Pull my finger

This quote from the Taipei Times on Wednesday says it all, really:

"The sovereignty of the ROC is already something that is acknowledged by the Taiwanese public, and proposing this resolution is like taking one's pants down before farting," Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Huang Teh-fu said. The Chinese proverb "to take one's pants down before farting" means to engage in an unnecessary act.

Comments

FXH said…
The Taiwan Parliament and political life has more robust exchanges than I am used to here. Paul Keating and Latho couldnt hold a candle to Taiwanese pollies in the insult league. I was over there just after Chen got shot and one pollie made a leering reference to the fact that his female vice pres. had crouched down near his crutch!

I loved the fact that the biggest insult is to call someone a "mainland gangster"

Go out to the National Palace Museum and eat in the cafeteria. It can be a queu if there is a few bus trips around but it was honestly some of the best food in Taiwan there for some reason. The old city bit out near Danshui (sp?)station is a great place to wander around. There is even a great small REAL coffee shop down a lane with cool jazz playing.
8 January 2005 at 03:30
Michael Barnett said…
Can you play Hava Nagilah or even Jingle Bells? ;)
8 January 2005 at 15:17
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thanks for all the fish

After 13 years with Blogspot, I've shifted blogging platform. So (drumroll, please), you can find my new blog here . Ari on the Web will stay online, so you can scroll through the archives for all sorts of embarrassing tidbits. To make it easier to find some of my writing on particular themes, I've grouped some pieces together under a few labels: Cancer Fatherhood Indonesia travels North Korea travels United States travels Undergraduate days   So as they say here in my new home of Japan, so long, and thanks for the all the fish.
Read more

Can conspicuous consumption save the news business?

Image
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue. It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers. There’s been lots of talk lately about ways to fund public interest journalism. One idea is to tax the online aggregators – Facebook and Google, primarily – that sell advertising against the news content of others to support news organisations. Another is to make news subscriptions or donations to its producers tax deductible.  Both ideas are worth considering, but they do not abrogate the need for news organisations to seek better ways to draw revenue from consumers.  (It is alarming that discussion of efforts to...
Read more

A place to rest my head

Image
I dream one day of visiting Pyongyang and staying in the wonderfully pyramidic Ryugyong Hotel. The outer shell of this hotel which dominates the Pyongyang skyline was built in the 1980s, and the interior was, well, never built. It seems possible that the project was commenced in a pique of optimism as North Korea put in a claim to share the 1988 Olympic Games with its southern brothers, but just as the offer was rejected - just like the bid to share the 2002 Soccer World Cup failed on the basis of North Korea's request to host the Opening Ceremony, Semi Finals and Final - the hotel was never completed. Nowadays, in stands pointing to the sky much the way that Kim Il Sung's statue does, both perhaps as a symbol of the excesses of North Korean enthusiasm. Instead of the Ryugyong, like most foriegn visitors to Pyongyang I found myself staying at the Yanggakdo Hotel. The Yanggakdo Hotel is a slice of Cold War Bondesque paranoia writ large. The hotel is located on an isla...
Read more