Personal Dork Assistant

Taiwan, Part 1

Well, the whole typhoon deal ended up being a whole lot of nothing as it swung north and only skirted northern Taiwan. Everyone's happy since work and school were cancelled and it ends up being a three-day weekend. Of course, this only happened because everyone was way overprepared after last year's disastrous flooding. Next time when people relax is when the typhoon will lay down the beatings.

The old warren of narrow streets and dumpy apartment buildings in our area have been replaced with gleaming highrises (in an earthquake area?) and foreign-branded boutiques. The Starbucks density is almost at Manhattan levels (there's one on the corner across the street), but what really surprised me was the sight of a Coffee Bean shop. The Coffee Bean near Caltech was why I started drinking coffee in the first place, and I thought that it was a SoCal-only mini-chain. Did not expect to see it on the corner of two busy Taipei throughfares. I might have to drop by for a Vanilla Sunrise sometime.

Mostly been following mom, 戴阿姨 , and their friends/family around to restaurants. I ain't going to lose any weight on this trip. Went to the high school where dad used to teach. 戴阿姨's brother used to be dad's colleague and is the principal of the school now. He dug up old yearbooks with pictures of dad, which was a cool yet strange thing to see. Went out to a nice restaurant beforehand. I know it's terribly exploitative and environmentally unfriendly, but the shark's fin soup was really good, if you're into the whole shark cartilege thing. And it was a single large fin in the bubbling hot broth, not the thin, stringy stuff one typically gets.

Grandfather is basically gone, when you talk about higher faculties. The only thing he can do by himself is scoop the mashed up rice and things into his mouth at dinner and chew reflexively, the basest survival instinct in action, and even then he's not very effective at it. Thank goodness for the full-time nurse. Grandmother is still mentally sharp, although the hand tremors have got worse over the years. The neuro dude (one of Aunt Dai's nephews) says that it's probably not Parkinsons, since the hands are still steady at rest, and language faculties are still good. Mostly likely it's Essential Tremors Syndrome, which happens to be a dominant hereditary trait in varying degrees (since multiple genes are involved). That ought to be be good news for Sam's surgery career.

Haven't really been out on the town because of the typhoon rains and my unfamiliarity with the city, so I spend too much time watching TV. Hooray for satellite TV, which has transformed modern Asian culture. The Asian ESPN channel gets most of the ESPN games, so I watched the A's winning streak, the Niners' opener, and the Giants' showdown with the D'backs all live (helps that I don't have to go to work in the morning). Since the channel is run in conjunction with StarTV (aka SkyTV = Murdoch empire), it gets Premier League and Champions League games, too, and the exposure has made Asia a big contributor to the earnings of the clubs. Also watched Team USA get their asses handed to them in bball. Nothing wrong with losing once, but losing two in a row confirms that the NBA pros didn't give a shit.

Apparently Korean soap operas are getting real big now, and China makes the best historical dramas since they have all the original historical sites, not to mention cheap extras for the big battles. The movies are American or HK, and grandmother likes to watch the NHK variety shows with your favorite Japanese oldies. Of course, there's more anime than you can beat with a stick, including genres that don't get to the U.S. like the sports and the historical stuff. The different languages and dialects make subtitles a necessity on everything, and from watching movies on HBO it's obvious that the translation is more art than exact science. The MTVs have the subtitles as an integral part of the video, fading in and sliding out in tune. I've been curious about how good the Japanese translations are, and I have a feeling that it's not as accurate as the illiterate yet accuracy-obsessed U.S. otaku would like to believe. There's a cognitive dissonance for Japanese->Chinese translation as the names are rendered in Kanji and pronounced as the Chinese words that they are, while in English the names are transliterated from the Japanese pronounciation. So the Americans get the right pronounciation, but the Chinese gets across the meaning, e.g. 美 = girl's name. Been watching 男女蹺蹺板, a.k.a. His and Her Circumstances (oh, the titles is an area where different translations diverge greatly, as the title-writers have to make it meaningful yet catchy). The shoujo stuff is like crack, a cheap emotional high, and it makes me glad I didn't have to go to high school in Japan. His and Hers is being released in the States on DVD right about now. I'll probably pick up the box set.

At least they haven't tried to fix me up with anybody. Yet.