Taiwan has some great bugs II

In case you had any doubts, the flies are exactly the same here....




But the ladybugs come in many different shades....

Promising New Blog: Wandering to Tamshui

Found some great new blogs today, among them this one: Wandering to Tamshui.

Off to Changhua Teacher's College

Clyde and Mike's Excellent Adventure Begins

Today I headed over to Changhua Teacher's College with my Axis and Allies buddy Malv to visit Clyde Warden, our mutual friend.


The secondary campus of Changhua Teacher's College

Clyde's office is in a branch campus located atop a giant mountain overlooking Changhua city, about forty minutes from my house. On good days you can see for miles, but today the heavens opened and it poured felines and canines all day long.


Malv and Clyde hadn't seen each other for a decade.

It's a sad commentary on our insulated foreigner lives that Clyde and Malv had worked for a decade in the same town but never crossed paths, although they had been fellow teachers at OCIT many years ago, back when Hoover was President and radio was multimedia technology.


The branch campus had just two buildings...

The campus is located near the famous Buddha statue on Pakuashan.


Clyde's grad students are doing a presentation tomorrow.


Clowning around with Clyde's attractive graduate students.

Clyde has a fat office and some slim graduate students to brighten his days atop the mountain. Malv and I, hicks from the sticks, were suitably impressed.


Clyde makes a point.


Malv replies...

After hiding out from the rain in Clyde's office, we ran into Changhua for some lunch.


Ma Po Tofu. Do you dare to eat it?

The Taiwanese consider Ma Po Tofu to be a hot dish. Note to self: take inhabitants of Taiwan to India this summer.

Clyde treated us to lunch at the local fine dining joint. Malv and I were suitably impressed, especially since Malv survives by scrounging dropped change at bus stops and eating at 7-11, while I have to eat my own cooking.

Were it not for the rain, it would have been a photo-filled visit. But at least we had a great time shooting the breeze and terrorizing random waiters and grad students.

Thanks, guys!

Today's serving of Hatemail Says:

I also get hatemail from time to time. Today's I found this in my mailbox:

You've got to be the stupidest person I have ever known. Not only that. You hate Taiwan. What a hate site. This is all so UNtrue. I have read every comment in here and I am appalled. Get the fuck out of Taiwan and go live in Colombia or go live in the burbs of New York City, Mexico City, Pnom Penn or Johannesburg. Get a real life and stop spreading malicious rumours about life in Taiwan. Like all places, there are some things that occur, but this is all so blown out of proportion. Luckily, I am already collaborating with a friend on a project to counterclaim all the stupidity on this site. You shoudl be reported to the FOREIGN AFFAIRS OFFICE and be barred from this nation. DROP DEAD!

A follow-up email reported:

MORE STUPIDITY FROM THE AMERICAN CONSULATE:

In the past few years there have been several incidents of violence committed by taxi drivers against solitary female passengers. In several parts of Taiwan, incidents of purse snatching by thieves on motorcycles have been reported.
==================================
Note: ...several incidents in the past few years. Do they know that in Los Angeles alone there are 9 murders per day? Or that Miami Dade County has 180 rape victims per day. Or that Johannesburg had 22,000 murders last year?
In several parts of Taiwan, incident of purse snatching... wow! I am truly scared. I better put bullet-proof windows on my property in Taipei City.

*sigh* Can't wait to see the countersite. If it is good I'll link to it.

UPDATE: then found this today

I think u are a good men, cause u don't afrid people been racial to u specialiy in our country. and you find ur own way to live in Taiwan, Peace u.

The public just can't seem to make up its mind.....

The English-Impaired, Brain-Dead Journal Reviewer: Case #2,559

A friend of mine in another Asian country who publishes regularly in top journals and has long list of publications, including both books and peer-reviewed articles, forwarded these reviewer's comments to a submission of hers. The author of the article in question observed...

BTW it took eight months to get this small amount of review work back! An ABI journal from ____ University -- and to be published each author must first subscribe to the journal -- a USD35 cost.

The reviewer's comments were limited to:

The writing of this paper is confusing and difficult to follow. Though the topic seems to be interesting, the English writing skills of the author impedes the overall quality of this paper. The abstract is confusing and doest not accurately reflect the focus of the paper.

The constant reference to the diagram within the paper itself distract the reader from the fact written.

Thought this paper does need a lot of editing work, I feel the underlying topic is interesting and I will look forward to reading it once it has been revised.

