Newley Purnell

Photos of old cassette tapes.

cassettes, cassette+tapes

Two Chinese teenage boys wearing Houston Rockets jerseys + The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way” = hilarity.

(Via Mike W.)

I thought it necessary to break my my radio silence to bring you this breaking news: Taiwanese airline Eva, in a quest to achieve ultimate Asian cuteness, has just christened a Hello Kitty jet. You heard it here first.

All’s well in Boston. Regular posting to resume tomorrow or Monday.

Hello+Kitty

I’m leaving this afternoon for a weekend in Boston. Coming back Sunday night. Posting will be light or nonexistent until Monday.

Until then, ponder the fact that I have inspired someone to start blogging in the United Arab Emirates (evidence in the blogroll). A scary thought, no?

CSM:

SOCHI, RUSSIA - At first glance, the view from Sochi’s Black Sea shore looks almost perfect: sparkling blue sea, a broad band of beach backed by palm trees and green hills, a range of snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Then a freight train rumbles down the beachfront within a few feet of sunbathers - and the idyll shatters.

The legacy of hamhanded Soviet planners is only one of many obstacles facing tour operators as they try to entice Western travelers to post-Soviet Russia.

Though it is the world’s largest country, with natural wonders, unique architecture, and famous art museums, Russia places almost last among European lands as a tourist destination.

Russia

American Dan Schorr is blogging from Pyongyang, North Korea; he’s there for the Arirang Games.

(Via BB).

North+Korea, Arirang

When he was all of nineteen years old, Truman Capote wrote a novel that is only now being published; he said he’d destroyed it. The current New Yorker has an excerpt from the book illustrating that Capote’s genius for stylish prose manifested itself at an early age indeed:

Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or in Stamford and Greenwich. Since she had turned seventeen, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed the most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not know who it was that replaced her, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name.

(Emphasis mine.)

“Capote,” a new biopic I mentioned earlier, opens next weekend.

(Via Maud Newton.)

Capote, Truman+Capote

I read a wide range of blogs written by expats (mostly English teachers) in Taiwan — they’re a great source of news from the island, and they remind me of the year I spent there.

Doubting to Shuo (an approximation of the Chinese word for “rumors”) is a new one that recently caught my eye; it’s penned by a guy in Taipei Linkou named Mark. A recent post contained a highly accurate description of employment options for teaching English in Taiwan. In another excellent post, Mark writes about highly successful foreigner-run cram schools.

Other Taiwan blogs of note are: The Taipei Kid; Michael Turton’s The View from Taiwan; Scott Sommers’ Taiwan Weblog; and a better tomorrow (a fantastic photoblog).

Doug Bandow, writing in Reason, says the US should let Korea defend itself:

The U.S. State Department has never met an alliance, treaty, or aid program that it doesn’t like. As a result, the list of Washington’s foreign policy welfare queens is long. The Republic of Korea, however, must be near the top.

Glen Rhodes says feeling rested depends not on how long you slumber, but on how many sleep cycles you get.

sleep, sleep+cycle

Absolutely amazing.

(Via #1.)

Saudi+Arabia, fatwa

AFP:

Talk about a Chinese take-away. Astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisjeng blasted into outer space with a full larder of Chinese specialities including cuttlefish and meat balls, and beef with orange peel.

But the pair of orbiting diners will have to do without chopsticks, which were considered too difficult to manoeuvre in the weightlessness of space. They’ll use forks and spoons instead according to the state Xinhua news agency.

(Emphasis mine.)

These particular taikonauts — as well as citizens throughout all of Asia — clearly need my chorks. (Note to self: have patent lawyer draft proposal for China National Space Administration STAT.)

Some background, for those of you who’re new to my chorks concept. While living in Taiwan last year, I really enjoyed using chopsticks — but I found that they failed in one crucial regard: picking up little pieces of food (vittles that’re too small to be grasped, and can only be poked). So I constructed the prototype you see above by fashioning tiny dumpling pokers to the ends of conventional chopsticks. And the chorks, thus, were born. Chopsticks plus forks equals chorks.

I’m still tweaking my current working model; in the meantime, I’m accepting overtures from angel investors who’re ready to change the world. Consider that the population of Asia is over three billion, and most of the people on the continent uses chopsticks. It wouldn’t take much market penetration to earn boat-loads of cash. But, of course, the chorks have never been primiarly a commercial endeavor: I just want the world to eat more efficiently. It’s that simple.

(News link via Ni Howdy.)

forks, chopsticks, chorks

WSJ:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When an Arab satellite TV network, MBC, decided to introduce “The Simpsons” to the Middle East, they knew the family would have to make some fundamental lifestyle changes.

“Omar Shamshoon,” as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at “seedy bars with bums and lowlifes.” In Arabia, Homer’s beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.

An Arabized “Simpsons” — called “Al Shamshoon” — made its debut in the Arab world earlier this month, in time for Ramadan, a time of high TV viewership. It uses the original “Simpsons” animation, but the voices are dubbed into Arabic and the scripts have been adapted to make the show more accessible, and acceptable, to Arab audiences.

Simpsons

Don’t miss this gallery of charming — and bizarre — Chinese space-program posters.

(Via BB.)

AP:

Ousted Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutierrez said Thursday he was renouncing his asylum in Colombia and would return to his own country where he faces arrest and attempt to regain power.

“I will use all legal and constitutional means to retake power,” Gutierrez told a news conference in a Bogota hotel.

Ecuadorean Interior Minister Galo Chiriboga warned that if Gutierrez returns, he “must submit to the law.” In a radio interview in Ecuador’s capital of Quito, Chiriboga noted that a judge has ordered Gutierrez’s arrest.
…
“What the de facto government does is not my call,” Gutierrez told journalists. “I cannot be held accountable for what happens when I step on Ecuadorean soil.”

Who’s writing Gutierrez’s speeches these days, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf?