Behave woman

C u on th flip side.....
U just got there 1st.

That's all.











There has never been a successful escape.

Hey, D-Wayne! It's raining _____

Having a wife who likes to stay up till 3:00am watching TV in the bedroom could be considered a bit impolite. However, as all programs on Taiwanese TV are captioned with Chinese subtitles, no volume is needed. This is great when trying to sleep, but not so great when other Taiwanese are around watching an English-language program. They tend to "read" the show while continuing chatting in their outside voice.

She will also watch things you would never consider watching. Fine with me. She's the miner working the sieve, occasionally returning with a nugget or two. The other night, she did just that.

She was watching an investigative news show on the one and only Peanut Head, Chaing Kai-Shek. Before I go any further, let me tell you that the use of "peanut" relating to CKS is not a Johnny Neihu-ism. I remember seeing it first in Barbara Tuchman's Pulitzer prize-winning book, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 . General Joseph Stilwell (Vinegar Joe), the military attache to China in 1935-39 and commander of United States forces and allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942-44, used peanut and peanut head regularly when referring to CKS.

This show claims that CKS's three, yes three, sons were not his own. According to the show's panelists, an accident at the age of 4 made fathering children impossible. At that time, crotchless pants were the norm for toddlers. They would walk around and when the mood took them, relieve themselves wherever they were. It seems that on one cold day, little CKS's mood took him inside to warm up, where he found a nice very warm spot to sit and rest. This very warm spot just happened to be the house's brazier, used to heat the home ( Man nuts roasting on an open fire,,,). The panelists did not say how long he sat on that ring of fire, but are somehow convinced that his bird was cooked.

Okay, PIMP, I have opened the door for your and your cohorts. I expect a conspiracy-theory video of at least two parts to be up and available for viewing in 2-3 weeks.

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Air Asia is offering $888 NT one-way flight to Kuala Lumpur. You must book before May 03 and the travel period is 1 Jul 2009 - 31 Jan 2010. From KL, you can connect to many other places dirt cheap. For example, a connecting, one-hour flight to and from Langkawi is $28 US. Total round-trip Taipei-Langkawi-Taipei (including taxes but not including about a $700 baggage fee if you check anything) is about $5,000 NT, give or take a couple of hundred.

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An enhanced Joe Cocker at Woodstock video. It takes about 25 seconds to really kick in. Watch and then proffer your best guess at what type of software/program was used.

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There really are no accidents.

Not quite as good as the previous workplace safety video, but the construction accident can compete with any of them. Five, thirty-second clips.

Transporter 6

Ever wonder where their all going?






Hammelburg?

Question for the Ages

Why is the mold that grows on my books at home white, while the mold that grows on my books at work black?

Stuff

I am moving back to the USA in June, so my wife is going through my stuff and tossing everything.

All my music CDs went to the local library. I guess they can enjoy my Dwight Yoakam CD. Two boxes of books, too. I told her I could give them to a bar, but she couldn't wait 1-2 days to give me time. They had to go in 20 minutes! 

Since most of the music is on my Ipod, its not too big a deal, but I still have some DVD's (region1) and books, and such that she has not tossed.

Anyone interested? There will also be more stuff coming down the pipeline as my wife turns her sights on everything else.

The world is an amazing place.

Bacon Salt.

Not only vegetarian but kosher as well.

So if you want to freak out any vegan jewish friends, I think you have your prank right here.

Is it just me?

Not sure about the name, but loads of fun. click here

P u l i

Definitely worth the ride up Kevlar!
Happy bd bout, China.




I seeeee nothing.......

Take Paragliding off the list

50 minutes in the car, arrive at the site, wait for the right wind and off. Got to look down on an eagle. Perfect Sunday afternoon activity.

This upcoming weekend is Yuri's B-Day. He rented an excavator to build a stone wall for the stage, for the live music, the bands. He leveled areas for camping, and put saloon doors on men's toilet.

Good vibes, i wanna go again some weekend.

It starts like this. You get something explicitly for your own use - your little toy. Then another person, let's say a wife, takes a liking to it and starts using it for her own use with the promise of getting another for you to replace the one she has usurped. Time passes. More than a year - or just a moment in Female. You make do. Sometimes you can steal it away for a bit or use it when she's not home. Then a situation arises where she needs to have it with her almost all the time and you end up having to find time to go out and pay for what you could have been doing more conveniently, for free at home. In this case, the it is my (past tense), our (for just a moment -Male), her (forevermore) laptop.

She has been taking two computer courses, creating a video CV and using her newly acquired computing skills in her private classes at night. All of which means that I see my, I mean, her computer as frequently as Robin Williams sees a good script. Saturday and Sunday mornings are the only time I have where I can spend more than 5 minutes online. So, I have made do.

And then it happens that it happens you start to question which type of dementia you are currently sampling because you can't get your password correct to log in to any log in-able web site. I can only remember my wife's cell phone number by "dialing" it with my finger. I tell myself I have just been using muscle memory and habit to enter my password. Therefore, I very consciously try not to think, close my eyes, channel Ray Charles and let my fingers work the keyboard. That doesn't work. Only after sharing my frustration with my wife do I learn that she has changed all of our passwords. One of her computer classes has made her so...aware of computer security that, in addition to changing the passwords, she routinely unplugs our wireless modem whenever the computer is off ( which led to yet another cognitive function query about myself as I played with all the settings for a couple of hours, until I was ready to hemorrhage from my eyes - our laptop's operating system uses Chinese).

Saturday comes and I go to the Internet cafe loaded with notes for posts I'd been planning and armed with the new password that she wrote down for me herself. Please note the stress on "she" and "herself". Yes, it was wrong. That's some password if even we can't get in. I guess she really is learning something at those computer classes.

