"Special Welcome" Part I

On Monday, a Chinese official visiting Taiwan in his role as a professor attending a mass comm symposium was interrupted by protesters and given a "special welcome."

According to the Taipei Times, the protester is a grad student who was born in the US, but came to Taiwan eight years ago to study the Taiwanese language and culture.

According to his spelling, he needs to switch a few of those Taiwanese classes for some remedial English courses.

Also check out the expression of the gent to the left of the protester.

Phillies closer blows World Series again!

What an exciting year for baseball! Who would have picked the Phillies vs. Rays? Perhaps one of our bloggers here at Nihowdy boldly picked his favorite team to win it all and at least one bartender from Philly will be up every morning to watch the World Series!

What a team the Rays have! After nearly blowing it, the Rays were able to overcome their absurd collapse (blowing their 7 run lead in game 5) to take the series in an exciting game 7. It turns out that game 7 had the highest tv ratings ever for a league championship. I'm not sure if it was the state of Massachusetts hoping to witness one of the greatest turn arounds of all time, or simply the rest of baseball fans crossing their fingers and hoping the Red Sox do not appear in the WS. Anyways, this team is stacked! Being led by the recently hot bat of BJ Upton, eventual rookie of the year Evan Longoria and the return of Crawford. The pitching hopes to stay hot too with Garza outshining all star teamies Kazmir and Shields. After hammering the Red Sox with the long ball the Rays hope to continue their sweet swinging ways against a mediocre Phillies pitching staff.

On the flip side of things, the Phillies also offer an exciting all-star like offense. Homerun champ Ryan Howard and MVP candidate Chase Utley anchor this lineup. Add a little bit of youth (i.e Victorino, Werth and superstar Rollins) and we have ourselves a Series! It will be on the shoulders of Brett Myers to continue his late season turn around if the Phillies pitching is to match up with that of the Rays.

Now having examined the all-star like calibre of both teams I believe this series will come down to execution and use of the pen. Could it be the Rays pen struggle and blow unbelievable performances by the starting pitchers? Or will it unravel unhittable Lidge returns to his Astros form and coughs up a series winning long ball that crushes the spirits of Phillies fans everywhere.

My money is on the Rays in 6. It's going to be a great series!

Surgeon General says

Grab a smoke and a check up....
While waiting for your next flight.




Who wrote Little Women?
Lonely little men.
Who do you love?
I want to be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you.
I want to be loved by you, you hoo hoo.
Boop boop be do.

Sun Moon Lake

Say good bye to the summer........


A wet duck only flies at midnight.
The night is the devil's playground.
When the swallows come back to Campobello,
there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.

Review For Deano

Strange how this post fits in with the previous few. While Matt Stairs was hitting that shot in LA, I was hanging out in State College, PA...home of the 3rd ranked, undefeated Lions. I was back in PA for an appraisal class/visit with the folks, that happened to coincide with a (Grateful) Dead reunion concert with the Allman Bros opening up. The last time I saw the Dead was 1984 & the Allmans was a few years before that. A few observations from the show:

Arenas at Dead concerts still smell like 1,000 simutaneously fired-up joints. Bic lighters have been replaced by glow sticks. Tie-dye apparently will never die. Dudes still wear doo rags & the girls still wear sun dresses. The scraggly haired, sun dress look was much sexier on the skinny 22 year old girls of 1984 then it is on their more robust contemporaries. Countless grey ponytails. Older Deadheads have swollen bellies and swollen prostates...the concession/bathroom lines were ridiculous. Seeing four 50 something, tie-dyed people get out of a BMW is a bit off. Seeing a family of four tie-dyed folks roll out of a VW was spot on.

If you can imagine Bruce Dern lost in the jungle for 4 months, then you can picture Bob Weir...fortunately his voice is still there. Phil Lesh sings a lot more these days and sounds good. The drumming is still amazing. We moved to a spot right behind/above the drum riser and took it all in from there. The highlight of the night was the Allmans encore performance of "Whipping Post." They had 3 drummers who just hammered them for 2 hours and Derek Trucks on guitar. No Bruce Hornsby. Not the best show they've ever done, but pretty decent. Closed with excellent version of "Not Fade Away." They may be touring next year...worth the price of admission.

The Phillies get in the playoffs once every 15 years or so. I'll get to see the rest of this series, but leave Sunday for a few weeks in Colombia. Will probably miss most of the world series. At least the Cowboys are imploding...there's always a silver lining!

The Greatest Thing You Could Imagine?

Gotta love Canuckistanis. After Matt Stairs (of New Brunswick) hit the eventual game winning homer in last night's heated contest between Philly and LA, the press asked him if this was the greatest thing he could imagine. His response: Well, I've always dreamed of scoring on a breakaway. Not a breakaway in the Cup Finals or a game 7 in the conference finals. Just a breakaway. Hmmm, game winning homer in the LCS or a breakaway goal in the fifteenth game of the regular season in a heated game between the Atlanta Thrashers and the Tampa Bay Lightening.....

In other news, both the TTech and UT are unbeaten still. Let's hope it holds up until they meet in Lubbock in a few weeks. UT has a tough one against Mizzou While TTech gets a wounded fAggie team.

