Striving for Excellence

I'm sure I'm not the first to ask this, but I will anyway: Why are the Chinese able to deliver stunning Olympic facilities, jaw-dropping opening ceremonies, and an incredible gold medal tally and yet export tons of defective products? I'm impressed that they are so successful in athletics and obviously have the attitude of "gold or nothing." (After all, when I think of Chinese jewelry, it's all about gold and jade. Silver? What's that?) They strive to be the best, they want to impress the world, etc, etc...and yet does it occur to them that the 1)crappy DVD player we got at Walmart that lasted a couple of months 2)laptop cooling pad which lasted one week and 3)earphones that would only please someone deaf in one ear, might be more significant an indicator to us of their worth than their Olympic accomplishments? Ah well, I suppose it's easier to cultivate 39 gold medalists than to manage the millions of laborers in their manufacturing plants. Hopefully now that the Olympics will soon be over, they can turn their attention to improving their reputation as manufacturers.

On the local front, hubby was given a Mel Rapozo campaign sign by a friend and being a very accommodating fellow, promptly put it in front of our driveway. I questioned this because I thought he was considering voting for another candidate. He said oh, he'd be happy to put up almost anyone's sign. Well, I'm not sure whose sign I want in front of our house yet, so I said maybe I should letter in "Colleen Toyama does NOT approve this message" on the sign. He said "Well look, now we have a good sign for our next garage sale...just put 'GARAGE SALE' over Mel Rapozo". I brightened at that thought since our garage sale will be in a few weeks.

Yesterday we got a Bernard Carvalho campaign postcard in the mail. Hubby said he's thinking of taping it onto the Mel Rapozo sign. "Look," he pointed out. "Bernard is saying 'Together we can!' so it'll be funny to stick it on the Rapozo sign, like they'd be working together!"

Later on he came into the house and reported that the neighbor was selling avocados in front of their house and their "Avocados for Sale" sign looked suspiciously similar to our Rapozo sign. Now he's thinking of more uses for our sign like selling tangerines.