Archive for May, 2006
Prasan Ke’
Today I had the pleasure of watching Fan Shan-shun’s 范勝翔 award winning short film Prasan Ke’ 巴拉散 給. The title comes from an Atayal 泰雅 Aborigine term which means “handing over to someone to transmit messages.” The director is not himself an Aborigine, but came up with the idea for the film after spending a […]
BBS
One of my many summer projects (it currently seems like those precious two months are infinitely long) is to crack into the alternative online world of my Taiwanese students, the BBS. This pre-world-wide-web technology is alive and well in Taiwan, for some reason that I can’t fathom. In the Web 2.0 world of Flickr and […]
Da Hsueh
Earlier I identified the phonetic system used to transliterate the name of my university as Gwoyeu Romatzyh 國語羅馬字. Today I look at the official address for my school, which was recently updated by the administration and all departments were required to follow suite. Accordingly, both the homepage of the university and my name card say […]
Incarceration Rates
Kieran Healy recently posted this chart showing incarceration rates in the US compared to other “basically well-functioning advanced capitalist democracies”:
Earlier he posted a more inclusive chart which also listed a few “countries that are not exactly model states.” America is still way out in the inglorious lead.
But what neither of these charts makes clear is […]
Insurmountable Immunity
This has to be stopped.
The Bush administration has asked federal judges in New York and Michigan to dismiss a pair of lawsuits filed over the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, saying litigating them would jeopardize state secrets.
… Justice Department attorneys said in their legal brief that the legality of the president’s actions could be […]
Characters
I was going to write a short piece linking to two great Chinese-character related blog posts, one by Victor Mair (guest posting on Language Log) and the other by LanguageHat, but Pinyin News beat me to it. So go read Mark’s intro instead (he includes some useful additional links), or just hop over to the […]
Dhurrie
My office is very spare looking, so to give it some more color I bought a cheap Indian-style dhurrie rug at the local department store. Now, whenever students come into my office they very carefully walk all the way around the perimeter of the rug so as to avoid stepping on it. Puzzled by this […]
Stormy Weather
I finally got my camera from the states, but I’ve been enjoying taking pictures with the crappy camera on my cell phone. In some of the pictures I’ve taken of the local scenery I feel the muddy colors and low resolution add to the mood rather than detract from it. Click here to see a […]
Dong Hwa
The official “English” name of my university is National Dong Hwa University 國立東華大學. I put English in quotes because, as you can see, the name is a mix of translation and romanization. This is different from some other universities, such as Taiwan Normal University 國立台灣師範大學, where the whole name is translated, but similar to schools […]
Seven
When I think of life in New York City, I think of the train I used to take every day. The train we heard in the distance from our bedroom window … the 7 train. You can see people reading newspapers in almost every language in the world on the 7 train.
The 7 train, which […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