The poor quality of the English here, from the subject-verb (dis)agreements that pepper it to that brilliantly crafted second sentence, makes me think that reviewer either never read the article, or is not capable of comprehending English.

Several of my friends, including the redoubtable Clyde Warden, who also publishes regularly, have run into this problem of reviewers overseas who diss perfectly acceptable English simply because it originates from a foreign address. I have run into this problem as well. There seems to be a built-in bias against articles originating from foreign addresses among US journal reviewers. Once the author's name is removed, a "they-must-not-be-able to-speak-english" circuit fires in the reviewer's brain, and that's that.....

More on the Funeral Rice Scandal

Blogs around Taiwan and elswhere have been lit up by the comical scandal of Wang Yu-cheng and the Funeral Parlor Rice Video Scandal. EWSN has the play-by-play, including pictures of Wang crying in public, which is the Taiwanese equivalent of an American politician showing up during a sex scandal with his wife and kids in tow.

New information out today makes the whole story even worse. According to the Chinese papers, Wang showed the video to the Taipei City government prior to airing it. At first dismayed, as the funeral parlors in question were city-owned, City Hall checked the records and found that the thing had to be a fake. Instead of squashing the show, however, they let Wang air the staged video, thus letting the poor restaurants whom Wang had alleged were receiving rice from funeral parlors suffer the subsequent decline in business. Hope City Hall, run by the spineless Ma Ying-jyeou, gets thumped for this one.

Upshot is, although Wang has been busted about as badly as anyone can be, he still won't resign his legislative position, claiming his constituents voted for him and so he would be doing them a disservice by quitttng. Apparently when he was both a legislator and a TV show host, he wasn't doing them a disservice by doing two jobs at once....

EWSN, which seems to delight in Taiwanese failure, had this to say:

More snarky material here on democracy as practiced in Taiwan. This one is truly pathetic. Try convincing mainland China that democracy is the best way to go!
......
This present case is an example of the worst of the worst. In the end, there will be those who say that the system worked because the truth came out. But the system certainly did not work for those restaurants whose business suffered due to the unsubstantiated blanket charge. While some of the media did raise doubts about the story, most of them gladly took the story and ran with it to the full tilt. The main culprit here was also simultaneously a Taipei city councilor and a television program host, which was the combination of the worst with the worst.

Why a city councilman staging a fake video is an example of "the worst of the worst" is beyond me. This kind of hyperbolic rhetoric is pointless. The worst of the worst is building a senseless fourth nuclear plant, or the boondoggle that is the High Speed Railway, or the KMT's claim that A-bian staged his own shooting and then attempting to provoke China and smear Taiwan by staging fake protests in Taipei. That's genuinely wrong, worst of worst stuff. This is a mere pimple by comparison.

UPDATED TO ADD: EWSN also had this on its list of articles:

(June 10, 2005) A Scandal in Hong Kong District councilors are accused of creating fictional grassroots organizations in order to steal government funds.

(Administrative note) Wham! Yesterday, the server got slammed out of nowhere with 7,713 page views of The Big Brawl in Taipei (April 27, 2005). Where did that come from? Which A-list blogger linked to it? Or maybe the people in China want to learn how to practice democracy ...

Note the cheap crack in the last sentence -- there's a definite tone of jealousy in EWSN's commentary. It's interesting to juxtapose the scandal in Hong Kong, far more serious than Wang yu-cheng's little escapade, that EWSN lets slide without comment, with EWSN's hyperbolic comments on Wang. If Wang is the worst of the worst, than democracy in Taiwan is doing pretty well.

Chen Shui-bian is my Relative

Yes, the rumors are true. I am related to the President of Taiwan. My wife's sister just called to explain the story....

My wife's grandfather, her father's father, was a wealthy man once upon a time. He had five children by his first wife, including my wife's father. Then she passed, and he married again.

His second wife gave him five more kids, including my wife's sixth uncle. By that time the family fortunes had taken a turn for the worse, and Sixth Uncle was among the second set of children who were farmed out to other families or sold. Sixth uncle took the surname of his adoptive family, Huang. His daughter married the son of Chen Shui-bian this week. So I am related to Chen Shui-bian, through the half-brother of my wife's father, whose daughter married Chen's son.

I'll be hitting up my new relatives for a job quite soon. And I expect to see some fat red envelopes from all of you!

UPDATED JUNE 17, 2005:

My wife just got a call today from my MIL. Turns out they didn't give away sixth uncle because they were all poor. At that time my wife's grandfather had not yet lost his head to his second wife, who, in family legend, stole all his money. Instead, sixth uncle was given to the sonless sister of the second wife, who had only a 12 year old daughter. In Taiwan it is very common for sisters to rear each other's children.

