Wuxi Tony Update #379: Not according to script.

Couldn't get Tony to show the audience anything, so I end up opining in this video.

Monday-Friday Morning Ruminations.

• This blog entry will be full of more motley (stolen from Radio Derb).
• Bubba, a.k.a. Bill Clinton, has found a great way to pick up chicks.  Clinton, using his status as ex-President, can convince dictators and the like to let the women go.  The grateful women, seeing Bubba as a hero, will of course want to sleep with him.  Heck, all female relatives and friends of the picked-up girls would probably want to sleep with Bubba as well.  What a great gig being ex-President can be!
• It is raining heavily outside as I type this sentence.  Looks like I will be taking the bus to work - no biking it.
• I picked up somebody else's baby yesterday.  The kid did not like it one bit.
• Tony was having great fun throwing rocks into a small artificial pond till the security man came....
• Ten most beautiful churches in China.
• I like to carry Tony on my shoulders.  It seems that I am the only person in child who does like to carry his child so, and so I wonder why this should be.  Some locals have asked me if it is safe.  I tell them it is perfectly safe.  Others think maybe Tony is to heavy.  I should say not and as well, I find it easier to carry him that way then to have him in my arms.  Tony, I believe, enjoys being on my shoulders as well.
• The Tonymeister was awake, but a bottle of milkie has pacified him.
• My wife was going to spend some time in Beixing with Tony, but that plan has fallen through because her parents have a dog that has bitten two people.  Why they won't get rid of the dog is something I haven't been to get an explanation about.
• Tony is up and about.
• I will wear white pants today.
• In a class yesterday afternoon, I asked the students who they thought had more pressure in Chinese society.  The male students all said women did; the female students all said men did.  I said men did because of the demographic imbalance that China is experiencing between men and women.  Men will have a hard time finding wives.
• I had another student tell me that it seemed strange to use the expression "too easy".  People want ease, she said, and would never want things to be more difficult or harder.

Sunday Night Ramblings.

• As the song goes:  "Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Oh Yeah!  Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Sunday Night, Oh No!  Tomorrow is Monday!" 
• Yep.  That is how the song goes.   Although, I don't have to sing this lament because for me, tomorrow is my Friday.  So ha, ha, ha! to you!
• I had an adult with a job in class today.  I asked him how business was.  He said orders from American companies were up, but they were asking for more time to pay - a bit of a risk for his company, he admitted.
• Some of the students will begin school next week.
• Some of the students have to do military training.  A crash two-week basic training course where they learn how to march.
• I asked students about nicknames.  One student told me his grandfather called him sweet heart because the student was such a good grandson.  I told him he must have mis-translated what his grandfather meant.  The same student told me he was also nicknamed "Condom" because his Chinese name sounded a lot like that word.  Another student in the class then asked what a condom was.  I decided to waive my rule of having the students try to explain the word to him in English - just tell him the Chinese word and get the incident over and done with.
• My wife phones me to say that she and Tony had another accident, that no one was hurt, but it was trouble and she was waiting for me.  She phoned me while I was in class and so had no time to get the complete details.  I thought of all sorts of possible things going wrong and the wife having a confrontation with some one.  But when I phoned her I learned that Tony had inadvertently locked her keys and wallet in the "trunk" of the electric bike, after he decided to close the "trunk" lid.  The wife had to stay at a neighbour's till I got home from work.  We ended up having supper there.
• Tony has a bruise on his cheek after having done a face plant at a KFC playground yesterday.
• Should I read the Iliad by Homer, or Ulysses by James Joyce?
• Youtube has a download MP4 feature which I have been using to upload videos to www.youku.com (look for wuxiandis).
• After having heard of the death of John Hughes, I watched a couple of his films on www.youku.com:  Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  I could only watch PiP for about twenty minutes.  It was so full of cliches.  Ferris, at least, had some funny moments.
• I am enjoying reading about the protests against Obama care happening in America now.  The whole Health care fiasco shows what I knew about Obama all along.  His talk about a new kind of politics was bogus and wasn't going to last long past his inauguration.  And  the fiasco is in some way a miracle.  Obama has a Supreme Soviet situation with majorities from his party in both houses.  He had the numbers to put the health care bill before the August recess. (Funny how Democrats can complain about the opposition resorting to "Nazi-like" tactics when the plan was to have the health care bill passed before even members of their own party could read the thing)  It would be a terrible thing for the world if the Democrats tried to have more government control of the health care system.  Part of the reason Americans spend more on health care per capita is they do a lot of medical and pharmaceutical research.  Countries like Canada have made it a moral cause to leach off the American system by charging less for prescription drugs.  Meanwhile, who gets holding the bag for research cost - the Americans.  People could make some argument about the drug companies making obscene profits.  But companies have a right to make money and all research has to be paid for and innovation has to be awarded.  When leftists start talking about obscene profits, they ought to be shouted down.  When people start off using bogus premises, what is the point of hearing them through?  (Another reason America has high per capita costs is that its system, as currently constituted, does have many people not directly bearing the cost of their use of the medical system.  That is, someone else pays.  Other countries have to ration to kept the cost down.  America doesn't do that.  When others pay, there is no incentive for many to economize and misallocations inevitably result.  In markets where governments stay out of the way, like the computer market, the increasing inexpensiveness of products is something to behold.  Why can't the cost of medical care go down?  Government is involved in it.)
• One of my students in China told me that he didn't want the government running the hospitals.  He pointed out the example of the government running restaurants.  When this happened, he said, there were few restaurants.

