Believe it or not, I was actually given a rubber stamp so that I can rubber stamp all the ridiculous paperwork that we have to deal with. Some memos are deemed too important to just e-mail to faculty. Instead, we have to go every day or two to the departmental office and officially stamp a [...]
In India, on January 12th, around one thirty in the morning, back from a long day of filming which had involved over nine hours of driving, I fired up my iBook just before going to bed. Thats when I got the email that would turn our lives upside down: I had been appointed as assistant [...]
My brother reports on how the media is reacting to the riots in France: My favorite TV program for the examination of television, Arrêt sur Images, had, as one of their guests this weekend the mayor of Clichy-sous-bois, the city at the epicenter of the recent events. One of the commentators on the show was [...]
I long ago discovered that the best way to reduce the amount of SPAM is to have two e-mail addresses, one private and one public. I use the private one for writing to friends and for professional work, only listing the public one on the web. Now I even have a third, gmail account, I [...]
Words to live by: I’m very paranoid about any metric of productivity. One person’s wasted time is another person’s productivity. For most of my life people saw me doing the things I liked to do and said, “you have too much free time on your hands.” I’ve decided that when you hear that, it means [...]
I’d like to issue a call for anyone and everyone who cares about the study of Taiwanese history to help contribute to the Wikipedia Timeline of Taiwanese History. Although I was aided tremendously by my handy copy of 臺灣史小事典, trying to sort out all the various dates and names of Taiwan’s various rebellions, rulers, institutions, [...]
A little horn tooting: My Language in Society book review on both At war with words and War of words: Language, politics and 9/11 has finally been published! Here’s the abstract: Daniel Nelson writes that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaic & Nelson [henceforth DN], p. 449). [...]
I missed this post by Tak at the time. It discusses the recent availability online of translations of Japanese history textbooks for middle-school: Lastly, Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the group of right-wing historians also known as tsukurukai or 新しい歴史教科書を作る会, has just published translations of their infamous textbook for middle-school students titled New History [...]
Anyone who knows me will be shocked to find that I’ve been writing about sports, but that is just what I’ve been doing over at Savage Minds. First a post about ethnic soccer clubs in Australia, and then a post about the representation of Aborigines in Taiwanese baseball. {Aboriginal, anthropology, Australia, Baseball, Soccer}
Those who haven’t been reading my other blog, Savage Minds, have been missing the huge debate that arose about a couple of posts we wrote on Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel. If you want to follow the debate in its entirety, you should start on this page; but with over 90 comments and [...]