This month will see the start of two baseball tournaments in Taiwan - The Asian Baseball Championship (The Asian Cup) and the Baseball World Cup. The former will be held exclusively in Taichung at the old Taichung stadium and the new Intercontinental Stadium from December 1st-3rd (English schedule here, Chinese here). The latter will be hosted at several cities around Taiwan. Taichung games commence on November 2nd and end on the 14th. The finals will only be in the Taipei area. Chinese schedule here. (D-Wayne, can you help out with the English schedule you found yesterday?)

Ticket information - outlets, online purchasing and types -for the Baseball World Cup can be found here (English).

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Final Costco (好事多) post, I hope.

The grand opening for the Taichung Costco is November 11. Hours are 8:30am-9:30pm.

• Memberships purchased by the 8th will still include an extra membership card. So, if you purchase a membership you will get a primary, secondary and a gift membership for $1,200NT (personal) and $1,000NT (business)
• Regardless of when you obtained your Taichung membership card, it will be valid until the end of November 2008. Mine was purchased in August and I will not lose any months because I purchased it before the store opened.
• There will be a free "Western" breakfast for the first 6,000 cardholders. 8:30-10:30am
• They will also give away to the first 20,000 cardholders... 10 eggs. Yes, 10 eggs.
• The temporary office has been moved into the actual Costco building. So, if you want a card, go to 台中市南屯區文心南三路289號 and the office is on the 1st floor.

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"Too much garlic is not enough." Me. A long time ago.

I love garlic. A lot. And now there is some initial research that garlic can be really good for us. Researchers at UAB found that garlic juice injected into human red blood cells prompted them to emit hydrogen sulfide, which causes blood vessels to relax. They also say that after crushing or chopping the garlic, you need to wait at least 15 minutes to allow the reaction that produces this release. Here are two articles discussing the study. The first is more general and the second a bit more specific.

However, do not view this as a coronary panacea. Garlic has no effect on cholesterol and also this:

Eric Block, professor of chemistry at the State University of New York, Albany, has also done extensive work on garlic. He called the paper "provocative" but expressed some concerns.
For example, he said, "the benefits of garlic on cardiovascular disease remain controversial, because they have not been established by the gold standard method of placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical studies," he said.

My mother told me that while she was in Saudi Arabia the Saudis would swallow whole, peeled cloves of garlic to aid their digestion. While my wife was talking to a farmer near Taichung about a natural make-up remover and cleanser, he started talking about garlic. Now we have a bottle of garlic wine in the mail. They might be on to something. Drink up and reek not of booze, but of garlic.