism that plagues our political life. She was reasonably honest & straightforward, unlike her rivals. On this ground alone, I thought her worth defending. Had she not been attacked so unworthily, I might myself have dismissed her as a lightweight. But in the context of the U.S. presidential election of 2008, it was worth noting that she had more native smarts, saner attitudes, more impressive personal accomplishments, & rather more executive experience than, say, Barack Obama. The one thing she lacked was the “cool” factor. She was too “authentic,” too salt-of-the-earth, had too much starch & integrity, to survive long in democratic politics. [A honest person will always choose salt-of-the-earth over cool. Anti-Palinism like anti-Semitism like anti-Americanism is a mental and intellectual disorder.]

Nicolas Gomez Davillia:

361 No being deserves our interest for more than an instant, or for less than a lifetime.


362 Progressivist hope does not swell up except in speeches. [This explains why Obama won't ever shut up.]

367 To the masses what matters is not whether they are free, but whether they believe they are free.

Whatever cripples their freedom does not alarm them, unless they are told it should.

368 To appreciate the ancient or the modern is easy; but to appreciate the obsolete is the triumph of authentic taste. [I came to China to see obsolete things.]

383 To reform society through laws is the dream of the incautious citizen and the discrete preamble to every tyranny.

Law is the juridical form of custom or the trampling of liberty. [The ACA law in the USA.]

388 Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial shacks, but it does not succeed in building either a palace or a temple. [Temples to consumerism are being built in Wuxi.]

This century will leave behind only the tire-tracks of the transports it employed in the service of our most sordid greed. [In Wuxi, they are building churches, temples, and palaces among all the industrial shacks that are being built. However these buildings are thoroughly modern and can't be said to be successes.]

395 Only the trivial protects us from boredom. [Paradoxical it seems at first glance. And it then quickly strikes one as being true. But read it again and you realize that the trivial and the boring are not the same things as all.]

405 Progress is the scourge God has chosen for us. [And to think that there are people who are proud to label themselves progressives.]

413 The unforeseeable grace of an intelligent smile is enough to blast away the layers of tedium which the days deposit. [I do need to smile more. However, I wonder if I am capable of intelligent smiles.]

420 In today’s political spectrum no party is closer than any other to the truth. There are simply some that are farther away. [Do any politicians have any truth in their sights?]

421 Sad like a biography. [Sad like my blog. Ha.]

The AKIC List of the Week: AKIC's Favourite Podcasts

I have three lists of podcasts for you.

The following are podcasts I listen to religiously:

• Coffee and Markets. A Conservative podcast full of wise economic and cultural insights.
• The Three Martini Podcast. Everyday, the hosts for NRO present the listener with three martinis: One good, one bad, and one crazy.
• Econtalk. A great podcast for those people who like me are Econ majors and are libertarians economically.
• The China History Podcast. Host Laslzo Montgomery will never ever run out of topics in this highly informative podcast about China.
• Radio Derb. Despite his defenestration, I listen to this conservative commentator who has a connection with China. Like me, China is his in-law and he can boost to having been an extra in a Bruce Lee movie.
• Rex Murphy. This is a CBC podcast. Murphy speaks with a Newfoundland accent. But don't let that throw you off. He has intelligent things to say.
• Frank Delaney's ReJoyce. This podcast is why podcasts were invented. Delaney goes line by line through James Joyce's Ulysses. Pick up the novel and you can follow along at your leisure. An acquired taste that no radio station could ever provide.
• Townhall.com – Dennis Prager. Prager is another great Conservative commentator fighting the fight against Leftism.

The following are podcast I listen to repeatedly:

• Saint Anthony Zaccaria's letters
• Heretics by GK Chesterton

These two podcasts are really inspiring audio books.

The following podcasts I listen to often:

• Vatican Radio [from Rome]
• EWTN [from Alabama]
• Charles Adler [from Winnipeg]
• Counterpoint [from Australia]
• Russian Rulers Podcast
• American Conservative University
• Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
• Grammar Girl
• Uncommon Knowledge
• The Official Marc Levin Show Replay
• Great Lives [from the BCC]
• Popup Chinese [from Beijing]

All of these podcasts are available on Itunes.

I fashion myself to be a 21^st Century Pepys

Here is my diary entry for October 21 to October 27, 2013

The Andis Kaulins in China Diary: October 21 to October 27, 2013

Monday [October 21]

[Home Laptop]

Don't work today. I will be a homebody instead of a office-chair body.

I got Tony off to school at 7:00 AM. He roused me out of this morning, which I think was a first. Usually, I rouse him out of his slumber.