A little joke for today...

Got this one off of Dailykos:

A cowboy was holding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formula. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant for the Democratic party," says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business...

.....Now give me back my dog.

Microsoft Helps China Patrol the Internet

A friend of mine alerted me to this article on MSN.com: "Microsoft bans 'democracy' for China web users"

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors.

Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".

Microsoft's excuse was:

MSN on Friday declined to comment directly on the ban on sensitive words, but its China joint venture said users of MSN Spaces were required to accept the service's code of conduct. "MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," the joint venture said. The MSN Spaces code of conduct forbids the posting of content that "violates any local and national laws".

But while China's ruling Communist Party deals harshly with political dissenters, there is no Chinese law that bars the mere use of words such as democracy.

Just one more reason to use Firefox and Linux.......

More from the letterbox: I wanna hold your hand....

Gettin' some fun letters lately.

hey,

I just finished my MA. Can teach at a univ there?

Not to be outdone for curtness, I wrote back.

Sure.

That provoked this spasm of eloquence

ok,

so what do I do to teach there? Show up?

...which prompted me to direct him to my university pages. Moral of the story: folks, please write with specific questions, you know, ones that haven't already been answered on my website.

Bush Says He Will Defend Taiwan

Our feckless President announced today that he would defend Taiwan:

Moreover, Bush said, the US adhered to the Taiwan Relations Act, which meant that it opposed either side of the Taiwan Strait unilaterally changing the status quo.

"In other words, neither side will make a decision that steps outside the bounds of that statement I just made to you. If China were to invade unilaterally, we would rise up in the spirit of [the] Taiwan Relations Act. If Taiwan were to declare independence, it would be a unilateral decision that would then change the US equation," Bush added.

Hey George? You and what army? Recruiting missed the target by a quarter (a third if the Pentagon hadn't revised the targets downwards). You broke our army in Iraq. You blew our budget with the biggest deficit in the history of the United States. Your corporate fellows are busy mismanaging our industrial capacity. But don't worry about it! Maybe you can fund a campaign against China with the $215 million that your GOP copycats mysteriously lost in Ohio.....or maybe you'll luck out, and your pro-fossil fuel policies will warm the globe so quickly that Taiwan will drown before it can be invaded....

Cat...Nappped!

Our crazy cat has been catnapped. Another in a long line of broken and lost cats we've owned....the Persians who were run over/ran away, the white kitten in Taliao that also ran away, two cats we got this year, one ran away, one catnapped....the cat we had in Texas had kittens and then died. As did all the kittens, within hours. And of course, my wife's cat in Neihu, which had been hit by a car, couldn't walk properly, and was bat-insane. I wonder what we did to a cat in our past life?

UPDATE: Our Siamese fighting fish fought his last today too.

Bauer on Abortion....

I was poking around in the China Post and ran across this essay by Fujen University's Daniel Bauer, a Catholic cleric who writes a regular column for the China Post, the pro-KMT rag. I am using this for my second years. as a writing assignment for their final. Bauer's position on abortion is dictated, of course, by his institutional affiliation with the Church, so there is a certain irony in his praise of "spiritual convictions" of others, when he is simply a cypher for someone else's authority values on so many key issues.

Bauer quickly describes the proposed law.

Proposed abortion law opens window to talk on sex, values By Daniel J. Bauer

Taiwan would clearly benefit by a hefty dose of political harmony. That is one reason I was pleased to learn this week of a dramatic bi-partisan effort by leaders of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Law-makers Lin Tai-hua of the DPP and Yang Li-huan of the KMT spoke as a team in support of a revision in the Genetic Health Law which would mandate a six-day waiting period before a woman could obtain an abortion.

I am guessing that various women's groups are making life miserable at the moment for legislators Lin and Yang, charging that a six-day wait for an abortion constitutes an unreasonable attack on a so called right to an abortion. Fidelity to spiritual convictions on this question while under public pressure from members of one's own gender is surely a tough challenge. Lin and Yang deserve our praise for their courage, as does independent legislator Chang Li-san. She also favors the proposal.

Believe it or not, Dan, opponents of this rule also have spiritual convictions. And practical ones as well...

Although I hope the suggested revision will win approval, I do not support abortion. I believe life in the womb is a whole human life, and society has an ethical and spiritual responsibility to protect it. The legislators say, however, that Belgium discovered a 60 percent drop in its abortion rate after its laws required a similar waiting period.