As you are reading this, it is obvious that I now know at least one of our new passwords. I hope to get all my planned posts up before there's another security check at my house.

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Will You Be Here Tomorrow?

This is supposedly a workplace safety instructional video from before. Fake or real, it doesn't matter. This is gold. It is also very graphic and bloody. Bloody good! Really, this is Roger Corman blood, guts and body parts graphic. You have been warned.

The Tonka XIX issue, vol 18

Broken Tonka.....





eins, zwei, drei .........

One Trillion Dollars

The power of VISUALISATION.....


To put the Financial issues into perspective........

All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"...

A billion dollars...
A hundred billion dollars...
Eight hundred billion dollars...
One TRILLION dollars...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

And $1 BILLION dollars... now we're really getting somewhere...

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we've been hearing about so much. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising.

Go ahead...

Scroll down...

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you $1 trillion dollars...

(And notice those pallets are double stacked.)
So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"... that's what they're talking about

13

EVA offers exciting prizes...

As a way of saying “thank you” to those passengers who responded, EVA Air will hold a “Lucky Draw”. Lucky passengers will win a free return ticket or a flight in an EVA Air aircraft simulator.

Bold is from EVA...nothing more exciting than a flight in an aircraft simulator.

I wonder if they offer simulated meals and simulated whiskeys?

China?

nope....Detroit.

The High Price of Illiteracy

Green tea flavored Crest toothpaste.

It has a sort of milk tea taste, which is not unpleasant, but is vaguely disturbing to use at night.

Back in th U S S A

In the US of A for a few days.

Any1 need anything?







"How high is your corn?"

Advice

The question is "When should I drink the devil juice, hooch, or ant wine?"

The answer is "When you have run out of all other forms of liquor."

Currently on the ant wine. Which is some Chinese home made liquor made with ants. They flew all the way to Shandong to get the right kind of ants.

Makes you crawl up the walls.

Bonus link to a diagram of an Obama sentence.

Anyone think that sentence diagramming would have been useful for their ESL students?

Stony, if you can answer, I'd be most appreciative, because I am wondering if sentence diagramming is like math for language.

Miniature Golf in Taichung

Last Sunday was the official opening of Taichung's only miniature golf course. The owner and friend, Steve Brown, has done a great job in designing and constructing the course. The standard 18 holes has been reduced to 12 - Hey, that's 3 more than I figured anyone could fit inside the city - and the official name has correspondingly been shortened to Mini Golf.

It's located on Da Dun 7th Street, No. 493 (大墩七街493號) near the amphitheater (近圓滿戶外劇場). They have refreshments, a second floor practice range (real golf) and offer instruction for those not familiar with the concept - and believe me, there are plenty of those. Just like the hypermarts have attendants at the top of the escalators to "remind" the customers that they need to keep moving, I think Steve will need some golf marshals to remind them to walk on the paths and that the little flags have a number on them for a reason.

One round is $100 NT, but for now, Steve is handing out 2-for-1 business cards. He is also very willing to seriously discount groups. He didn't give me an exact number, but I get the feeling that even groups as small as 5 would be cut a deal. Steve wanted me to stress that if you do have a group wanting to play, call him first. He can arrange a better deal for you and ensure you will have time and space to play. Give it a try. I'll be going back this weekend with my niece and looking to improve on my first round score of 29 - which was Karl's score for the front 6.

Telephone: English (that would be Steve) : 0983-109-541

中文: 0937-296-520

Karl the Groundskeeper celebrates a 5.

ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈ or Zhuyin Fuhao

About the Bopomofo The bopomofo (pronounced buh puh muh fuh, for the first four symbols of it) is, like the english alphabet, a phonetic alphabet. That is to say, each character is a sound. In Taiwan, students use the bopomofo to learn how to read traditional Chinese characters. It is also a common way to type traditional chinese characters into a computer keyboard, and is used to look up words in dictionaries. The other main alphabet used for learning mandarin is the pinyin system. The pinyin system, adopted by mainland China in 1958, is just another phonetic alphabet used for sounding out mandarin words. Unlike the bopomofo, however, it uses roman characters to sound out the words. The pinyin system has been adopted by the United Nations and is increasingly the standard system worldwide for transcribing mandarin into a roman alphabet. However, many agree that the bopomofo is much better suited for capturing the phonetic structure of the mandarin language than the pinyin system. The bopomofo consists of 37 symbols, which were derived from Chinese characters. Just like in pinyin, there are 21 initials (consonants which start syllables), and 16 finals (kind of like vowels that end syllables). Pinyin has additional "compound finals", which the bopomofo doesn't feel like it needs because it so accurately captures the sound of Chinese pronunciation. Bopomofo Pronunciations Listed below are the 37 bopomofo symbols, with approximate english spellings and a link to a practice card. If you are using internet explorer for windows, you should be able to hear a pronunciation of the character when you click on the symbol. 1) buh card 2) puh card 3) muh card 4) fuh card 5) duh card 6) tuh card 7) nuh card 8) luh card 9) guh card 10) kuh card 11) huh card 12) jee card 13) chee card 14) shee card 15) jzer card 16) chzer card 17) shzer card 18) zhe card 19) dze card 20) tze card 21) sze card 22) ee card 23) oo card 24) euu card 25) ah card 26) oh card 27) uh card 28) ey card 29) ay card 30) eh card 31) aow card 32) owe card 33) ahn card 34) uhn card 35) ang card 36) ong card 37) ur card Class on Monday 3/23 4:30 pm and Wednesday 3/25 4:30 pm? Pls. confirm you can make it....... Reservations are required?