Capers With Carroll

World-wide, Chinese New Year is celebrated by Spring Festival and Chūnyùn (春运), the greatest annual migration on earth. In 2008, the 1.3 billion Chinese took 2.2 billion train trips within the 40 day travel window. The celebrations include feasting, fireworks, dragons dancing in the streets, and time with family and friends. Apparently, also, they google the phrase Xin nian kuai le.

I know this last detail because over the past six weeks, this blog has been celebrating its fourth annual Capers Virtual Chūnyùn. I began seeing traffic pick up in mid December, helping to make that my most-visited month ever. Traffic continued steady through January and then spiked on Saturday the 29th. For the first time in the blog's six year history, page views topped 1,000. All by itself, Wednesday—Chinese New Year—brought 429. Five days into February, its totals now exceed all of January. Just four days this week, Monday through Thursday, out-performed the whole four month period, April to July.

Credit Google.

I'm assuming the vast majority of my traffic came from overseas Chinese. This past month, if Sweden’s nearly 13,000 Chinese expatriates went to google.com.se and searched for Xin nian kuai le, they got 272 000 results, of which my 2008 New Year’s greeting was listed 2nd. The United Arab Emirate’s 180,000 Chinese found me 3rd, and sent me 29 hits. Also at 2nd, Singapore’s 3.6 million found me 300 times. Myanmar’s million-plus found my 2008 message 4th and December 2010 update 5th. They made 139 visits. The UK’s 400,000 Chinese clicked on me 111 times. None of my visitors clicked in from China itself, but there, “新年快乐”would be far likelier to get lost in the crowd than would Xin Nian Kuai Le in the Diaspora. That and 2010 saw Google and China tangle, with a reduction of Google’s presence.

When all these numbers began to develop, my first reaction was awe over the chance popularity of an almost-throw-away post from three years ago. It struck me as random and surreal. Then, as I studied the source locations, I was transported back forty years, to a time in my life before marriage into a Spanish-speaking family, nine years living in Colombia, and 20 years teaching recent immigrants from Mexico. My focus on Latin America and its immigrants had interrupted an earlier interest.

I mentioned in my recent post on Fred Korematsu Day that I took at class at Pasadena City College called Sociology of the Asian in America. I took it because, even in high school, I had an interest in immigration and the mixing of cultures. Over the course of completing a history major, whatever class I might be taking, I wrote about Asian immigration into the Western world. I wrote about Japanese in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil, and especially, I wrote about the Chinese in Europe. During three quarters of independent study at UCLA, I wrote what I believe was the longest treatment of the Chinese in France that then existed in English (it has since been surpassed).

As blog hits came in from Holland, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, I was once again looking at the Chinese in Europe, and a Diasphora that now includes places like Dubai and Nairobi (I showed up 4th at Google Kenya).

I’m not sure yet what conclusions to draw, but I find myself thinking again on this subject after many years away from it. I am also beginning to read When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts. Stay tuned. My thoughts in this Year of the Rabbit may turn increasingly to China, and its Diasphora. Watts’ premise is that any race to stave off global warming and worldwide ecological disaster will be won or lost in mainland China. The same may be true in a wide variety of human activities. I am fortunate to have friends both inside and outside of China, and about two months of Chinese travel experience. That doesn’t rank me yet as an expert, but it gives me a place to start.

Happy Year of the Rabbit

Notes:
On Chūnyùn. On the Chinese Diasphora, and the Chinese in Europe.


Disclosure of Material Connection: The link above is an “affiliate link.” This means if someone clicks on the link and purchases the item, I will receive a commission. This has never happened yet, and would only be a pittance if it did. For this reason, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

When is Chinese New Year? The calendar tells us the Year of the Rabbit doesn't begin until February 3, 2011, but my scientific study shows that the anticipation of it started about a week ago.

It has become a peculiar annual pattern here at Capers with Carroll that in mid December, Sitemeter reports that my February 1, 2008 New Year's greeting becomes more popular than anything I have written before or since. Throughout the year, a smattering of visitors arrive by Googling either "新年快乐" or "Xin Nian Kuai Le," but suddenly, a week ago, it became a torrent. The Capers archives store 148 entries on a wide variety of topics, but over the last nine days, a full third of the traffic has come for this single, two-year-old post. How can that be? The last ten hits have come from Poland, France, Germany, Thailand, Italy, Canada, and two each from Singapore and Vietnam. Perhaps these place-names define the Chinese diaspora. I do not understand this phenomenon, but like other mysteries in life, I can enjoy it without knowing how it works.