The problem lies right here -- importing things from another culture without any similar infrastructure in one's own. Six day waiting periods are also found in Europe, where abortion rates are much lower than the US or Canada or Taiwan. Why? Because in European countries, where the neurotic, anti-human sexual doctrine of Christianity has long since been dispensed with, there is a rich infrastructure of family planning, sex education, information, national health insurance, and so on. None of that is available in Taiwan.

Bauer rightly notes that abortion statistics in Taiwan are a joke -- far too low -- but then comes to the wrong conclusion. He thinks that we ought to have another 150,000 babies on the island every year, because, as we all know, Taiwan needs more people. Everywhere you go -- the streets are empty of vehicles, the night markets lack for customers, the sidewalks are barren of life -- there just aren't enough people in Taiwan. Everyone I know complains about how hard it is to find other people in Taiwan. Good move, Dan!

Abortion restrictions punish women, and here in Taiwan women have already been punished enough. We should note that the big month for abortions in Taiwan is September as women go back to school. A six day waiting period means that a lot more girls would go back pregnant. In a more enlightened country, that would not be an issue, but here, pregnant girls are stigmatized and often forced to drop out of school. Bauer's policy in effect calls for the creation of more single mothers who are school dropouts. Good move, Dan.

Further, Taiwan, like many nations with double standards on sexuality, has a vibrant back alley abortion industry. It's not as bad as nations where the Church has been a success, as in Latin America and Africa, where young women are maimed and killed in botched abortions every year (and abortion rates are multiples of countries where abortion is safe and legal). In Kenya, where I used to live, at any one time, more than half the beds in the obstetrics and gynecology ward of Nairobi’s major state-funded Kenyatta hospital are occupied by women admitted with abortion-related complaints. Every year in Kenya alone about 2,000 women die from complications from abortion. Good thing they value life there, eh? If abortion were legal, Kenya would have fewer abortion deaths, and fewer abortions as well. But what is life-affirming logic in the face of an implacable hatred of women and sex?

In any case, a six day waiting period will have little effect in Taiwan for the simple reason that anyone who doesn't want to wait can get an abortion without one off the street, an option many will choose. Not only does Bauer on one hand call for an increase in the number of single mothers in Taiwan, on the other, he proposes that we increase the number of illegal abortions as well. Good move, Dan!

Bauer may not realize this, as an asexual priest without wife or child, but babies do cost money, and so do health complications. Orphans and single mothers drive up social welfare costs. Someone has to pay for medical care for victims of botched back street abortions. Us taxpayers, of course.

To his credit, Bauer, who has lived in Taiwan many years, is not entirely clueless about the complete lack of sexual knowledge among the young. He knows....

Those words may be of help in a far away culture, but what works here at home? When it comes to knowing how our local parents talk of sex with their teens, we are sitting in great darkness. Most of my students tell me their parents have NEVER spoken deeply with them about sex, babies or birth control. Don't you too feel we have a little problem here?

Yes, we have a problem here, Dan. The problem is that you can't introduce measures that depend on a certain level of social infrastructure, in countries where that infrastructure does not exist. You've seen the problem, but refuse to think it through to the end. Bauer at one point calls for the island to take a shot, saying;

Well then, why not try it here in Taiwan? Let us do all we can to confirm the value of human life.

By all means, Dan. Let's do that. Let's confirm human life, in a broad and progressive way. Let's have your authoritarian Pope resign, consign the pedophiles your Church protects to prison, apologize for your close ties to Mussolini, Franco, Peron, and other facists, and let's see promotion of a truly life-embracing culture in your Church that values people like Oscar Romero and Dorothy Day, instead of hopeless rightists like Escriva of Spain and Cardinal Stepanic of Yugoslavia. But in the meantime, keep your nose out of Taiwan's ethical business, because when it comes to ethics, your Church doesn't have a moral leg to stand on.

Taiwan has some really cool bugs...

In my next life I'm going to study bugs, I've decided. I especially love the island's beetles and spiders. Caught this presumably female spider with an egg sac (?) as it crawled along wall next to the foundation of my house.

The Mushroom Farm: A Field Trip

My wife and I accompanied my daughter's class on a field trip to a mushroom farm in one of the local mushroom growing centers, Hsinshe. Mushrooms have been an important crop since they were promoted as an export crop in the 1950s. Anyway, I've created a website about the trip here.