Finally, today will determine if the Canuckistanis give Bush-Lite a shot at a majority government. How are those Kyoto agreements working out again?

Ferrari

Billionaires, movie stars, swimming pools and cattle trucks?





The Grateful Dead are alive and living in Beverly Hills.
Simon and Garfunkel fell off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

I watched the OU vs. UT game yesterday at Fubar. Sorry for the late post, but if you saw it you should have come out. It was a great game. Three and a half hours of everything: big plays, stupid plays, lots of points, bad calls, lead changes and perhaps the biggest surprise, Bret Musburger stating the obvious truth that is usually glossed over on network coverage. And he did it not once, but twice.

One instance was when Colt McCoy was being chased out of bounds and a defender very lightly placed his hands upon Colt's person. One hand was clutching the back of his jersey near the neck and the other was in front around the stomach also apparently clutching some jersey. It appeared that he was trying to help Colt remain standing but Colt had other ideas. Colt must have thought the defender was carrying tasers and he was in for a tasering because Colt blasted forward, tumbling onto the ground like he was blasted by Black Lightning. McCoy got the ref to throw a flag for a personal foul that put the Longhorns deep in Sooner territory.

Musburger (my recollection): The refs are going to have to start issuing yellow cards after a dive like that.

The second instance was a roughing the kicker penalty against UT that resulted in a Sooner first down. The UT defender lightly grazed the punter - a piece of jersey flailed the punter's knee. Of course the punter went down immediately. Looking up while on all fours, after a couple of seconds the punter remembers the scene is not over and grabs his knee, cringes, rolls around until the ref signals the end of the act with a flag.

Musburger (again, my recollection): The punter should get the Heisman Award for Acting after that performance.

Congrats Brett and UT. Yall have another tough one next week. Meanwhile, my Red Raiders are savoring their pit stop in the Top 10.

College Football Sunday

Fubar will show the #1 Oklahoma Sooners vs. the #5 Texas Longhorns at 1:30 today (Sunday). I doubt they will have a replay later in the afternoon because they are having their Canadian Thanksgiving celebration starting later in the afternoon.

The Tonka XV issue, vol 14

Workin on th chain gang........




The fuchsia fox fell fifty fathoms from father's famous fish fry.

Tampa Radio Broadcast

It's Friday Night, and I just heard this on the radio:

Rays Announcer: I'm here with Hulk Hogan.

Hulk: When I slammed Andrea the Giant in 1995 brother everyone went crazy. It's gonna be the same brother, we're gonna kick ass like I did. We got the original Ray hawk, we're gonna have to create a U hawk for me brother. It's gonna be like Wrestlemania, brother!!!

Announcer: Hulk --

Hulk: We're not cocky like the Boston fans. We know we're the best. We don't need to talk about it! I've been a fan for a long time. When I started coming to these games in the Division series, brother, I knew it was gonna get big brother! I'm gonna be on the bottom of the pile when they win this thing brother! I'm gonna be on the field! Rays Nation has been built over three years brother!

Announcer: Back to the booth.

Booth Announcer: I wasn't going to cut him off.
Color guy: Me either.

Gotta love baseball in America...

This Day in Alternative History

This is the flag of the Republic of Formosa.

While its pretty cool, I still like the Republic of China flag in use today.

Happy Double Ten!

S u z h o u

Blue ridge mountains.....




Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.

Random thoughts

a.j.'s gout remedy (white wine, really?)

kevin sandbagging a boat and winning 5NT

CROSS!

the smell of ponce's house after a night a night of AC and cards

stoney being stoned and wondering where all his money went (i'm not comin', i always lose man!)

beating dean and john with a straight flush, 8-Q of diamonds

brit brett struggling through the english language, arriving after everyone has lost their money and calling five card stud, which i never won

a.j.'s floor and kevlar's table (black and red version)

j-hole and myself fighting over the finer points of 727, perhaps the dumbest game known to mankind. we had many meaningless arguments...

red A telling me he quit smoking and then proceeding to smoke my entire pack of 7 lights

me folding on a royal flush because i simply couldn't comprehend the amount of wild cards in the random canadian style poker game (7s and 8s, really?)

that final night of Murder at my house and the $12000 NT pot that went with it (floating my boat on a two of clubs, the lowest card in the deck)

the birks that i'm still wearing from winnings i took when i revisited taiwan

red A rubbing his hands and telling kevlar "it's only money" after red A had folded ten minutes previously

ann's big eyes when she collected my money-- the only night we allowed her near the table

mushroom nachos (what was i thinking?)

retro night at the pit

spending the evening's winnings on tepanyaki (or however the hell you spell that)

learning my lesson and buying red A a pack of 7 lights on my way to the pit

cleaning up after all you sorry bastards left

dothead paul coming at me after i wiped my ass with his jacket (thinking it was john's).


i'm guessing it would be worthwhile to revisit taiwan simply for a game of poker.

K u n s h a n

Jiangshu Province.........

West Virgina

Never before in the history of human endeavor have so many given so much to so few.

