"This year's most powerful typhoon...Jangmi...made landfall at 3:40 PM near the fishing town of Suao in Hualien county. The storm will batter the north of Taiwan all through this evening, before it's expected to slowly head towards the Chinese mainland sometime Monday morning. Typhoon Jangmi is packing wind speeds of over 170 km per hour with gusts up to 209." - e. smith

and while the rest of taipei found shelter at home...the 2 of us went to play in the rain!

5:13 AM

to me, she's always been this pale faced, disgustingly skeletal, bimbo on tv hosting the 2nd most annoying show in taiwan. 模范棒棒堂. （number 1 is 黑澀會美眉). if u've never seen it, it's a bunch of annoying high schoolers running amok, making a fool out of themselves with half ass talent shows of hip hop dancing, hip hop rapping, shameful singing, hideous outfits, annoying girly voices, pubescent pimples, all under the umbrella of the host. 范瑋琪. but once again, that's what the people like and that's what the people get. the people here think she's beautiful, smart, skinny, classy and clever. she's known to have quit harvard to come back and be a star. (it's true, however for the record, it's non matriculating harvard extension school).

"she's nice"

12:01 AM

I CALLED A CAB FOR JOHNNY KWEK. AND THE DRIVER WROTE THIS ON THE PAPER. GO GO GADGET TAIWANESE ENGRISH!

11:38 PM

the prerequisite to making the billboard charts in taiwan is to have no balls. either u're a woman OR you've castrated any hope of testosterone production for the sole purpose of that GAWDDAMNNED FALSETTO! (note: let's for now put aside the whole anorexic androgynous femme-look male artists have adapted- the japanese have taken this to a ridiculous extreme). anyways, it seems that no matter how chinese artists adapt to all genre's of music, including their own aboriginal tunes, they heavily induce the airy, high pitched, nasally falsetto as 90% of the melody. the only hint of a man singing could be a small bridge or just the talking btwn the verses. but that's what the people like and that's what the people get. so in short, if u can sing like a woman, u can be a star.

with the femme-voice trend in mind, last nights event coordinator for the HENNESSY ARTISTRY EVENT was quite brilliant. they booked a perfect buffet of jazzy, boy bandy, poppy acts that all tie in the easy listening unisex appeal. with bigger budgeted events being pushed into the growing markets of shanghai/hk....taiwan made use of it's compromised capital with the quaint 西門紅樓 venue. It's an east meets west living room with a chinese facade that houses 2 floors of modern bar atmosphere and a small stage with great sightlines for almost 300 degrees. (i would love to have a private party there)



until june started the show. they look like they went to prep school and sound (as expected) like postal service/grandaddy/deathcab.   trendy pop with lots of oo's and ah's in falsetto which i think wowed the audience.  if that didn't work, this did...月亮代表我的心



then came joanna wang.  there's no doubt she has talent and there's no doubt that she's been trained (not to mention that her dad is a producer) but her hunched back lazy singing style was seriously so tough to stomach.  "看的很痛苦!" -L.LEE.  she sang a full set of oldie hits (summertime etc) but at age 20 she hasn't developed any sense of her own style to give her rendition that extra ummph.  didn't warrant me to take any pictures....

then a short cameo by pretty boy dj tom price.  girls flocked to him for photos even though he only lazily spun 2 songs.

ended with shane ward.  great "american idol" type voice.  had a few songs with a dance team behind, did the boy band "come hither" look most of the time.  sang "apologize" by one republic and had a duet with joanna ward.  good voice, veteran stage performer, not a bad night.

11:25 PM

...if i can't be a rockstar, then im gonna drive the people with potential around me to be a rockstar. im managing kent lee. the 2nd coming of 伍伯....

7:52 AM

we, the a.b.c.'s (american born chinese) of taiwan, have the conversation about "deteriorating english" quite often. no matter how well versed you are in western culture and education it's bound go to sh*t. about 50% of the abc's back in taiwan are for family business and in order to spike the learning curve in traditional business settings, one must make that extra effort to assimilate with the cultural nuances covering all aspects of life (sauna, betel nuts, taiwan beer, smoking, gao liang, taiwanese language etc). and as one learning curve spikes upwards, another plummets to hell. the sin/cosin of cultural assimilation. the other day someone asked me...

"那天好不好玩？" (how was it last night)
"還好, 就那樣啊...但他們玩的滿HIGH的" (it was ok, same ole, but they partied pretty "high")

I CANNOT BELIEVE I SO INSTINCTIVELY REPLIED USING THE WORD "HIGH".

happy birthday frank.

11:45 PM

i guess i haven't learned my lesson.

last year, i took a trip to kuala lumpur for a string of meetings with Petronas. during that one day trip, i drank about 8 coffees. the first 3 were to stay awake. the next 4 were cuz everyone else had one (kopi run in malay veins). That's 7 coffee's and not 8. my math is wrong and my story is exaggerated. but the essence of this story is in the effect of the lactic condiment.

i had so many coffee's that day that the milk made me wiggle around my chair in every meeting that day. i hit the bathroom 50x and didn't feel better till 2 days later. nor did i sleep till 2 days later. last week, i walked around a factory inhaling rawhide-washing and dying chemicals, burning my nostrils all while my stomach, once again did back flips during the tour and more so the meeting.

what a day.

