Gone Rockin'

I'll be out of pocket today and tomorrow, so no phone calls or text messages. Today is Deep Purple day in Taipei and there's a great lineup. On lead vocals we have, of course, Esquire Willy. (Leading to the) Front man, Mr. Bean. D-Wayne is in charge of the pyros, Brit Paul is technical engineer and token ginger and I will be playing the Macolm McLaren role of encouraging excess and reaping the profits. There may be a couple of special appearances. Union Sam is wishy-washy in his commitment and AJ expressed interest but has not confirmed. As I got off my scooter at the Internet cafe I saw AJ speeding south on his scooter, laden with backpack, fanny pack and snack pack. Time to go to the train station. I'm sure there will be pictures later.

Free Beer! Is he in prison or something?

Congratulations to Taiwan's women's softball team. They swept New Zealand in a best-of-three to win the Asia/Oceania qualifier for the 2008 Beiping Olympics. They went through the tourney with a perfect 10-0 record. Because the IOC seems to prefer RMB to NT dollars, athletes representing Taiwan must accept the "Chinese Taipei" moniker or be forced to sit out events. So if they can't change the name, how about the font size?

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I feel that I did not do Yahoo's bilingual dictionary the service it deserves. It does have romanization, sound and Chinese phonetics. It has words that send you scurrying for your Webster's and even those who don't read Chinese characters can benefit. For example, let us say you want to explain how the venerable China Post will not conjure up news with a political slant, but don't know the Chinese for slant. Simple. First, type in the word and find an example that is appropriate.

Using example 2 from below, cut and paste the character(s) in to the search box. For our purposes, the third grouping is the one we want. Enter and you will get the results on the bottom.