Titbits...

And in other news... Nick M has a great picture up of Uma Thurman and is throwing his new word around "Ashocka!"... and Linda Morgan reviews Martin McPhillips' new book "Corpse In Armor". I'll get around to it eventually... Martin's blog is always one of the first I read; the fella is on the side of the angels and has a brilliant turn of phrase sometimes e.g. his recent line on Facebook:

"It’s like being tied to the railroad tracks of memory as the freight train of karma rolls over you."

Lately...

Things have been rotting like a pile of late-autumn leaves in early spring here. It's been an age since I could even bring myself to look at a news item without feeling my hands go limp and my cheek slide sideways against a window pane that isn't there. I've been propping myself up on the little things.

About a year and several months ago, I picked up a three-month old puppy on the road just outside my company's building. One lane of the two-lane road had been closed for roadworks and she was running around playing with the traffic and I could just see what was going to happen. Within the first five or six months of having adopted her, I began the process of trying to get her used to water by taking her to the beach at Anping - she was terrified of the little waves. I gave up the beach and began taking her to another park nearby where, following Typhoon Morakot last summer, the little rockery pools filled up with water for the next few weeks. It was there that she broke her fear and learned to swim. And so I began taking her to the beach again - but again, she found the waves a little too scary to venture in on her own so I would carry her into the sea with me and let her swim back to the shore herself. Then - just last week - it finally happened. I had taken her to the beach on a tuesday lunchtime so there was nobody around and after playing with her on the sand for a while I took off into the sea to give myself a little stretch before getting ready for work. I'd given up coaxing her into the water and had swam out a good hundred odd yards from the shore when I turned round to see she had followed me into the sea and was herself already a good thirty-forty yards from shore! I wished I could have had a camera with me at that moment. Over the moon I was! Since then she has regularly been following me into the sea on her own account.

I have also - as of two weeks ago - sold the motorcycle featured in my blog picture. Trying to keep four working bikes together is tricky, especially when you're not driving as much and as far as you used to. Of the four, it had to be that one to go; it was costing more than the others to maintain, it was offering nothing over the others apart from a distinct driving aesthetic, and was offering a lot less than the others on practical grounds. Still, it's a shame as there is a part of me that would have liked to have kept it. Soon after I bought it about four years ago, I drove it up the east coast - my very first time - all the way to Hualien and on the way back (riding with my helmet off, strapped to the back of the bike) I crashed it coming downhill on a bend on seeing a very big snake cross the road! The car in front of me had also slowed down (presumably to let the kids in the back look at the snake) without realizing that I was coming down behind him. Anyway, I made it back down to the south west of the island eventually. The east coast is a magnificent ride. Loved that bike.

What To Do When You Wake Up Inside A Comic Book Deliberately Written Weirdly

So I wake up with a bit of a hangover this morning - not too bad actually, but enough to make me run out for a bottle of Super Supau - and when I eventually drag myself in front of the laptop, I find a video entitled "Bird Imitates Construction Site". My eye passed over it for a second but then I looked back and read it again:

"Bird Imitates Construction Site".

I mean... christ. The video actually shows a bird - a Lyrebird - imitating the typical sounds of a construction site (drilling etc). But "Bird Imitates Typical Sounds Of Construction Site" is readily comprehensible if still retaining some weirdness - but "Bird Imitates Construction Site"?! What am I supposed to do with a title like that? Rupture my imagination muscles...

The video is fairly amusing as a spare minute point & chuckle, but if you make a video like this and put it up on the internet for people to watch, why weird the whole thing up as a desperate attention-seeking ploy? What the fucking hell is so valuable, and to whom (??), about a bird imitating sounds it hears that somebody decides to not only make a video to put over on the internet but to actively try to attract viewers by sounding retarded? And the corollary to that - other people sitting around all day trawling the internet for things appearing to be vaguely retarded... My excuse was recovery from a naughty little sortie out last night, but jesus man... if I wasn't in need of a shower, a tidy up, some onions, bacon etc right now then I could just spend the next hour or so delving into the mathematics pages on wikipedia just to sober myself up from that looniness. So that's my plan for the next hour or so... wash, onions, mathematics. Ripped out of context as say, a video title, that could seem at first like a random bunch of words - but if you savour them you can at least smell the order.

Commies Everywhere

The BBC - always a likely hangout for commie shitheads - has video up on their football site showing some lunatic calling himself "Attila The Stockbroker" barking about how football clubs should be "owned by the community" - like Barcelona. Watch how he spits out the word "customer" with utter contempt from 1.06 on:

"... and fans being treated like customers!"

Now I like football a lot and I don't see anything wrong with applying the concept of "customer" to a fan attending a football game. You pay your money and the club provides a team (and all the infrastructure neccessary to that) for you to watch. If you don't like it that rich people happen to mismanage your club, then buy them out with your own fucking money and if you haven't got enough - then shut up until you do have enough.

'These wounds I had on Reconciliation day..'

"In his stately paneled office with Potomac view
He will yearly on the vigil feast his lobbying-staff,
And say 'To-morrow is Health Care Day.'
A PowerPoint graph of his Gallups he will show,
And say 'These wounds I had on Reconciliation day.'"

Iowahawk imagines how Obama would render Shakespeare's Henry V Agincourt speech.

President Obama

"Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics."

That's Martin McPhillips on why U.S. conservatives, not excluding those in the "Tea Party" movement, are unable to recognize President Obama as an existential threat in the same basic sense in which the Soviet Union was. The standard retort at this point would be Hanlon's Razor ("never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence"), but, to paraphrase J. Porter Clarke, it is sometimes impossible to tell sufficiently developed incompetence apart from malice.

No Escape Except...

From now on, in the United Soviet States of America, you can be convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol even when you are not under the influence of alcohol. The police and the courts are not interested in anything other than increasing the number of convictions whilst reducing the length of time it takes to secure such convictions. This is a predatory system which will, I have little doubt, eventually be imitated here in Taiwan.

Billy Beck linked that.

Epistemological Castration

"An ugly, undesirable manifestation of a bloated, self-satisfied egomanical Western culture... Those missionaries. It’s ok to hate them you know; it’s not like hating race, gender or sexuality for example. Missionaries are, by default, pious, arrogant, narrowminded and self-righteous without a single exception. Those qualities are the prerequisites of missionaryhood; if you do not embody these adjectives, then you are not missionary (in effect, you must believe that your religion is the best, your culture is the superior, and your language is the greatest, and you must be willing to inflict this on innocent people who are generally quite fond of their own culture to begin with). This kind of mind is very similar to the kind of mind that starts wars and erases generations, and, due to the nature of religious groups, all members must share this attitude. In their case, the stereotype is absolute and, because ‘tolerance’ is largely based on the fact that stereotypes are not manifest of a group, I can say ‘I hate them’, and it is beyond any kind of moral, liberal, or philospohical reproach."

This is what to expect from other foreigners in Taiwan.

Update: linked up now - thanks to Linda Morgan for pointing out the missing link.