( Read more... )

If you live in Taiwan, there is no doubt that you have heard song 不得不愛 ("Can't Resist You" is the official English title), by some guy named Wilbur Pan (潘瑋柏) at least one hundred billion times ( Read more... )

I used to think that the expression to make ends meet was end's meat. I think I was about fifteen when I realized how wrong that was. I remember being super excited when I finally figured it out, because I'd always sort of wondered what end's meat was supposed to be. I figured it must be the cheapest, lamest kind of meat that no one else really ( Read more... )

A few big foreign companies-McDonald's and Nike come to mind-have gotten in trouble in China for producing commercials deemed inappropriate. From what I've read (which isn't all that much), the majority of the negative public reaction to these commercials comes only after someone in the government pushes their own negative interpretation of the ( Read more... )

Here's material that's not going to make it into the story I'm writing this week for Newspaper T (isn't this technique of lettering everything a totally a great way to keep people from figuring out that I'm writing about them?). The story is about a Turkish restaurant in Taipei that unabashedly retrofits its food to comply with Taiwanese tastes. It ( Read more... )

Not far from Taipei 101 "stands" what appears at first to be its direct opposite: Taipei Artists' Village, which looks like a series of low grass mounds, and is in fact a series of smallish underground bunkers with triangular, grass-covered roofs sticking up from the ground. Unlike the huge phallus of commerce that is 101, TAV makes ever effort ( Read more... )

I do a lot of my journal writing in Chinese these days, so I've been posting a lot of links and clippings here. That's a bad habit. But anyway, here are some more:

From the LA Times: Voices from the Front. A collection of photos of and interviews with wounded soldiers, as part of a series on the army doctors in Germany and the US who treat ( Read more... )

I attended a lecture at National Taiwan Normal University the other day. The French department hosted a French scholar to gloss Italian history. I didn't really learn much new, but listening to him talk about these movements in art and thought that lasted hundreds of years, I thought of something strange: Imagine being born into a word that was ( Read more... )

From the Taipei Times (this is the entire blurb, so no link):Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) yesterday told reporters that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Ching-hua (李慶華) had been acting like a three-year-old, one day after Lee called him "Dick Minister" and "Pert Minister," referring to a shampoo brand, during a ( Read more... )

I'm supposed to be writing an article or sleeping. But I thought I'd write quickly about the big story in today's Taipei Times. The story reports on a Liberty Times story, which itself references an anonymous source quoting intelligence supposedly gathered from China-so take it with a grain of salt.

China is thinking of changing the Anti-Secession ( Read more... )