I spend the morning on the computer, taking videos, editing videos and reading in bed. I produce Views of China from Casa Kaulins #32 and #33, and Scenes from My Life in Wuxi, China #48.

Yesterday, I parked my e-bike at the Wanda Plaza and then later found it was blocked off by e-bikes that choose to park all around it. I had to physically grab these other e-bikes and clear a path for myself to get out. It so happened that one of the drivers of the e-bike came upon me moving his bike. I swore at him; he smiled at me. I think it was one of those weaselly smiles that Chinese make when they have been caught red-handed.

I made mention of Paul Krugman in the October 14 to 20 issue of the AKIC Weekly. Just now, about 16:10, I got a Google News Alert email for Andis Kaulins which turned out to be a link to some other Andis Kaulins saying something favorable about Paul Krugman. How annoying! This Andis Kaulins is going to have to change his name. I have some suggestions. He can call himself Andrew Krugman, Adolf Krugman, Wiemar Republic Krugman, Ponzi Krugman, Barrack Obama Krugman, Zimbabwe Greece Spain Italy North Korea Soviet Union Krugman, Barabbas Krugman, Vladimir Barabbas Kim Il Sung Un Jung Pelosi Biden Rockefeller Krugman, or Juan Peron the Second. How dare that person whose name I wouldn't mention if it wasn't my name defame and besmirch my fine name and his fine name by agreeing with a drug taking charlatan. Andis Kaulins, who doesn't live in Wuxi, change your name!

A little knock on the door at 16:15. Who is it? Tony!!!

What did you do on your days off? Thankfully, no one asks me that question anymore.

Tuesday [October 22]

[Home Laptop]

I will work 13:00 to 21:00 today.

I have sent Tony off to school.

I am trying to get Tony to say that Daddy is right and Tony is wrong. To his credit, Tony understands what I am saying but he won't say it when I ask him to. He say that I am wrong.

Last evening, I took Tony to the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza.

This morning, I read an article about Gypsies in Taki's Magazine. In one passage of the article Gypsies were said to be Jews without accomplishments. However, the article in saying this left one thinking that the article's author also thought Jews were parasitical.

At the entrance to my school is a poster of me where I called myself a Gypsy. I didn't think that I was labeling myself a parasite, but just a person with no firm roots anywhere because I had moved a lot in my life.

Gypsies and Jews, in the article, were said to tend to stay aloof from the rest of the population. I am that way. However, my aloofness came from an inherited shyness which has evolved into a kind of passive aggressive resentment.

[School Laptop]

I took the 25 bus to work.

Wednesday [October 23]

[School Laptop]

I work 13:00 to 21:00 today.

I didn't have much to say yesterday. I don't have much to say today but I will try.

It's our 7^th Wedding Anniversary this Sunday. Yes.

On Friday, October 27, 2006, Jenny & I took the train to Nanjing to get our wedding license. We were supposed to have gotten it on the 23^rd. We had made a trip of it to Nanjing on that date and stayed overnight at a nice hotel, making love and all that, only to learn the next day that Jenny's paperwork was wrong and so she had to go back to her hometown to get some forms corrected. Jenny was very upset at the time. I shrugged my shoulders, but I think how I flattered I am now in retrospect that someone would be upset that they couldn't marry me right away. We returned on the 27^th on Jenny's insistence. I had to switch shifts to get it done. There was no night of passion spent at a hotel as I had to go back to work the next day.

I think I will consider October 27 to be our wedding anniversary instead of December 3 when we had our wedding party. I didn't particularly enjoy December 3, 2006. I think of the relationships that have been broken since then and all the people I invited to the party that I wish I hadn't in retrospect, particularly one Scottish piece of English Teacher scum. But at least the music at the party was all Sinatra – so there was one touch of class.

October 27, 2006 and August 23, 2007 are the best days I have ever spent in China. For it was on those days that Jenny became my wife and my son Tony was born.

Whose faults were these relationship breakups? They were my decisions for the most part. But if they hadn't been my decisions, they would have happened anyway. They were becoming intolerable.

I hoping to create a Toss Tossing Game GUI with Python.

Thursday [October 24]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 21:00. It's my longest workday of the week.

I succeeded yesterday in creating a crude coin tossing game with a Graphical User Interface. I know how to refresh the various elements of the GUI when the coin is tossed and results are produced. I of course need to refine it. I have to figure out like how to position the various elements of my program on the GUI canvas.