Photos of Tony Mania

I can say, with confidence, that hundreds of photos were taken of Tony yesterday on the school trip to Tianmu Lake. Even some tourists not with our group took photos of Tony. Some of these tourists, with children, asked to have Tony pose with them.

Wuxi Tony Update #378: Tony on a Boat.

Tony on a Cruise Boat on Tianmu Lake.

Wuxi Tony Update #377: Tony on a School Field Trip

Saturday Morning

• The brief respite from teaching, yesterday's field trip, is over.  Now it is back to teaching.  The fallout for me from the trip is a stiff back from having to carry Tony around all day.  I don't know how my wife can do it, seven days a week!
• I gave Tony a bath last night.  It went well, Tony was calm.  I lathered his hair with shampoo.  But then I tried to rinse it out and discovered that Tony doesn't like getting water in his eyes and face one bit.  The poor fellow, I had to hold him, wet and naked, for five minutes till he would calm down.  My wife has a struggle with Tony when washing his hair that is painful to listen to, let alone watch.
• I sweated buckets on the field trip yesterday.  It was muggy, and carrying Tony was an exertion that was enough to turn on the spigots of sweat.  Many photos of Tony and me were taken yesterday, but they will show a very wet t-shirt and so not all at becoming.
• I finished Michael Crichton's Timeline last night.  A good read.  While there is some two dimensionality to his characterizations, Crichton does include lots of scientific detail.  His mixture of science, popularly presented, and his stories do receive and deserve high praise.
• I could provide you with ten links that I found interesting when surfing last night.  Here is one about James Joyce's novel Ulysses.  I have the novel in Wuxi.  It made my short list of books that it was essential I take to Asia.  The copy I have I absconded from an uncle long since passed away.  I can say I have read the novel from cover to cover once, but I do like to, every now and then, leaf through the book.  It is full of virtuoso writing and showing-off that many a write wish he could have done himself.
• Hundreds of photos were taken of Tony on yesterday's field trip.  He was the smash I thought he would be when,I decided to have him accompany me on the trip.

Tony Mania Runs Wild.

You can go to my other blog to see a photo of the Tony Mania that occurred on Friday's school field trip to Tianmu Lake.  For whatever reason, my home computer won't let my use my VPN so I can upload photos to this site directly.  I will upload them tomorrow when I get to school.

 

Tianmu Lake was okay.  It was a nice diversion from teaching.  But the park is nothing spectacular and contains many of the vices of other Chinese tourist traps.  For example, the park was full of statues of animals that aren't native to the area.  The statues were really cheap decoration.   There were the gift shops selling over-priced merchandise.  And there many other things that maybe impress a local but underwhelm a foreign visitor.

Friday, Andis is cleaning ass.

Or at least that is the plan.  I hope to bring Tony along to the school field trip tomorrow.  So far my wife seems okay with the idea.  But she is expressing some trepidation.  So she may just change her mind at the last minute.  Either way, no Friday blogging from me.