10:15 PM

good for a weeknight =).

i've been craving korean food every single day. in fact, close to every single meal. and when i'm dining @ other asian restaurants and kimchi is available as a side dish, no matter how unauthentic it may be, i still nonchalantly scarf the whole thing down whilst contemplating ordering another. maybe it's that i've bought 4 korean movies this week and watching girlfriends beat up boyfriends and incessant smacks to the head between guys, has brought back the nostalgia of jnco baggy jeans, the one strap manhattan portage bag and a heaping wad of gel. but more likely it's the joint slurping over a communal pot of red stew with long spoons and washing it all down with a face cringing shot of soju.

disco claims my kimchi levels are low
chomo claims im merely going back to my roots.
louisa claims im craving a korean girl.

isn't it amazing how a couple summers @ hak won can change one's life so dramatically? people in taiwan have proclaimed their love for pork floss. "i can just eat pork floss with a bowl of rice", i, however, instinctively replace pork floss with kimchi. hahaha. now where's that djdoc cd!

9:50 PM

6:51 PM

with most guys, the topic of conversations revolves around ur standard, sports/food/sex and alcohol.

with my group of guy friends who don't talk about drinking and just drink, and who don't play any sports, ergo the topic of conversation is sex, sex and more sex.

and when one topic is mulled over repetitively, talking then becomes a sort of fused charade.

of which the "eh eh" sound combined with a butt wiggle and dikembe mutombos finger waving is now a standard "NO" euphemism. otherwise known as "the dolphin"

www.urbandictionary.com

feel free to add to the list. ami, i know u've got some interesting ones up your sleeve! hahaha.


dolphin 349 up, 59 down
When you attempt to enter the anus doggy style and she reels herhead back with a dolphin like "en en"
"I was going for the cornhole when she denied me with the DOLPHIN"

double houdini 17 up, 6 down
a variation of the standard houdini sex act. Perform sex in a doggy-style position, and instead of faking ejaculating on the lady's back as you would in a houdini, you actually do ejaculate. When she turns around, you give her a right hook to the jaw.

Not very nice, but neither is a houdini.
Top points were given to the man who could pull off the most double houdinis and get away with it.

Dirty Sanchez 3994 up, 1699 down
NO, a Dirty Sanchez is performed when a male fingers a female's ass and wipes the reminants on the female's upper lip. What you referred to below, when a male inserts his penis in a female's ass then transfers the fecal matter from his penis to the female's upper lip is the Dirty Rodruigez, the first cousin of the Dirty Sanchez. Don't feel bad though, they are commonly confused.

Abe Lincoln 120 up, 93 down
When a man ejaculates on a womans face then shaves her pubes of and throws them on the woman's face so it has the appearence of a beard.

Donkey Punch 7503 up, 936 down
The Donkey Punch is when your engaged in anal sex and when your about to ejaculate you punch the poor little lady in the back of the head so her anal cavity tightens making the orgasm all that more better (for you ofcourse).

6:36 PM

follow me with this one...

instead of harold and kumar go to white castle...

imagine alex goes to 林森北路！

it could be either a scary movie (lost in the labyrinth of the haunted ktv) or a funny movie (lost in the labyrinth of the haunted ktv)

hahahha....



ps:

ray - u'd love this area. i ended up there to have dinner for "personal reasons". louisa broke her neck checking out the scenery. kent said it reminded him of vegas. the restaurant on the corner had a huge marquee that said "浪漫一生" which translates to "romantic for life" and that was for a western buffet restaurant. "浪漫一生西餐" apparently it's been around for a long time.

*wink wink*

6:21 PM

from an email fwd....



If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would
now be worth $49.00.

With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1000.00.

With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left.

If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank
all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling
REFUND, you would have had $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink
heavily and recycle.

It's called the 401-Keg Plan

7:40 PM

completely inverse to the 85k people (lehman & merrill) in complete disarray as to their employment status, i, the unemployed insomniac, blogging at 4am in the morning, have other, more important post-mortem concerns such as the soundbyte in the title above.

"the girl in the white top" - shell, jeremy

or

"i drink good, but she scares the shit out of me" - shell, ray.

after a year of sporadic intensive drinking bouts in singapore, ray and i, finally set up a time to both be in taipei at the same time, where a work trip to taipei would be enhanced by a weekend of leisure. however, when us two american alcoholics are put together, the word leisure is heavily litigated in fierce debate by both our livers and eventually overruled by the hormone of testosterone and that US passport of accepted gluttony. it was always easily foreshadowed that ray and i would have a great weekend boozing and oogling at asian women and boozing and -fill-in-the-blank- and boozing and -fill-in-more-blanks-with-women...however, with the shell fuel oil team fully aware of taipei's reputation as a country of light skinned, delicious women, ray came with backup whom eventually found enlightenment in taipei, right btwn the girl in black with short hair and the girl with the short shorts and brown hair.  "the girl in the white top" - shell, jeremy.

typhoon sinlaku made the poignant weekend (being that i moved out of spore) a bit repetitive but it still allowed enough sights for plenty of drooling.  it was your usual bar, club, ktv, "eat and order everything on the menu" type weekends where my previous 'work crowd' got to meet my personal buddy crowd.  and right on course, louisa scared the sh*t out of everyone.  "i drink good, but she scares the shit out of me" - shell, ray








this is how it was every place we went to eat.
"waitress, i'll have everything on page 1, page 2, page 3, and i think"....points to 3 more items
waitress responds, "sir, i think u forgot this one..."
"sure...give me 3 orders of that one"

1:55 AM