June 2009
42 posts
EdgeVideo: MURRAY GELL-MANN →
A Nobel Prize winning physicist on another Nobel Prize winning physicist (Feynman) and washing your hands after you pee.
Kevin: dudez, i'm usually up until 3 or 4
me: that's not healthy kiddo
Kevin: and even better, i didn't even eat any food today until after midnight!
me: whoaz
but that's true everyday
you can't eat food after midnight
that day
sorry
Kevin: i thought about pulling the full on fast, but i gave it up when i realized i'd be laying in bed dreaming of a cheeseburger
me: you can't eat that day's food until that day has started, ie after midnight
Kevin: thank you semantics warrior, i had no idea
me: haha
sorry
i was flailing around there for a second
me: i'm gonna meet up with my cousin and my uncle
and try to simmer down from my dispute over internet blog writing
i got worked up
Deepal: haha
wait
who liked it?
me: james
Deepal: oh man
My dad swung by last week for dinner and brought over a bag of cherry tomatoes along with dinner and bags of fruit. I reminded him of this previous time he had bought me a bag of cherry tomatoes. When I was a kid (somewhere between 4 and 8), we came to Taiwan as a family. I remember I asked my dad repeatedly to buy me a bag of cherry tomatoes. He relented, and when I got home, I ate the whole bag...
WatchThe Kinks - Strangers - Sapo Vídeos
I share my findings here after only being able to find horrible covers of this song on youtube.
“We will defeat the terrorists, just like we beat the world in cricket.”
– A Pakistani cricket fan celebrating Pakistan’s cricket world cup win.
I’m impressed when I go to those ridiculous restaurants where they think of every single thing. I may have mentioned this before, but a good example of this is how, at Gary Danko, my mango dish was served by an Indian guy. I went to El Toro in Taipei, which was started by a Spanish dude who had supposedly worked with Ferran Adria at El Bulli and subsequently married a Taiwanese woman and...
A demand for errand runners is helping many... →
For no fee, anyone can register online to be an errand runner. If they want benefits entitling them to business cards and insurance against broken or lost items, they only need to pay a one-time fee of NT$1,000. There are no middlemen fees.
And all they need is a computer and access to Web sites where errand requests are posted. The first to reply to a customer’s online request usually gets the...
“[redacted] has tons of friends who are girls. actually, he is himself obsessed...”
– Mihir. Well Mihir, I’ll take that as a diss because, as you know, what I do I like to do well, including thinking obsessively about girlz. But I’m just glad to be in the running, and in your frame of mind as you ruminate deeply on these weighty issues. I’m happy to be here, and...
“your tumblr has started to attain a certain je ne sais quoi. it’s...”
– James, giving smalter.org a characteristic backhanded complement. HELLO JAMES?!?!??!?! I think I’ve already made it clear that smalter.org is the #1 website on the Internet. It’s already good. Je sais quoi: I ownz. Holla!
“O yea congrats to sun yue, nee how”
– Shaq via THE_REAL_SHAQ (THE_REAL_SHAQ) on Twitter
“I refuse to look at any ‘what-ifs’ [in my life], because I love to...”
– Ed O’Bannon via Ed O’Bannon Gone From the Hardwood to the Sales Floor - washingtonpost.com (via jeffmiller)
China’s College Entry Test, Gao Kao, Is National... →
This article is a cautionary tale: Don’t send a white person to do a Chinese person’s job. Another horrible/pointless article about China. A representative example:
China may be changing at head-twirling speed, but the ritual of the gao kao (pronounced gow kow) remains as immutable as chopsticks. One Chinese saying compares the exam to a stampede of “a thousand soldiers and 10 horses...
Palau: The New America →
“It’s an old age tradition of Palauans to accommodate the homeless who find their way to the shores of Palau,” [President] Toribiong said in a telephone interview. “We did agree to accept [the former Gitmo detainees] due to the fact that they have become basically homeless and need to find a place of refuge and freedom.”
Former Gitmo Detainees to Live Out Their Days in... →
dhk:
“The Uighurs are a mostly Muslim minority living in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. The latest US State Department human rights report says China has stepped up repression of the community.”
