About half of the students at my college are Taiwanese Aborigines. Many of them are able to apply to the school directly, rather than going through the national examination system. This effectively a form of affirmative action, one which I fully endorse. In fact, it is one of the reasons I wanted to come here [...]
A lot of online activity is about establishing identity, and identity is largely equated with what people consume: what music they listen to, what books they read, what films they see, what games they play, etc. This can be useful. If we find someone whose tastes we respect we might find new things to consume [...]
Are you a U.S. citizen living overseas? These are perilous times. Please VOTE! Vote From Abroad will ask you some questions and automatically generate a PDF form for you to print out and sign. What are you waiting for? {vote, elections, absentee, ballot}
Krugman’s latest: Between 2000 and 2005, the number of Americans with private health insurance coverage fell by 1 percent. But over the same period, employment at health insurance companies rose a remarkable 32 percent. What are all those extra employees doing? Now we know at least part of the answer: they’re working harder than ever [...]
A conversation while ordering dinner: Me: I’ll have the poached fish. Waiter: Do you want milkfish or turbot? Me: No, she’s not my wife. Even in our native languages, we understand far less of what we hear than we realize. Try counting how many times in a day you say “What?” A lot of time [...]
Thaksin Shinawatra was a brutal man whose own commitment to democracy was less than stellar (to say the least), but that doesn’t really explain what happened in Thailand. Unfortunately, reporters haven’t bothered to interview anyone other than members of the Bangkok middle classes who wanted Thaksin out. We are regularly assured that democracy will be [...]
This really is gruesome, so don’t read it if you don’t want to spoil your day. Still the recent murder of five children in a home in Hualien has confounded investigators, since the house was locked from the inside, with no other apparent way out … {hualien, murder, 花蓮, 台灣}
Like thousands of others, I’m hooked on The Show: a one year experiment in video blogging by Ze Frank, a web deisgner/performance artist who lives in Brooklyn. On The Media interviewed Ze Frank this past week. While I enjoy the show, it is hard to pin down why. Although he is a very sophisticated writer [...]
Not having lived there for a long time, I don’t much write about Hoboken on this blog, but that is where I grew up. The setting for On The Waterfront, Hoboken was once a large shipping port. As a result, it has long been famous for its drinking establishments. Below the fold is one of [...]