[LECTOR: Why? ANDIS: Because I don't want to lose my sanity. LECTOR: You think you are sane and everybody else isn't? ANDIS: Of course I don't think that. I know that I am insane or am at least willing to admit the possibility. I don't want to come in contact with people who really think they are sane or act on the pretense of being pseudo-cool crazy. LECTOR: What do you mean by pseudo-cool crazy? ANDIS: The people who bragging of the insane and crazy things they do.]

I took the 602支and the 81 buses to get to work.

A very happy student, who has graduated from university, tells me she is happy because she can sleep in every day. I remember being filled with anxiety about what I was going to do when I graduated with my second bachelor's degree. And of course the anxiety was well-founded.

Another student, who works in HR, tells me she prefers to hire non-Wuxi people. Wuxi people she says are rich already and not very ambitious when it comes to working, preferring to take it easy.

Funny how her idea of natives being lazy was not so different from a Canadian's idea of natives being lazy.

We, that be the Kaulins Family China, may be posing for portrait style photographs on our anniversary day.

For the economic historians who may read my blog, I will mention that the big breakfast I had at McDonald's this morning was 22 rmb.

Friday [October 25]

[School Laptop]

I work 11:00 to 21:00 today.

Last night, I had Wifi while I was waiting for the 635 bus. A rather pleasant occurrence. When I am getting a Wifi signal, My Ipod will make train whistling noises to tell me I am receiving email updates. Imagine my surprise when listening a podcast of Ben Shapiro speaking and staring at the Moresky360 building to hear a train coming in.

This morning, I stood on the same spot and didn't get Wifi.

I didn't have breakfast at McDonald's this morning. I figured that two pieces of toast and a large mug of tea at Casa Kaulins would suffice.

It is Anniversary Seven Day minus two.

I made substantial progress toward designing my coin toss GUI program yesterday afternoon. I have a toss button which when pressed will show the score and line-score progress of my coin tossing matches. I just need now to pretty the GUI up. My next project will be to create a GUI for a round robin tournament.

It's Friday. Time for some interior monologue mixed with third person narration. I almost forgot about that. I'll do this now; and at lunch, I will prep my classes. My first one is at three. Two students. Talk about family. Andis reclined in his chair and looked at his desk. He saw a pair of scissors. Put those back! He surveyed the desktop again. What a mess! Papers. Pens. Stapler! Put that back! Andis then yawned for a good five seconds. What I am so sleepy considering I am not so busy? Call this a job! It is more a case of keep myself occupied. Now. What to think? My mind is blank. What do I hear? Andis heard the voices of some teachers who were in nearby classes. BEICs. I wonder if they stick with it. Andis saw a carton containing a piece of cake from 85 bakery. It was on my desk on Tuesday. I will keep there as a sort of social-chemical experiment. Will it become stinky? Will someone take it away?

The Wuxi Peach Maoists. Oh six and one. Will they ever win a match-up this year? Never give up. A win now is a way to really stick it to the other team. They slap themselves for losing a game they thought was in the bag – the joys of being a spoiler.

Andis saw a short girl round a corner to get to her office. Marketing. They have awful jobs. Worse than having to talk to students who have nothing to say. If I didn't say inanities I would have nothing to say. Better to be quiet than to risk saying something inane.

Andis again leaned back in his chair. He took off his glasses. He wiped tears from his eyes. Tears of boredom? Tears of tiredness. Insane to get up so early and then don't do any real work till the evening.

Andis wondered what to think then. What to have for lunch? Already decided that. I won't. I will wait for supper. I have a package of M&Ms in the backpack if need be.

In someone came. Silence. I will be glad when I have this office again to myself.

Andis looked at the photo of him, his wife, and his son. Don't look at the hair so closely. A big patch of hair at front top of my head doesn't block the view of my bald spot. I can't see the hint of it clearly. Still, Tony and Jenny look cool. Yes!!!

I have a coin toss game GUI that works. It will let me toss a coin, keep a current line-score scoreboard of the toss results, and will even finish correctly in the last “inning” of the game.

Saturday [October 26]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 18:00 today.

It is Anniversary Seven minus one. We will be going to the Jin Ling Hotel tomorrow for a deluxe buffet dinner.

This afternoon, the school will have a Halloween Party. I am not sure what is going to happen. I won't wear a costume.

The wife wanted me to wear a costume, of sorts, tonight for a family portrait shot. Fortunately she changed her plan and we will be doing the photo session on Monday after Tony's school is finished. I wasn't keen on having to rush to a photo studio after having finished work, and then having to put on a suit.