Red A Update

My daughter has bronchial pneumonia, so she's been staying in the hospital for the last week. (Cheng Ching hospital on Chung Gang on the way to Dong Hai, which I highly recommend for children - Dr. Hu is a great pediatrician.)

Its actually not as scary as it sounds, but they like to keep kids under six for monitoring when they have serious respiratory illnesses and fevers. How sick can your kid be when it takes FIVE people to hold her down to get the IV drip in.

The hospital had no rooms at first, so we had to wait about half a day, and then we got the VIP room with the extra bed, couches, kitchenette, and private bathroom. Our private insurance just covers the cost, and its the best room on the floor.

She should be coming home this week, latest on Friday.

H a i N i n g

Almost Heaven........
1.5 Hours from N i n g b o or S h a n g h a i ?


Herb Alpert takes trumpet lessons from Guy Lombardo

Canadian Tonka

Discovered this in my backyard in August.

Steak Typhoon

Another typhoon visited Taiwan this week. This one was Typhoon Jangmei, the third in a month's time. The previous one seemed to have heavier rains, this one concentrated on wind. Typhoons were new to me when I came to Taiwan from Lubbock, and I have really only experienced one real knock-down, drag-out, take-no-names kind of typhoon in Taiwan. I live in Taichung so we are spared the worst of many of them because of the Central Mountain Range which usually can downgrade a big typhoon to a gutter cleaner. My favorite typhoon of my time here is, was and shall always be Typhoon Doug. Doug closed down work on Monday, like this one, but hit only a mild slap and left us to enjoy a sunny Monday.


Mondays are my worst day work-wise. I teach seven and a half hours with one 30-minute break for lunch. This is not too bad. It is not bitching. It is just griping. I know I've got it good but still enjoy the time off. Given that I have only 30 minutes, I must have food prepared to put in the one microwave in the office or eat the crappy bian-dangs from How Ma Ma. If I want to eat crappy fast food, its got to be the crappy fast food that I grew up with. How Ma Ma's steamed, plain, white rice, heavily breaded meat look-alike and a wilted, oily, stir-fried green veggie isn't enough to get me to change teams.


Taichung beat everyone, I think, by calling a typhoon day for Monday by 3:00pm. Places that were more affected, like Keelung and HuaLien, still had to work and study. Knowing that Monday was free, I went to my wife and informed her of the urgency of the situation. I was hungry, we needed food and there was a typhoon coming, dammit! We needed to stock up. So, of to Costco we went where we procured the basics: steak (obvious), cheese (nachos and tacos) and wine ( because if the power went, we still had potable and medicinal beverage - it was also 5 liters worth). Somehow we also ended up with a baker's butt-load of shiitake mushrooms. That package is now down to just a mere butt-load.


Next, I had to secure the grilling site. There's a lot of water falling and while we do have a covered porch, water from the outside seems to like our house the best to meet, hang around and accumulate. I have lived in several different residences in Taiwan and I seem to always choose the ones designed by the architects who went to the Putt-Putt Institute of Design and became infatuated with the Ant-Hill hole: all the drains require the water to travel uphill. But this time it was windier than rainier, so the shoe-soaking-but-not-grill-inhibiting rain was dismissed.


We started by preparing the side dishes: Spanish rice from the night before that we liked so much we both were just spooning it cold out of the tupperware, stuffed mushrooms which Petra added my full glass of wine for drinking to the chopped stems and veggies ( A little purple, but, what the hey? It was good ) and plain old grilled mushrooms.



The next step was to prepare this.



Then this: Combine ingredients for marinade.

• 1/2 cup of soy sauce



• 1/4 cup of mirin or orange juice


• juice of 1/2 a lemon


• 3-eleventy cloves of chopped garlic


• 1 tbs. Worcestershire sauce


• 1 tbs. olive oil

Method: Discard marinade (or use it for some cubed chicken breasts or chuck steak and make teriyaki kabobs). We're talking steak here. If you feel the need to alter the natural taste and bite of a good cut of beef, give me the good cut and dump your sauces on a bian dang from How Ma Ma.

Next was to throw our sirloins on my Lodge cast iron grill, listen to the sear, flip and admire the grill marks. Once ready, I poured myself some wine and hid it from my wife while the steak rested. If you don't let your steak rest for several minutes after taking it off the grill the juices will flow out. I actually like it this way as well as I always have a piece of sourdough to sop it up with.

Finally, everything was in place and I asked my wife to select some appropriate music. She chose Trisha Yearwood. Petra really likes her. Really likes one song in particular. Likes it so much that she played it 3 times in a row. She then went online to find the lyrics and I finished dinner with a pseudo-karaoke session with Trisha backing up my wife.

My next Monday off is in November and I'm already thinking about Steak Super SuPao.

Rocky Update

For those of you who remember Rocky (the Steve Largent/Terrel Owens like superstar who used to grace our football field at the middle school), he recently sent me a post with these two websites. Those more versed in reading Chinese can perhaps decipher what exactly he is advertising, but I thought I'd pass them along anyway.


http://pub.taichung.emmm.tw/
http://happyintaichung.emmm.tw/?ptype=vote

Enjoy, and thanks for the scuba update J-hole.