And so, I send my New Year's greetings in advance, to all the Chinese (and other Asians) spread around the world: Xin Nian Kuai Le!

(P.S., This post received such heavy traffic, especially from Singapore, UK, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, UAE, and the European continent, that I wrote about it here.)

God's Guest List: Welcoming Those Who Influence Our Lives
by Debbie Macomber
• Hardcover: 208 pages (also available for Kindle)
• Publisher: Howard Books (November 2, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 143910896X

It’s always fun to be anthologized. It means an author interested in a subject surveyed the available literature and found one’s offerings noteworthy. That kind of complement puts an extra zest into sitting down at the keyboard for one’s next efforts.

Debbie Macomber has had a career in fiction that proves the power of plodding. I heard her tell her own story at the Mount Hermon writer’s conference, where she was the keynote speaker in 2008. A dyslexic with only a high school education and toddlers to care for, she yearned to be a novelist. Macomber tells the story with humor, but what I took away concerned a tenacity that eventually paid off with over 150 novels published, and over 60 million copies sold. Within the industry, people also mention her stunning accomplishment in maintaining a mailing list with every person who ever expressed an interest in her writing (begun in a shoebox, before the advent of computers), and her use of that list for a steady output of thank-you notes and personal invitations anytime she would be appearing in an area or releasing a new book.

Macomber was fun to listen to, and some of her modules show up in this volume, one of her rare ventures into non-fiction. Of course, that’s not why I’m plugging her book on my blog. However, the explanation begins with that same 2008 conference at Mount Hermon. It's a right-place-at-the-right-time story about getting into an anthology of right-place-at-the-right-time stories. There, at a meal, I briefly met Janet Kobobel Grant, of the Books and Such Literary Agency.

After the conference, I put the agency blog, Between the Lines, on my reader. The agency’s members rotate the duties and host one of the better daily conversations about writing and the publishing industry. Over these 30 months, I have joined in when the topic brought something to my mind.

A writer is only a writer if he or she writes. My problem is that teaching junior high school is an extreme sport. After running 7:30 to 3:00 on adrenalin, trying to stay one step ahead of 120 teens, the kids leave and I go brain-dead and drowsy. Sometimes in the evening I write tests or worksheets. I don’t have the oomph to work on my novel. But a couple times a week I might have the energy to craft one good paragraph and leave it somewhere on a blog.

So when I returned to Mount Hermon for this year’s Christian Writers’ Conference, I made a point of searching out the Books and Such table at lunch the second day. Wendy Lawton was already seated and was asking people’s names. I gave her mine and her eyes dropped immediately to my name badge, “Oh,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you.”

For an unpublished author, that kind of opening line from a respected agent is about as good as it can get. But it got better. Wendy explained that she was working with Debbie Macomber on a book project and they wanted my permission to include an anecdote I had posted on their blog. It’s an account from my 2004 trip to China. I’d already reported a variation of it here, but it was a rich enough experience that it could be told from a dozen different angles, each supporting a different thesis. In this case, I offered it in response to comments Wendy had posted about literary pilgrimages.

The upshot is, this week’s mail brought a signed copy of Debbie Macomber’s new book, God’s Guest List: Welcoming Those Who Influence Our Lives. (I'm sure I've also made it onto her prodigious address list.) She asks the reader to look at those times in our lives when we were at the right place at the right time and to acknowledge that these weren’t coincidences. Some of this overlaps the keynote addresses she gave at Mount Hermon, other parts of it are new. Some of it is her own story. Some of it comes from others. And page 72 is all mine.

Before her career got off the ground, Macomber made a list of famous people she wanted to meet and began pecking away at it. However, as she began to actually meet some of these people she found herself disappointed. Up close, some of the famous turned out to be unimpressive or even unpleasant. That caused her to begin looking closer at the non-famous, the people all around her whom she had previously looked right past. Then she began to examine those "coincidental" moments that she had previously not focused on, and to gather similar experiences from others. From those examinations came this book.

