Culture
Technologies of the Self
If you google the letters “GTD” you’ll get seven million hits back. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done,” a time management book, method and philosophy promoted by David Allen which has spawned a huge array of self-help blogs and task management webservices. Wired magazine described it thus:
Allen’s approach is not inspirational. Instead, it is detailed […]
Happy New Year!
A very happy year of the (Mickey) mouse to everyone from Taiwan!
PS: Its worth noting that this is not a pirated product, but an authentic Disney product marked with a hologram to that effect. Disney must be raking it in this year!
Understatement
It bears no relation to the main point of his article, which focuses on how economic ideology led the Fed into the current “unmitigated disaster” known as the subprime lending debacle, but Paul Krugman chose this interesting quote as the lead-in to his article:
When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision […]
高一生
The other day I went to see an interesting performance built up around the life and work of Gao Yi-sheng 高一生. Who is Gao Yi-Sheng? There isn’t much about him in English on the web, but here is a short blurb from the Taipei Times:
[…]
KUSO
If you walk around Taipei these days you’ll be sure to see the word KUSO written in big letters all over the place. For instance, this summer there was a city-sponsored cultural festival in Ximending called “KUSO Ximending.”
But what does “KUSO” mean? Luckily, Wikipedia is there to help us out:
Kuso is the term used in […]
Viacom vs. Daily Show
Does the writer’s strike have you down? Miss The Daily Show? Here are some things you can do:
Download Miro.
Watch some classic Daily Show clips here.
Read and watch the official blog of the writer’s strike.
Watch the following YouTube video made by some striking Daily Show writers:
BBQ
This is one of those “only in Taiwan” stories: Police in Hsinchu 新竹 captured an escaped convict when they noticed a man attending a police-sponsored BBQ.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 almost every Taiwanese family has a BBQ, sort of like the Fourth of July in the US. The practice has become so wide-spread that […]
Ousmane Sembène
I only recently learned that Ousmane Sembène, “the ‘father’ of African Cinema” died last month. Sembène was much more radical, much more of a brechtian filmmaker, and much more influential than Michael Moore could ever hope to be. Sembène was a writer who went into filmmaking because of the high rates of illiteracy in his […]
Responsible Criticism
Reading the reactions to Sicko in the press is an interesting exercise. Almost without exception, including papers from both the left and the right, reviewers feel compelled to adopt the tone of voice of a disapproving adult, condemning Moore for his excesses while reluctantly conceding that the film is important and that these issues need […]
Edward Yang
I was sad to hear that Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang 楊德昌 died so young. I’d only seen one of his films, Yi yi (”A One and a Two”), but it ranks amongst the best Taiwanese films, moreover Yang was still quite young at 59, having died after a seven year long battle with cancer.
Interestingly, most […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
