I have a new post at Globorati. It’s about “leisure farm” resorts in Tainan county, Taiwan.
I recently stumbled across this remarkably complex Wikipedia entry for “backronym”:
A backronym or bacronym is a portmanteau of backward and acronym[1] coined in 1983.[2][3] It usually refers to a phrase that is constructed backwards from the phrase’s abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or acronym. Sometimes backronym refers to the initialism or acronym itself,[4] but […]
You may recall my friends Lee and Sachi, who I met up with here in Bangkok last year. They’ve finished their year-long round-the-world trip and are back in Seattle working on social design and online community issues. And they’ve just created an informative video that explains RSS in plain English. Check it out.
And if […]
Is Thailand’s ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra aiming to snap up English football club Manchester City?
IHT/AP:
Toppled Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, who earlier made an unsuccessful bid for Liverpool, is planning to buy another English soccer club, according to a Web site close to Thaksin seen Monday.
The site — http://www.hi-thaksin.net — said that the former prime […]
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Virgina Tech massacre. My thoughts keep returning to the issue of American gun culture.
I asked my friend Ben P. to weigh in. Ben is an American who’s lived in Australia for the last two years; I asked him what he thought about the shooting.
Why […]
TimesOnline:
A scientist surfaced yesterday after spending almost two weeks under water in a steel box, pedalling a stationary bicycle to generate electricity and growing algae to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Lloyd Godson, a marine biologist, had been five metres (16ft) down on the bottom of a lake near Albury in southeastern Australia since April 5. […]
Say hello to the Dog Powered Scooter.
Related tomfoolery: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled?
I’ve got a new Globorati post about where to celebrate Songrkan in Bangkok.
A and I have had the great fortune of welcoming several friends to town of late. Here’re a few pics:
Paul and Chika came all way from New York City for a mere four-day visit. But they packed a lot of sightseeing into their sojourn, and even overcame their jet lag in record time. They are […]
According to the trend watchers over at BuzzFeed, Ecuador’s Mt. Chimborazo is currently all the rage in the blogosphere. That’s because the Andean peak is technically the tallest mountain in the world due to the fact that it sits on the equator’s bulge. (That’s when you measure distance from the center of the earth, not […]
Don’t miss Tom Fuller’s IHT/NYT story about the quest for an odorless durian. My favorite passages:
“To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer in based Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive. It […]
That’s the subject of my latest Globorati post.
Here’s another great IHT story, this one from Clifford J. Levy. It’s a playful look at the psychological complications involved in using an Internet phone service to forward local calls to your cell phone abroad. (I use Skype to receive calls dialed to a DC area code number; they’re sent straight to my cell phone […]
Jenn Chen recently had a great story in the IHT about how a growing number of people are renovating Bangkok’s once-neglected shophouses.
Here’s more info on shophouses. (I was lucky enough, last year, to check out a number of particularly well-maintained examples in Penang, Malaysia. And when I ventured further south, I stayed in a […]