Like any anthology, it can be read straight through, or in small doses. I’ll admit: I skimmed through until I found page 72. Now I’ve gone back and read some of the passages I skipped over, and others beyond. There’s some interesting stuff. It’s a book I can enjoy being a part of. I was at the right place at the right time, and I'm glad for it.

The poppies are telling me the Capers winter hiatus has extended unbecomingly into the spring. That leads to a problem of surface tension. How does one return to blogging after a twelve-week absence without unleashing all the stored up thoughts? This, in turn, becomes self-perpetuating. When one does not know where to start, one rarely gets started.

I did not mean to leave-off posting. Life happens. Weeds infiltrate. Laundry accumulates. I spend my days teaching junior high: six performances a day in the center ring. Stare them back to their seats, find new ways to entertain them, keep records of everything, hope they don’t call one’s bluff, grade the papers, and pray they’ll somehow pick up what they need for the state tests. Whistle while you work. Collapse in front of the computer screen when the kids go home. There may be energy for Facebook, but not for much else.

This year’s distraction is that a third of the teachers at my school got lay-off notices, me included. I expect that most of us will be hired back by August, but it is one more example of amateur-hour at the highest levels of California government. There are other current events I want to write about, most noticeably the issue of immigration reform. I attended a Tea Party on Tax Day, but I am a party of one, searching among strange bed-fellows for someone to whom I can feel comfortable granting my vote.

I attended the four-day Mount Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference over Palm Sunday weekend. I had attended twice before, and was accompanied this time by my daughter Rebecca. We took a ten-hour class in writing narrative non-fiction from Lynn Vincent. I appreciated Lynn’s work during the ten years she wrote for World magazine, and her recent books have included NY Times bestseller The Same Kind of Different as Me, and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. She taught an excellent class, and it has seeded much of my thinking over the last month. Some of those thoughts may turn up here on Capers over the next few weeks.

I also renewed friendships from previous conferences and made new ones. Among the former was Randy Ingermanson, who taught the workshop I participated in two years ago. Among the latter was Dale Cramer. Referring only to the “L word,” Randy pointed Dale out as an author who writes in the same Literary Fiction category where my stories seem to fall. I came home from the conference with a tall stack of books to add to the stack I’m picking up at the Perspectives course I’m taking Sunday nights. Is it just a coincidence that I stopped blog-posting right when the Perspectives course began? I tend to read several books simultaneously and finish a bunch at the same time. The next few weeks may see a slew of Capers book reviews.

I also hope to get back to a series I was running two years ago, on the history of my novel. I posted fourteen episodes and then got interrupted. Fortunately, in the interim, I have made significant progress on the novel itself, and I came home from Mount Hermon with some encouraging feedback from a couple of well-respected agents. If I’m not teaching in the fall, I will be busy finishing the current novel and starting the next two. Capers will also stand to benefit. I wouldn’t expect to see a three month winter hiatus next year.

This week, as chūnyùn (春运), the largest annual migration on earth (likely 210 million passengers in 40 days), gets underway, it’s time for the Capers with Carroll Annual Chinese New Years Post. Chinese custom says that the third visit makes one a friend, so this third installment of Spring Festival greetings raises our blog-tradition to a new level.

I hope all of my friends in China (and some in Korea and parts of Southeast Asia) enjoy wonderful holidays with their families, and prosperous and healthy new years.

Everything points to an auspicious year for love. For the first time since 1934 (Year of the Dog) and 1953 (Year of the Snake), the lunar calendar teams up with the Gregorian calendar to usher in the Year of the Tiger on the same day as the Western world’s Valentine’s Day. (China celebrates its own version of Valentines Day, qīxījié [七夕节], on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month: August 16th for 2010.) Let’s face it, as Valentine images, dogs and snakes can’t compete with tigers. Go get ‘em tigers!

A lot has changed in a year. Last year, the chūnyùn migration bogged down in the kind of freak snow storm that had the Chinese government working hard to avoid any thoughts that it might have lost what the ancient Chinese referred to as the “Mandate of Heaven.” As I write this, it’s the Atlantic coast of the United States that is bogged down in a storm that mandate-damaged President Obama himself referred to as “Snowmageddon.” We are different cultures, to say the least.

Again this year, my Xīn Nián Kuài Lè posts for 2008 and 2009 begin drawing heavy traffic about six weeks ago. I suspect people are googling the Romanized pinyin spelling and hoping to find the Chinese characters. If so, in the spirit of the season, we here at Capers are pleased to provide this service. To each and every one: a full measure of New Year’s happiness.