— Gitmo Uighurs hail freedom | PerthNow
Uighurs that ride together, die together
The tropical Pacific island nation of Palau announced yesterday it will accept up to 17 Chinese Muslims who...
Wiener Fest at Computex - Taipei Times →
The bar was full, but despite the fact that Wednesday was ladies night, most patrons were male. If you were there to drink and hang out, it was a great place to be, but if you were a man and looking for romance, the odds were stacked against you.
“Everybody knows about Carnegie’s — a place where ladies dance on the bar — but seriously, there were too many blokes in there,” said Tony Ricardi,...
Q
In Taiwan, there’s a word for a bouncy, chewy kind of texture, and it’s Q. It’s popular here. For instance, you’ve got bubble tea tapioca, mochi, glutinous rice generally, etc. It extends to meat: the cut of beef used in the popular beef noodle soup is a shank that’s half meat half tendon. I was at a Japanese tappenyaki spot in Taipei and they did beef two ways: one...
And another thing
endasher:
leoncrawl:
Seriously fuck Jay-Z. What does he have against auto-tune? “This ain’t for itunes, this ain’t for sing alongs, this is Sinatra at the opera, bring a blonde, preferably with a fat ass who can sing a song, wrong, this aint politically correct.” “Black republicans” indeed…
Also what is it with him and writing punchlines about pens that don’t make sense. “Like bringing a...
Conservative Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito,... →
azspot:
So as we continue the confirmation process of Justice Sotomayor, whose main offense appears to be that she’s empathetic to victims of injustice, consider what the radical right is telling America about the views they’d like to see in a Supreme Court Justice:
Shorter conservatives:
1. A fair trial does not require an impartial judge, let alone the appearance of one.
2. We think our...
re http://smalter.org/post/118809192/does-the-special-relationship-a-mother-has-with
I asked my dad, “Do you ever wonder if I’m your kid?”
He laughed, and said, “No.”
I asked, “What about when I do stuff that’s really annoying?” (As I’d done that day.)
Another smirk from my dad. And he said, “That’s karma.”
Taipei Times - archives →
Chung made a living by growing tea and fruit in the mountains. Recalling that he was stung by an entire nest of paper wasps more than a decade ago, he said with his heart still fluttering with fear that he was patching a leak in the water pipes across a river valley that day and disturbed a paper wasp nest by accident. He said that his head and legs were stung by more than 300 furious wasps and...
Does the special relationship a mother has with her child have to do with the fact that she can be sure the child is hers? Ya know, even if both mother and father are present at the birth of a child, only one of them can be sure that the kid came from his or her loins. I imagine that if I’m ever a dad, I’ll wonder on occasion if the kid is really mine when it does something annonying.
I log on to my friend's facebook to stalk a mutual...
Jose: What you do to my facebook?
Each time i login it's all in Chinese!!!!!!
Fix it man!
Jose: Never mind. I learned your language and put it back in english.
A New Perspective On One Of Last Century's Most... →
sequentialist:
While the original image of the “tank man” might be described as an icon (a representation with purely symbolic and decontextualized meaning), this photograph makes clearer (for a number of reasons that include all the other people in the photo running away and the eye-level perspective) that this was a regular dude carrying his groceries home, but then decided to do something...
Bloggers commented that the Supreme Court delivered the Sixth Circuit a “smackdown” in its reversal of Eric Clay’s decision in Bobby v. Bies. Yeah, the decision was unanimous and the opinion was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, likely the Court’s most “liberal” member, who said that Clay fundamentally misunderstood the Double Jeopardy clause of the Constitution.
...
2 meals
My cab driver took me to a dim sum place that he called old fashioned and said you could only find it in Hong Kong. I arrived confused, all right, and somewhat ostracized. I ended up drinking tea out of the bowl that I was supposed to sanitize my eating utensils with, and the other guy at my table pointed at me and with a look of incredulity basically said to his friend, “What the fuck is...
I finished up my stint last week as a law clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. I’m now in Hong Kong, communing with my people.
Being a law clerk is a power trip, but in the end, that wasn’t quite the most gratifying part of the job for me. What’s remarkable about being an clerk on the US Court of Appeals, versus say the Supreme Court, is the number of mundane...