Posts from February 2004
February 29, 2004
Corbett's 10 reasons why walking the dog is therapeutic
1) Dogs have a soul, and they need to get out of the house too
2) The coffee shop is only 100 yards away
3) Wife needs you to get out of her face
4) While walking you can let your brain concentrate on simple things like "Should I let him poop there?" or "Will that car run over him?" rather than complicated things like "What's the legal implications of that particular issue which is still unresolved with those [expletive] [expletives] which I can't really do anything about since the [expletive] situation is out of my control, but the shit will rain down on me if I don't cover my ass, so I better figure out a back up plan just in case it doesn't go the way the lawyers think. [expletive]."
5) Your dog has a chance to meet other dogs
6) You have a good reason for not having to talk to anyone on your mobile because everyone understands that dog walking is down time
7) You don't have a computer in front of you
8) You can whistle, spit, scratch ass, pick nose, burp, fart, talk to yourself, stop and look at nothing, without creating alarm
9) You begin to realize that having the time to do things like walking a dog is precious
10) One day you might be a dog
Elmore Leonard's 10 tips for writers
As I've been asked to take this information off of my site, please contact Beth Neelman Silfin, Associate General Counsel of HarperCollins Publishers, who now own these 10 tips. beth.silfin@harpercollins.com
She can help you become a better writer.
I can add tip 11 below:
11) Don't share with the other writers out there the first 10 tips, as this is in violation with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and might actually make people better writers.
February 28, 2004
"Oh my god! There's an axe in my head!"
Today instead of taking my dog out for a walk, I learned how to say, "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head" in various languages.
February 27, 2004
A suit in Taiwan?
Tonight we're playing outside the club for the first time. The guys are pretty psyched. Turtle's doing some fancy function at the 101 for a new club, and asked if I wanted to put together a jazzy thing for all the cool people. DJ SL is spinning as well. Maybe we can fiddle around as well. I haven't played out with a band in a looooonnnnngggg time, so this will be fun. I told Dazz, our drummer, that he needed to wear a suit, and he's like, "A suit in Taiwan??" So he's got to come up with the gear. Reminds me of my first gig when I had to go out and buy a suit.
In other news...
Last night another sax player stopped by for the Living Room jam. Klaus Bru is from Germany, and played great. I heard him do some out stuff with laptops and a mixer, so knew he would be ok with some weird stuff, so we opened the night with some authentically weird stuff. I started putting down some avante stuff on the Echoplex in odd time signatures, Klaus started playing some wild German soprano, then Arnaud took out his clarinet and started into some French klezmer, and finally Dennis got his tenor out and started honking like a Canadian duck. We did this for nearly 20 minutes, moving from vamp to vamp.
I think the audience was thinking "Jesus god, what is this bizarre concoction of sound?" Hopefully five years from now one of them will be driving his car, stopped at a red light, hear someone honk, then suddenly remember that night in the Living Room when those four foreigners were tooting away on instruments with weird loops and harmonies. They'll smile, thinking back 5 years and say, "Hey, that was a great show."
This is always one goal in music for me: To wake people up, so they say things like, "Hey, that was a great show." If only I had like a web counter thingie that tallied up when people thought this thought, so I could check up if people ever remembered a show or were influenced in some way by something I've played. That would be cool.
February 25, 2004
Beard thang
OMG, I'm turning into a hippie. First, the hair started getting longer. I figured not many 38 yr olds had the ability to let their's hang down, so that was reason enough. Then over CNY, I stopped shaving. Wife liked it, so now I have a beard. Then I wear those big yellow snowboarding DJ glasses with a hoodie. Then the club keeps me up until like 4am every night. And now my band is playing groovy Grant Green tunes from the 60's. Maybe it's a latent desire to stick it to the man, dude.
Peace, Love, and Happiness from the Beard Thang.
February 23, 2004
Say Come on Fhqwhgads
Just when I think I'm starting to understand things, I'm pushed to the limit by fhqwhgads...
Whoa.
February 20, 2004
Ah-Bien says...
TIME: If you lose the election and the KMT takes the government, how bad would that be for Taiwan?
CHEN: I will be re-elected. I am a person that writes history and creates new chapters in history.
February 19, 2004
Support my friend Scott!
Scott's book blurb:
You have all probably heard me mention in the past year that I have been working on a book. After two years of work, the book is finished and is now available! The title of the book is (fittingly) "Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks". It is published by O'Reilly and Associates (a well known technical publisher) and is available at book stores that carry O'Reilly books, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Just type "Scott Fullam" into the search window and you will be directed to the book.
The book is full of fun hardware projects that vary in difficulty from beginner to expert. Don't be intimidated by the title, everyone can enjoy it. It makes a great gift for others or yourself :)
I am happy to autograph copies.
The book has already gotten some good press. The San Jose Mercury News did a cover story on the book.
If anyone knows of newspapers, magazines, or other media outlets that might be interested in covering the book, please let me know.
Thank you for your support!
Scott Fullam
Richard W. Hartzell
Uncovering the Truth of the Taiwan Status
by Richard W Hartzell
As most people know, at the present time Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign independent nation by the world community.
February 16, 2004
Blue skies shining on me...
When the weather's nice like recently, and you can actually see the blue sky, and feel the sun all over your face, it reminds me of college for some reason. After all those miserable hours studying, cramming, reading, or going to lectures, I can only really remember the feeling of being outside. Usually on a bike, or in my car, or sitting on some grass, or watching people walk by, or walking to the market. Funny that after 17 years that's all I remember, a feeling of pure freedom.