I interrupt this period of silence to warn readers that, should your computer start flashing you messages that Windows has discovered a virus and you need to purchase "PC Antispyware2010," it's already too late. Wipe your PC clean and start all over. This blog will resume when I finally get my rig back from the shop. (Oh, and be careful about adding widgets to your Google home page. I'm highly suspicious of my daily dose of Dilbert.)

(I am double-posting this review as a way to inaugurate my new blog, Back Lit. Here at Capers with Carroll, I post more frequently, but with shorter posts on a wider variety of timely topics. There, I will have fewer pictures, but longer essays, more focused on literature, and less tied to current happenings. I hope to begin writing reviews of whatever I am reading. Some will be new publications. Others will come from the pile of books I collected but was too busy to read during my masters program. Still more will be from the old and out-of-print treasures I enjoy finding at used book stores or saving from boxes of discards destined for the dumpster. I also plan to resurrect papers I wrote for classes, for some of which I put in far too much effort to only have them read by one professor.)

The Diary of "Helena Morley"
translated and introduced by Elizabeth Bishop
Paperback, 282 pages, Farrar, 1995
Film adaptation (2004) by Helena Solberg, as Vida de Menina.

For a bibliophile like myself, one of the lasting blessings from sending my children to college is that the books they bought for now-forgotten classes still occupy bookshelves here at the house. Thus, when I finished reading the last assigned novel of my own masters’ degree program and turned to the shelves for my first, guilt-free, frivolous reading in five years, my eyes fell on this diary, penned by a teenaged girl in a backwater-Brazilian mining town in the 1890s, published in Portuguese (Minha Vida de Menina) in the 1940s, translated into English in the 1950s, purchased by my daughter in the 1990s for a History of Latin America class at Westmont College, and left behind seven years ago when that daughter made Brazil her home. I now have my own cache of Brazilian memories, but I don’t think they are necessary to appreciate this book. In Brazilian literature it is considered a classic, but its appeal should be far broader.

Helena Morley (pseudonym for Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant, 1880-1970) had a British-physician grandfather who migrated to Brazil and grew wealthy and a father who bought and managed marginal diamond mines and grew poor. At thirteen, attending a four-year normal school that would qualify her to teach primary school, a teacher assigned her to keep a diary. By her own description, Helena was mischievous, intelligent but lazy in her studies, and more fond of house work than homework (the diary being an exception). She was her grandmother’s favorite, but burdened by a godmother, her aunt, whose ‘love’ seemed to be expressed diabolically. Readers see her alert to both her own inner thought life, and her context in the larger community.

That community, Diamantina, Minas Gerais, some three hundred miles inland from Rio de Janeiro, is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an example of Brazilian Baroque Architecture, but the population still hasn’t reached 50,000. Her neighbors were poor families with both adults and children sorting through piles of gravel, picking out tiny diamonds or flecks of gold. Helena was there to witness the arrival of the first post office, and discussion about a possible railroad line. She thought the train money could be better spent bringing the town clean drinking water, and worried that the post office was replacing the lame delivery man who had to be lifted each day onto his donkey.

Brazil outlawed slavery in the years just before this diary began (newborns in 1871, and older slaves in 1885), and one of the interesting dynamics in Helena’s community involved the relationship between those who had once been masters or slaves. Her grandparents had owned slaves. Upon emancipation, most of the males moved to the big cities to find work and most of the females (more than available work required) stayed on to enjoy economic security with grandma. Helena’s daily entrees offer a wealth of material on the interaction between these two groups. There were resentments in both directions, yet honest affection, as well. There was also a pattern of white women with empty nests taking in orphaned black babies and raising them almost as pets.

Throughout, Helena describes her own conflict over Catholicism. She asks her mother to stay on her knees while Helena takes tests she hasn't sufficiently studied for, and catalogues saints by distinguishing which ones offer effective returns on prayer, and which ones don’t. She suffers under an aunt who, after the family has already offered sufficient prayers for the evening, then launches into long prayers to move the souls of nearly-forgotten relatives from Purgatory to Heaven. Helena also struggles with the belief it is a sin to consider her priest homely, and then wonders how she can confess that to him.

