when sex and god come together

Heh heh.

Masturbation: God's Great Gift to Us, among other interesting articles for your perusal. Enjoy!

i want it this way

Sent from a friend, this video is worth watching. C says it is so Taiwanese high school student-like - they love their boy- and girl-bands out here (the Taiwanese-born and bred ones especially). And you can use the new Google Video!

click click

I've uploaded some pictures (finally, yes, I know). One gallery from around the city this summer (including a couple of hurricane aftermath pictures from the big one in July), and another gallery from a couple of trips to Taipei (one with the girlfriend, one with my brother). Enjoy!

Oh, and if you go to the gallery page itself, use the first kaohsiung summer album (the one that's linked to on the left). The other one is having issues that I'm trying to resolve.

my goodness how taiwan changes you

It happens so slowly you hardly even notice it. Went to take a picture for the 'rents today, and damn. I barely recognize myself anymore.

why taiwan will never be taken seriously

Local politics have never been so crazy. Oh wait, they've always been this crazy.

There's quite the furor going on right now about a national TV station that some say foreigners own a majority in, which would make it illegal. Various people want it shut down, a bill recently went through the legislature about the media, and the president has said that no TV stations will be shut down during his tenure. Fine. Great! I understand. But the part that goes too far is one legislator who said that he would change his name if the legistlation went through and the TV station was not shut down. To what you may ask? A character that meant 'bitch' or 'whore'.

Well, guess what. The station didn't get shut down, but the legislator ended up changing it to a character with similar pronounciation, only this one meant 'picture frame'. Such is the Chinese language. There were still articles in the paper about 'bitch brother', as he had previously joked people could call him.

This week, he said that if the opposition-led legislature doesn't pass the defense bill (which they've rejected 36 times now), he'd change his name back. Guess what? They rejected it. More publicity for him. The title of the article? "Tsai no longer a 'bitch' as bills blocked".

And really, this is the heart of it. Could you imagine a legislator anywhere else in the world (except maybe Korea, home of other crazy politicians) where someone would say, "If this legislation does not pass, you can call me Peter Whore."? No. And until Taiwanese politicians stop acting like children (believe me, they do - throwing water at each other, yelling while others talk, fighting and drawing blood in the legislature, tearing down pictures of the president and running around with them... it's all happened), the world is basically forced to ignore them, just like a parent who has had quite enough for one day of the rowdy children.

how to properly work for a multi-billion-dollar-earning company

So, I subscribe to a newsletter for a very funny webcomic - Toothpaste for Dinner. Good stuff. The newsletter is really what the Internet is for - sounding off on whatever you want and having people read it. He's really funny, though. His newsletter contains randomata, especially b-side comics that don't cut it for him upon reflection. However, his commentary always kills me. For example:

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/wash-your-pants.gif - it's true. you really don't have to wash your pants. i once had a temp job for six months and i wore the same pair of pants the whole time. they were just
brown flat-front pants. i might have washed them a couple of times, but, you know, maybe not. whenever you do something like that, there is always an internal reasoning, and usually it's like "hey, pay me more, and then i'll wash my pants."

or "if you pay me more, i won't take two-hour lunch breaks and forget to note it on my time card." or "if you pay me more, i won't tip off stockholders that the company is falling way short of expected earnings, causing your stock price to plummet." you know, stuff like that. you can usually justify anything with this mechanism. especially if you work for exxon, who made ten billion dollars (NOT A TYPO OR EXAGGERATION) last quarter. if i worked for them, i'd be walking around with my shirt off, crapping in the hallway, and charging bentleys to my
corporate card, explaining it with "hey, you made ten billion bucks in the past three months. pay me more and i'll stop crapping in the hallway and put my shirt back on."

what about the bentley? well, you guys made ten billion bucks last quarter, so i'm keeping the bentley, you dicks.

Yeah. Visit his site. Good stuff.

Ten billion dollars. Man.

loud imaginations

Sometimes I wonder if people who have never lived in a big city imagine it sounds like my big city did this morning, as I lay relaxing and reading in my apartment.

Traffic, siren, jackhammer. That's all I could hear.

The chorus of a populace.

Incidentally, the comments are fixed. Don't know exactly when they broke, but thanks to this guy for sending me the file that unbroke it!

climate control and you

Weather machines. Think of all the wonderful uses. I mean, looking at the way the world is today - droughts all over, the Yellow River drying up in China, the Amazon not reaching places it used to, global warming heating up the oceans and causing intense hurricanes, unseasonably warm winters - a weather machine could put things right back in order, the way they should be. That is, if you were allowed to use it for good.