I've sort of kept tabs on a few friends from back then. Not many. Most have kids, a mortgage, are in senior positions, and have finally figured out what they wanted to do. My last 17 years were completely backwards: The first thing I did was what I had always wanted to do, I owned a house, had a daughter, and was on the right track. Now, I've got rid of the house, am not doing what I originally thought I wanted to do, daughter is grown, and I'm back to square one. It's an odd sense of freedom, knowing you made it through the rat race intact, even though you walked backwards through it. But what next?
Not quite ready to have the midlife crisis, no interest in red sports cars or young chicks, and I'm not loosing my hair or getting fat. I'm almost exactly the same as I was when I was in college, just older.
And today, the weather is nice, I can see the blue sky, and I feel free.
February 14, 2004
Mr. DJ
I was just reading through a Pots magazine tonight, and marvelled at how much seemingly interesting music nightlife was going on in Taiwan. Or was it that they did a good job of making the mediocre sound marvelous? What was most interesting to see was how DJs are now the busy touring musicians. These guys run around with their flight case full of LPs and a small Vestax mixer tucked in a backpack, making hour-long appearances all over town. We still call it gan chang, which means literally "rush stage", and is what most musicians/performers here have to do to get paid. You gan from one gig to a chang somewhere else. Then on the weekends you spread out to include Taichung, or maybe some rave party. I like the stripped down touring business model that these guys have. They don't have to deal with equipment (it's already there), or bands (they spin alone). They don't have to schedule practice (alone in the bedroom), or learn to read music or understand changes (we're DJs dude), or sing, or even dance. They can wear an old T-shirt and a pair of Pumas and be stylish. Just as digitalization has cannibalized the old fashioned music industry, we see the same thing happening with old fashioned music performance. It's interesting to see. I remember trying to mix in grooves with live music back in 1991. They thought I was some whacko. One shocked listener even wrote a concerned letter to me to tell me that she felt "scared" by the "black jungle sounds" created in my music. She didn't know how to "feel" when she listened to this weird music. Now Taiwan is finally getting up to speed on music culture, or so we think. We've been doing an "underground" hip hop night at the Living Room, and some cool DJs turn out. We've got guys from South Africa, Canada, Taiwan, Australia, and the UK. What's even more interesting are the Chinese kids in their basketball jerseys that read "Iverson" on them, walking in with their high tops, jogging pants, and sideways baseball hats. They got the look, but most of them can't book. Still, it's the beginning of something different, and we have to thank Mr. DJ for putting that record on.
February 07, 2004
Sodami is cute...
I noticed this on a friend's kitchen table when I was looking for a piece of scratch paper.
Project mode
Chinese NY has passed, it's still damned cold, and I haven't been writing. I've been in that slow organizational self recovery mode of "getting my shit done."
This ranges from Homer Simpson stuff like: painting walls, building speaker shelves, fixing video cameras, rewiring 1/4" cables over to XLR, etc...to Dilbert stuff like financial reports, hiring, training, developing SOPs, and file cleaning, to blue jean geeky stuff like implementing new backup procedures, building forums for inter-office communication, and trying out new hosting tools, to goatee-boy stuff like building Tiff her band website, teaching my god-son how to use a CMS, and adding scanned articles and MP3s to the Living Room site, to setting up new business projects (which unfortunately can't be detailed here), and writing executive summaries describing how IT will make YOU more MONEY. I have long since realized that it takes more time convincing someone to accept what you are doing (and hopefully making some money from it) than it does to just go ahead and do it and make it happen. The outcome is the same either way. It works or it doesn't. Since time is the precious commodity in this equation, which makes more sense? This is my motto for 2004. Don't waste my time BOZO. My personal equation is simple: Raise more money, see less movies. Raise less money, see more movies.
Christofu is finally joining the blog world, and will cronicle his process of being a guy with no kids, to a guy with two kids, including dealing with standard pregnancy stuff, to going to China to pick up his new adopted child. Cool.
February 02, 2004
Bummer for Chocolate
...after being accused by his wife Chang Wei-chin (張瑋津) on Jan. 16 of raping two male college students while being infected with syphilis...
I've known Charlie (aka: Chocolate) since he came to Taiwan. Apart from being unusually happy most of the time, he seemed like a pretty nice guy. Why he would get married to a Taiwanese woman when his inclinations leaned another way beats me. She apparently is super loaded, and it is good to have some local $$ guanxi to back you up, so maybe that's a possible MO, especially being a foreigner, and a black foreigner at that. That's like a double negative in racist Taiwan. And being a gay black foreigner is like a super double bonus negative.
Normally police would not be involved in some stuff like this unless someone leaned a heavy shoulder against them to do it (ie: one pissed off wife). So his wife has accused him of having sex, but is there any proof of mischievious poking around? Are the college aged rape victims accusing Charlie? I guess the existential question here is: "If someone is poking around in the forest, and here is no one there to see him poking around, was there really any poking happening?"
So, it sounds like Charlie got screwed. Figuratively and literally. Bummer. I guess the moral of the story is: Don't piss your rich and influential Taiwanese wife off by sleeping with younger gay men.
February 01, 2004
Friends at home
Serious hot pot going on here.
Sneeze sexy?
Japanese women in bikinis sneezing is way out there.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