The story is full of rich characterizations; the neighbor lady who steals chickens, but then offers heroic help when Helena’s mother is sick; the father who reinvests all of his income in buying new mines, leaving his family in poverty; the grandmother who holds the family (and servants) together. There are also delightful vignettes; the women-folk carrying laundry to the river and Helena interrupting her bath and hair-washing to catch a dinner’s worth of the crawdads nibbling at her feet; the monkey who would toss Helena the ripest fruit from the top of the tree; the disaster when—at age 14, against her will and with no orientation or instructions—the crazy godmother arranges for Helena to substitute teach one month in a classroom of hellions.

In my day job, I teach junior high. Some things never change. The day after I read Helena’s account of being caught with a crib-sheet during a test (a footnote tells us they are called concertinas in the Portuguese), I saw one of my better students awkwardly trying to use one during the test I was administering. Helena’s teacher walked around and stood beside her for most of the test period, enabling the other students to use their own concertinas unnoticed. I walked around and stood next to my student. She sweated under the pressure, and after a while, handed me her test. Across the top, I wrote, “Would you like to start over, without the cheat-sheet?” With downcast eyes, she nodded agreement. In her diary, Helena lamented her poor luck.

Separated by 115 years, different languages, and all the changes of our modern age, a fourteen-year-old is still a fourteen-year-old. That a junior-high-aged girl produced this finely-layered story reminds us how observant this age-group can be. My own students can ignore the lesson I’m teaching, but will notice if I wear a new shirt. Helena has that same capacity. She carried me back three generations, across 6,000 miles, to another culture, and showed me the students in my classroom today.

As an adolescent, I wrote quite a bit of poetry that, even now, I look back upon as being several cuts above the, well . . . adolescent. I stopped writing poetry when I married. Subsequent soul-searching led me to the conclusion that my verse had been tied up in my loneliness. No longer lonely, my muse fell out of use. In my recently-completed program for a masters degree in creative writing, I produced nary a poem.

However, what my MFA professors could not draw out of me, a blog competition has. Literary agent Chip MacGregor runs an annual Bad Poetry Contest. I took a class from Chip at Mount Hermon, in 2003, and read his blog regularly. I’m still a little miffed at him for not recognizing the brilliance of my entry last year. The poem has been up since last May for the thousands who read his blog, but I figure it’s time to share it with the tens (sometimes twelves) who read mine. Chip threw down the gauntlet with the assertion that

There are only four words in the English language that rhyme with love: "Dove" and "Above" are the popular choices. "Shove" and "glove" don't really count. Use of the baby word "Wuv" can get you shot. (British citizens who enter are allowed to use the word "guv," as in "guv'nor," but don't push it. We Scots have been pushed around by you people long enough.)

I thought I deserved at least an honorable mention for expanding his list 0.4-fold with this entry:

Love

Love
is
like a lot
of
p’lov
in a pot—
rice and mutton
(nice for gluttons).
It warms your innards,
even for beginners.

Love
yells
“Mazel Tov!”
A reset button
When I’ve hit bottom.
It turns plain sinners
into winners.

This year, I’ve decided I won’t wait twelve months to share my poem here. I won’t even wait to hear if I won the Grand Prize lava lamp. So here is my 2009 (untitled) Bad Poem:

this post-modern poem is self-referential
bad as i hope it will be

it won’t rhyme
any time
except by accident

forward or
drawkcab
d
o
w
n

or

p
u

it phlaunts its phreedom to dephy conventions
boldly going where no poem has ever gone

read it and weep

And if this one doesn’t win, I’ll cultivate a new bad poem for next year.

It's still Sunday evening in California, but it's just past noon on New Years (Monday) in China, so this goes out with warm wishes for a healthful and prosperous Year of the Ox. In looking back at the Year of the Rat just finishing, one surprise here at Capers was that the page that most often captured visiters coming over from a Google search was . . . (the envelope, please) . . . 新年快乐 (Xin Nian Kuai Le!) from a year ago. We've had a steady stream throughout the year, often from Europe. This week, 新年快乐 got ten hits from the United Arab Emirates alone. So while I'm wishing all my Chinese friends a wonderful new year, I'm also scratching my head and wondering to what I owe this popularity. So a request: If you arrived at this blog after a Google search for "新年快乐", please leave a comment and explain what you hoped to find here. And then, may you enjoy health, peace, prosperity, and joy in this Year of the Ox.

