I know it’s been Chiwanese (Chinese/Taiwanese) 24/7 in these parts recently, but this was too good to pass up.
CS Monitor: “East meets West, with an Argentine twist”:
BUENOS AIRES – Like many in Latin America’s most Eurocentric country, 26-year-old Emanuela Gavezza has long fancied the West. Her grandparents hail from northern Italy, which she has visited […]
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Tagged China
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China Post:
The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) suggested yesterday that people in Taiwan come up with alternative recreational programs if they had mapped out outdoor plans for the weekend.
CWB officials said Typhoon Longwang, the 19th-named storm of the western Pacific typhoon season, has been heading west toward Taiwan from the east, is expected to bring heavy […]
Peter Hessler, who wrote the exceptional “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” has got a new book coming out in April. It’ll be called “Oracle Bones : A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.” Those’re the only details I’ve got. I may just have to pre-order this one.
(Hessler’s author bio in last week’s […]
When I was teaching English in Taiwan last year, I used to require my students to beat me in rock, paper, scissors in order to go home when class was over. They’d line up by the door and then challenge me individually — if they lost, it was back to the end of the line. […]
Don’t miss John Perry Barlow’s “The Pursuit of Emptiness.”
Meet Franklin, the pet tortoise.
Jacksonville.com:
Cops in North Carolina thought it was odd enough a Jacksonville man was driving an ambulance reported stolen hours earlier.
Odder still was that he was wearing a makeshift doctor’s uniform consisting of a stethoscope, a pager-like gadget and latex gloves stuffed in his back pocket.
But then things started getting really strange when they saw a […]
NatGeo:
Like something straight out of a Jules Verne novel, an enormous tentacled creature looms out of the inky blackness of the deep Pacific waters.
But this isn’t science fiction. A set of extraordinary images captured by Japanese scientists marks the first-ever record of a live giant squid (Architeuthis) in the wild.
The animal—which measures roughly 25 feet […]
WaPo:
Unless you can afford a first-class seat on an airplane, you’re stuck in steerage — a cargo area where solo travelers have little say about the person who will become their seat neighbor — also known as the person you plan to claw your way through when this thing ditches in open water.
Now, a Web […]
I took a few poetry classes* with Chinese-American novelist Xuefei Jin when he taught at my college**. (And he even wrote me a gradudate school recommendation letter.) He had yet to become a literary big shot when I met him — a couple years after I graduated, he won the National Book Award and the […]
I haven’t talked about baseball in these parts for a long time. Mostly because — and I wish I could explain why — I’m not as enthralled by my team, the Braves, as I once was. Perhaps it’s my proximity to RFK and the Nationals. The Braves are predictably and monotonously good-but-not-great once again this […]
Conventional wisdom holds that when Kim Jong-Il finally loses his grasp on North Korea, millions of refugees will come streaming across the border to the south. Or will they?
(Via The Marmot’s Hole via my brother.)
North+Korea, Kim+Jong-Il
Here’s a delightful SF Chron article from Michael Wolgelenter about various strains of Western pop music — good and bad — he’s discovered in far-flung corners of the world.
I had a similar cross-cultural sonic experience last year in a town on the rural east coast of Taiwan. I was in a bar and listened in […]
File under: Another Reason to Laugh at Bill O’Reilly: he doesn’t understand basic market economics.
Big Bad Bill on “the price of a gallon of gasoline”:
Every time I ask who sets the price I get “the market”, “the Merc”, “OPEC”, and on and on. Well it’s all B.S. Somebody tells your local gas station owner […]
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Tagged Politics
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