Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
I’ve been asked to speak at a Wright State University forum; their Honors Institute is having a symposium on Chinese-American relations called “Connecting With China”, and I’m to talk on “Exploring Issues in Cross-Cultural Adoptions” from 2-4 pm, February 17th. The event is free to the public, but you have to register in advance to [...]
This one is a weird amalgam of the Dayton Daily News article and the Newsweek one. For one thing, it thinks that we used to live in Dayton; the last time I lived in Dayton was 1977, thirty years ago, long before I married Susan. It also notes a 2009 picture of the twins as [...]
Above is a weird line from another Chinese article on the twins that appeared in the Hong Kong news for Yahoo; from the “(Ming Daily) on December 22, 2009 on Tuesday 05:10″ The article (English translation via Babelfish translation) follows after the cut. It seems to be a boil-down of the Newsweek article.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1 The Power of Two: http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098 Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning. This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around [...]
Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town. Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)
Speaking of the seriously rich are still pretty much the seriously rich unless they put their money in the seriously stupid, the Chinese Prime Minister is getting nervous about the safety of US Treasury securities with all of the talk about spending lots of newly printed dollars. Dude. There’s no real place to go with [...]
From The People’s Daily: Jiangmen cops broke a child selling ring. Details after the cut.
Today was Mere’s ‘family’ birthday party out at her great-aunt Marlyce’s house in Elgin, and we moved the time up somewhat because of the weather; it was getting slick and messy from sleet and snow. And also, it looks like Mere is coming down with a cold. She came home, and moaned and crashed very [...]
Panic in various circles over the mistaken notion that ‘Obama’s going to shut down gun shops and confiscate our guns‘. Various people who were proclaiming Obama’s victory in OMG terms now doing a ‘never mind’ response. Dogs are adopting kittens in Jiangmen, Meredith’s home town in China, but you can’t adopt or foster children if [...]
More excerpts from the journal, this time from the day we actually adopted Meredith (the day after we got her). Again, see some pictures of the day on Flickr – the picture below is something the Jiangmen paper later got out of the files of the orphanage when the paper was running that stupid ‘Dick [...]
Today is/was the eighth anniversary of our adoption of Meredith in Guangzhou, China – and it’s a big day around here. As you may have guessed, she’s the center of the household, and we all love the stuffing out of this wild, brave, wacky child. Below is some material from the Journal for the day [...]
We’ve known for some time that eventually, Meredith would need glasses – she was slowly getting nearsighted, and we would have to recheck her every so often. Since she’s going to be in a new school this fall (in 2d grade) we just did the exam, and she’s 20/40 with a 1.25x. So she got [...]
Right after I got back from DC in mid-January, I posted the following: And there’s something surprising I can’t talk about going on; very complicated, very very big and very important that we’re looking into. Very good news if true. It’s had us tied in knots thinking about it, and it’ll be a little while before we can openly [...]