Well, we powered it up this morning to find that while we slept, five visitors stopped by to put Capers over the one thousand mark, but none of them left the required comment to make them eligible for the big prize. Fortunately, all those who entered our contest are closely enough related to the author that they are already on the short list for autographed copies of Friday 10:03 when it is finally published.

However, if this may seem a disappointing conclusion to our big contest, our disappointment probably pales compared to that of googlers who come to Capers hoping to find the music video Itsy Bitsy Spider and instead found this. We have managed to frustrate 14 such searchers in the last three weeks alone. So, our next contest: an autographed copy of my novel (when it finally gets into print) to the one thousandth person who visits The Ittsy Bittsy Spider, thinking they'll see EliZe (with thanks to arachnomusicologist Mataikhan for identifying this artist) singing Itsy Bitsy Spider (and leaves a comment).

Currently, if one queries "ceanosis" from Google Images, one receives four pages of images, fifty of which come from this blog. However, the one ceanosis image I've actually posted is not among them.

I discovered this after observing that several viewers came to my blog as a result of a "ceanosis" search, but they ended up landing at truly random locations on the blog. This is the kind of marvelous trivia that comes my way courtesy of BlogPatrol, which I added to this site December 5, 2007, about the time I started to get serious about this blogging thing.

During that time, I have had 993 visitors, which means that someone in the next day or two will become my One Thousandth Visitor. I suppose I could have one of those flashing pop-ups, congratulating that visitor and promising a prize, except I can't think of any prize that I'm ready to offer. Oh, and I don't know how to create one of those flashing pop-ups.

Someday I hope to have an autographed copy of my novel to give away. So here's what we'll do: to be in the running for a someday-autographed-copy of my novel, leave a comment below this post. Then check back in a day or two to discover who landed as The Capers One Thousandth Visitor!

I noticed today that I have traffic coming to this blog from a link posted by CNN at the end of their current article on yesterday’s Colombian marches against kidnapping. CNN has a nice feature at the end of their stories, called From the Blogs: Controversy, commentary, and debate, which offers a survey of blogs that mention the topic at hand. Once before (May 16-17), when I commented on the Sichuan earthquake, CNN listed me in its queue, thereby introducing my thoughts to two readers in Hong Kong, one in the UK, and one in the USA. Four readers may not seem like much, but it indicates that someone out there believes that as you, the reader, search for free access to content, and I freely provide it, the go-between can sell advertizing and turn a profit.

I knew that.

And maybe for young people this is so du jour that it’s no cause for rumination, but for a guy like me who took my first journalism class while JFK was president, I can marvel at both the news (like the amazing upturn of events in Colombia) and the way that news is delivered.

Simply as a case in point: Last night, in a few minutes before going to bed, I wrote a quick couple of paragraphs and added links to an AFP newswire story and two You-Tube videos, one a week-old interview of Ingrid Betancourt by Al Jazeera and the other a Colombian TV report from a concert earlier yesterday. Then, while I slept, CNN found my quick paragraphs and made them available to the world. The Internet has both enabled a million people, world wide, to organize themselves into a demonstration—a remarkable feat of mass democracy—and then allowed individuals to sort through the chattering-class reactions of thousands, and for one single comment to be read by anyone who is looking. In part two of the Al Jazeera interview Betancourt talks about how the Internet reduces national boundaries. But she does not speak as if a Rip Van Winkle, returned to see the Internet’s growth over six-and-a-half years. It seems obvious that even as a hostage in the jungle, she was able to look over some guard’s shoulder and see the world.

I’m still processing that, both the good and the bad. I won’t get to the bottom of it tonight, especially with an essay that is trying to run in three different directions. I will see which direction it’s looking for tomorrow, and maybe continue.

On March 12, my daughter Slowlane tagged me with a print-based meme. In turn, I tagged my new son-in-law, my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, and John Hales, who wrote the book I used for my response to the meme. Now the dust has settled. On March 29, Son-in-law responded with a discussion of the Biblical implications of the number forty, from Teologia do Novo Testamento. When I saw John at school, and he said he doesn't have a blog. Today Daughter-in-Law-Designate ties together 奢白，炫放无暇钻光, a Japanese comic book, and a definition of manslaughter. Then she tagged jeorgesmith. I thank each of those who contributed to restoring Karmic balance here at Capers, and we turn our eyes to The Dry Wash.

