Personal Dork Assistant

World's Worst Ideas, #21895701

Sat around home watching TV with dad for a month and realized that my Chinese listening skills are getting pretty poor. Couldn't quite resolve speech into words fast enough without reading the subtitles. So I started Tivo-ing the Chinese news broadcasts on the International Channel. The Taiwan and mainland news are back-to-back, so it's fun to see the same news from both sides. The courageous Coast Guard that chased down devious smugglers become armed aggressors harrasing innocent fishermen in the next half hour.

The good thing about having a free and competitive media market is that there's lots more sensational and wacky stuff in the Taiwan newscast. Apparently there's a matchmaking service in Taiwan now offering Ukrainian brides to schmucks who's willing to pony up 50K TWD to join, 500K TWD to get in touch with the ladies (must be tough to find translators), and then another 500K if you want to bring her over and get married. Taiwanese guys have been picking up brides off-island for a while, but mostly from the mainland and south-east Asia. Now, I love Slavic chicks in short skirts as much as anybody, but I just can't imagine any possible way that this works out. Most of the Russian women on dating sites will at least pretend to know English. I doubt very many are conversant in Mandarin, much less Taiwanese.

Bad Idea #N+1: The Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition"? I guess it's easier to sell "Extreme!" than talking up the big level-3 cache. At least it's not Capcom Hyper Street Fighter II X.