You see, weather machines seem to come with a prerequisite: they can only be used for evil. Think about it. Have you ever seen a weather machine be used for moral, humanistic purposes? Have you even really though about it? I would bet my brother's right arm that you haven't. You've thought about how you could bring out the sun on that chilly day, or a nice cooling rain during that heat wave, or a blizzard when you don't want to go to work. It's not your fault, though. We've been brought up in a culture of evil weather-machine madness. Even good scientists never create them, only evil. I'm sure it's even been passed into scientist law. And the media bombards us with images and stories of evil weather machine usage, such as Dr. Evil joins Al Quida to use weather machine against US. The news is so important that they can't even spell it right in their rush to bring it to you. Makes one tear up, really.

How can you solve this? Vote Yes on Proposition 162 the next time you visit the poles. It's time to take back the weather machines.

it'll make you sick

But not as sick as it will make them.

The United States EPA is looking to pass legislation that would allow companies to test pesticides on mentally disabled children and orphans. Read about it here.

This sickens and apalls me. The EPA is taking comments on it now. If you find this as disgusting as I do, please submit something to them. Anything is better than letting them think this is OK.

Link from Uncommon Thought.

this could bake your noodle

When we say it is raining or it is sunny, what is it?

Later: Emphasis added later. What I want to know is what does the pronoun it replace? (it's a grammar question)

and it's only four months late!

So, I went to China this summer. And I've finally written about it. Yay! This is a two-part post - one part about Shanghai and Xi'an, and the other about Beijing and some final thoughts and observations. Also, as a picture is worth a thousand words, and I've only given a couple pictures with these words, you can see more at in the gallery.

So, China. I went at the end of July - still quite a warm time. Three cities was my plan, catching some of the biggest tourist draws and visiting friends. I flew into Shanghai with two visits on my agenda - my ex-roommate Alicia and her boyfriend Yam, and my friends Scott and Michael, who had both recently left their teaching jobs in South Korea. Shanghai was a business mecca for China, already getting ready for the World Expo in 2010 (sometimes through shady practices, if the stories are true). It mixes this new business atmosphere with semi-traditional Chinese living and old European architecture along the Bund, an area of town built up in the 1930s during the heyday of trade with Europe. Shanghai was a visit with friends - I enjoyed good times with Alicia and was one of the first of her friends to meet Yam, whose band I also got to see play. Scott and Michael and I joked around and explored the Shanghai museum, where we went through most of the porcelain exhibit backwards before we realized what we had done (we just thought they got worse at it ;-), explored a bit of the business architecture of Pudong, and journeyed to the top of the Oriental Pearl - the tallest tower in Asia.

However, there was a face of China that people don't want to see - the extreme poverty. It made itself known especially at night - mothers with children hanging around bars to beg for money from people leaving. Entire families sleeping outside of public buildings, as the weather was quite warm. With recent reports of the growing rich-poor divide in China, such sights are only going to become more common. I wonder what they do in the winter.

And then, before I knew it, I was saying good-bye to everyone and climbing on a train for a soul-crushing 14 hour ride on a top bunk (about a foot from my face to the ceiling of the train car). Yay! I was off to Xi'an, home of the legendary Terracotta Warriors, a collection of warriors created around 2000 years ago by a Ming Dynasty emperor who not only wanted to have his mausoleum ready for him when he died, but to have a vast army ready to rise to his command in the next life. He spent 38 years and 700,000 slaves doing it, but less than a half a dozen years after his death, citizens got pissed at his waste and stormed the mausoleum, destroying a lot of what had been built. After lying dormant for centuries, a farmer discovered some shards in the 1970s, shedding light on a forgotten phenomenon. They've excavated over 2000 warriors and hope to get twice that out as they continue to dig and explore. They are so incredibly life-like, even to the point of having different faces for each soldier. Of course, many lie shattered on the floor of the three pits that are open to the public (which are being excavated even now), and various accoutrements - jewelry, cooking pots, and other equipment on display in a museum. To see these thousands of soldiers lined up, silent, and to imagine the handiwork and lives that went out to create these artificial lives...the dynasty system was pretty nasty.