Both as a novelist and Bible teacher, I enjoy Athol Dickson. I also follow his blog. Today he posts about an amazing observation concerning the meaning of YHWH, the secret name of God.

First a little humor:
This morning I stumbled upon a site which combines a Latino viewpoint with a little whimsical irreverence. For example European Non-Girly Man In Charge Of Huge, Basically Mexican Hacienda Sin Bandera State Expected To Endorse Panamanian For Casa Blanca That, of course, refers to our Austrian-born Governator who recently came out for McCain (born while his father was a U.S. navy officer stationed in Panama) over Romney (whose father was born in Mexico of Mormon missionary parents). Or this one in a similar vein: Cubans Choose Panamanian Over Mexican American to be Next President Outlived by Fidel Castro

Yesterday I saw my first yard poster (Romney). As far as I’ve been able to see, my Huckabee bumper sticker (that I mailed away for, Jan 18th) is the only bumper sticker in Tulare or Fresno Counties, for any candidate, in either party. I don’t watch television, so maybe that’s where all the action is.

On January 19th, I signed up as the 8th member of the Tulare County for Mike Huckabee Meetup. I am still the newest member. No meetings are scheduled. On the Huckabee national website, the pre-Super Tuesday action all seems to be in Georgia, with maybe some spillover into Tennessee or Alabama. In news stories, the spin seems to be that by staying in the race, Huckabee is stealing away the conservative votes that rightfully belong to Romney.

Well, no. I was grateful to the voters of Florida for eliminating Giuliani, who had been my worst case scenario for most of last year, but that pops up Romney as next on my list. I’m not one of these people who hammer a politician for changing an occasional position (for example, slamming McCain because he now supports keeping a tax cut that he voted against six years ago). Goodness, do we want a leader who’s not allowed to rethink anything? On the other hand, Romney wants us to believe he rethought everything—that the only thing he retains from the first 25 years of his adulthood is his ability to handle money. On everything else, he’s done 180º.

I could still change, but if Huckabee isn’t contesting California, this social conservative is voting for McCain.

I want to wish a very Happy New Year (and a warm place to sit by a window and look out at the beautiful snow) to all of my shivering friends in China. I have been reading the emails and news reports. Yuting tells me it has been over ten years since they last had snow in Chongqing. I’ve also been watching video reports on the hundreds of thousands (400,000 to 600,000?) people camped out at the Guangzhou Railway Station in Guangdong province, waiting for the trains to start running so they can get back to their families for New Years. (Oooops, when I first wrote this, I was confusing Guangzhou [where I have not been] with Guiyang [where I did go], so I'm removing some of my original post. Now, however, I am particularly concerned about my school-teacher friend Suyun, who would have needed to pass through Guangzhou to get home for the holiday.) It is hard to imagine half a million people waiting in line for trains, camped out in weather that turned suddenly cold. Today’s reports say the trains have finally begun to move. I hope everyone gets home quickly, and that the holidays with family make it all worth while.

Ever since I began this blog in 2004, I have hoped to find a way it could be viewed from inside China. With many thanks to Middle Son, I believe my Chinese friends can now visit here as often as they like. This certainly makes visiting easier than having to ride 20 hours on a hard seat train, or waiting several days in the cold outside a train station! So I welcome my Chinese friends, and wish you all 新年快乐. Please leave a message, so I know who stopped by to visit.

(P.S., This post receives more traffic than any other post I have written. It draws some all year long, but heavy traffic during December, January, and February. It comes especially from Singapore, UK, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, UAE, and the European continent. After this 2011 firestorm, I wrote about it here.)

This page is slowly evolving. When I began Capers with Carroll, I was both new to blogging and newly back from a summer of teaching English in China. I was looking for a way to keep in touch with the students I had enjoyed having in my class, and to even share pictures. Unfortunately, from the very beginning, Blogger was being blocked. For that reason, this page languished unused. Meanwhile, I began a second page, The Occasional Visitor, for the purpose of sharing with members of my family. Now, as I attempt to get a career off the ground as a novelist, I again need a second blog, as well as a website. Therefore, Capers with Carroll will become my professional blog, and will link to my website http://briantcarroll.talkspot.com/. Obviously, this will not happen all at once, but little-by-little I hope to get there.