I have nothing against wearing suits but I am afraid that I have adopted the modern habit of dressing casually all the time so that the suit I do have is ill-fitting and ill-maintained and cheap-looking. So if I do wear a suit, even half-ass well, I am better off dressing casually.... Either way I look bad but with a suit I look ridiculous.

A young student tells me that in grade two, students are able to go to school by themselves. I recall, but I will admit that my memory is fuzzy, going to school by myself in grade one.

[Home Laptop]

At the Halloween party, I snagged an Iron Man mask for Tony. You can see him wearing it at Tony Kaulins in China Wordpress.

It was bloody awkward having to not seem bored at the party. They carved pumpkins and wore unimaginative contests.

The only thing that kept me interested was the pretty young M.C.

Jenny told me that she was going to go downtown with Tony. They were first going to eat at a restaurant near Casa Kaulins and then take a bus downtown. This meant that I would have to eat dinner by myself downtown. I had no idea what to eat so I decided to check out the Hen Long Plaza, the second big shopping mall to open in Wuxi last month. The Plaza was cavernous, with seven floors, and was full of many expensive clothing stores. I was surprised to see a store for Major League Baseball on the 7^th floor. However, it sold mostly New York Yankee memorabilia.

While on the subject of MLB, I know the World Series is taking place now. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. The only sports talk I have heard of on my podcasts is about the NFL. The match-up in this year's World Series is classic: Cardinals and Red Sox. Still. No buzz.

I have to admit that I don't care for the way the MLB is being marketed on its website. What's with this new expressions like walk-off? Is MLB trying to imitate the NFL and at the same time try to create some new hipness? What's with the fashion of players wearing barbarian viking beards? And why don't they wear stirrup pants anymore? My image of MLB is from the seventies and eighties and nineties. I look at the video of MLB as it is now on the Internet, and feel that it isn't the same game.

Anyway, I won't be spending much time at the Hen Long Plaza. There isn't anything there that isn't already available at the Hui Shan Wanda. It just seems so unnecessary to build two shopping centers, both with seven floors, within two blocks of each other in the downtown.

Sunday [October 27]

[Home Laptop]

Happy Anniversary! Happy Anniversary! Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary!

I have marked this special day by publishing photos and videos, from that day seven years ago, on my two Andis Kaulins in China blogs.

I uploaded three videos to Youtube over night: Scenes from My Life in Wuxi, China #48 and Views of China from Casa Kaulins #33 & #34.

What are my plans for the day? This afternoon, we will be going to the downtown to get haircuts and to have a deluxe buffet dinner at the Jin Ling Hotel.

Jenny was complaining that it was cold outside yesterday. I thought it was comfortable.

I am up early and I don't know what to do with myself.

I spent some time looking for pdf and epub copies of books recommended by David Warren.

I spent my time, as I do everyday, licking psychic wounds. Being with Tony helps me to forget all.

I read a story about Sarah Palin refusing an invitation to appear on the Piers Morgan Show. Palin has very good reasons not to. Morgan should be offering Palin a grovelling apology for comments he made about her. He was helping to circulate a satirical story about Palin as if it was true. In fact, any Leftist journalist requesting an interview with Palin should offer a grovelling apology for spreading lies about her.

Tony watches violent Lego City video on Youku.

22:52 The K family went downtown and then returned to Casa Kaulins by 10:00 PM. They went to a small salon, a two seater, for two haircuts and a hair-wash. The salon had been opened by a stylist who had worked at the salon that the K family had been going to. Jenny said the stylist was good and so the K family took two buses to the salon which was located at the end of a row of businesses on Jiankang Road near the Hubin Street Bridge.

As foretold in this blog, the K family then went to the Jinling Hotel for dinner. Andis and Jenny had their fill. Tony ate all the chicken nuggets on offer and played with a girl from another table.

The K family then did a Downtown Wuxi Mall Crawl. They walked through the Baoli Shopping Center on the way to the Suning Plaza where they went to the grocery store. And then from the Suning they made their way to the Hen Long Plaza.

At the Suning Plaza grocery store, Andis saw a Tomica plastic cup that cost 43 rmb – a completely ridiculous price, even with a Tomica premium. The cup was a small child's size and its Tomica images could have easily been peeled off.

The Kaulins family had two items of celebration at this evening's deluxe buffet dinner.

1. It was Jenny & Andis's seventh anniversary.
2. They had paid off the mortgage on their apartment.

So Tony was prodded into giving his parents a congratulatory toast.

If you ever visited the apartment – fat chance of that happening – you'd laugh. But hey! It's paid for!

Thus ends the diary for a dull week.