After spending some polluted time in Shanghai and now a day or two in Xi'an, notoriously one of China's (and the world's) most polluted cities (it was really disgusting), I needed some time in nature, so I went and climbed a mountain a few hours outside of Xi'an - Huashan - which provided some much-needed relaxing. It was an intense climb - I mean, it was paved and staired the whole way up, but at times there were stairs almost straight up. More like ladders. Either way, it influenced my decision to take a gondola down after catching a hazy sunrise from the summit. I made my way back to Xi'an, grabbed my stuff, and was off to Beijing.

china, pt. 2

Beijing. If Shanghai is business, Beijing is the seat of power. Culture and Government surround you wherever you look.

I got in after another grueling train ride, and immediately set off walking. I got to see Chairman Mao's tomb, an event that ended up making me quite angry. But he is dead. It's a free visit, which is why it took an hour of standing to get in, but you have to check everything except your clothes for a modest fee. You can also buy flowers to place in front of his portrait, which they periodically wheel out and resell to others to do the same. The viewing lasts for about twenty seconds, as they hustle you through into merchandise city, then back out into Tiananmen Square, crowded with people and history.

During my first weekend in Beijing, I managed to visit a few temples (even after living in Taiwan, I could still manage some of the cooler-looking ones), an art museum (who had a collection from an artist who painting riveting scenes from Taiwan on display while I was there), and took a wonderful self-led bicycle tour of a small portion of the hutongs (thousands of back streets where a large portion of Beijing lives). Of course, a day's walk along the Great Wall was in order, and didn't disappoint. I chose the untouristed-up version, a 10 km hike over the Jinshanling section of the wall. Back to nature, it was nice - blue skies, China on one side, Mongolia on the other, and this twisting brick structure stretching as far as you could see in either direction. There were quite a few sections where the wall simply disappeared, however - a sign of its age. Still, breath-taking. Probably the oddest occurrence was the bus driver, who, during our final half-hour of the three hour drive to the wall, popped in a tape to play Hotel California, then promptly shut it off. No music before, no music after, just that one song. Bizarre.

A trip to the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City were also in order, both of which were terrific and also indicative of how lavish the government was (and still is). The Olympic countdown clock passed by 1000 days while I was there, and the government is spending billions to get the city looking pretty for the rest of the world (ignoring the fact that the age is what makes a lot of it so interesting). The Summer Palace was actually built by an Emperor Dowager, scouring money from the military budget when she could to build a huge, well, palace. A life-size steamboat model made entirely of stone was installed on the lakeside at one point, the largest collection of lotus flowers I have ever seen in my entire life installed, and everything painted and gilded and WOW. The Imperial Palace/Forbidden City was just as astounding, though also for the intense crowds. I have never been around so many people in my life. Such a crush. But a plethora of mini-museums, giant buildings of the palace proper, and statues galore make for an amazing time. Don't forget the much-talked about Starbucks right in the heart!

My last major adventures in Beijing were in the company of a friend of a friend, a fellow Canadian named Sherisse, and her boyfriend Paul. These two wonderful people showed me a wonderful coffeehouse, a small little restaurant bar with a bar made out of 5000 books, a back street taste of Beijing Chinese food (Best. Kong Pao Chicken. Ever.), my first Beijing duck (delicious), a good time at Sherisse's birthday party, and a night market or two, in addition with regaling me and teaching me through wonderful conversation. I had a terrific time visiting with these two, a time I won't soon forget.

And then it was all done. It was certainly an adventure. All the city and pollution was not my favourite part by far, but I did have some fun, saw some unique, marvelous sights, and met and/or visited some terrific people. Some final observations?

1. There are no diapers. Could you imagine if there were? Instead, babies wear pants with the crotch slit open.

2. There are banks open every day, 9-5. No religion = no special days to close things.

3. Clean public bathrooms everywhere. And someone to sell toilet paper in a little room at the front of most of them.

4. Military everywhere in Beijing. I didn't go a day without seeing a group of men in uniform walking around.

5. Smoking is legal just about anywhere. Except in your bed.

6. Seeing three different areas of China was really interesting, but China is still very different from any place I've been before. I was told to stop taking photos of military in public. There were political warnings everywhere. The Lonely Planet book for China could be bought in English bookstores, but it was kept under lock and key and the Tiananmen history section was removed. China really is ready to stomp out Taiwan. It was an interesting and sometimes intimidating balance of movement and restriction.

7. Knowing a bit of Chinese helped immensely. I always thought my Chinese sucked (my girlfriend speaks it, as do many of my friends), but going there and being able to buy tickets and get directions and order food and tell the cabbie where to go were made so much easier. Yay for living in a Chinese society! However, it also made me much less impressed with some things (temples) and much less patient with others (crowds, pollution). Such is life, I guess.