John Kuhel's Tainan Factory Cats to play in Taichung on New Year's Day at noon.
I assume the opposition will be a local team.
Game to be played on one of the ball diamonds near dirty town.

Have a peek at Factory Cats baseball.

Have a look at Ah Fu's game.

Captain Kidd's abandoned Quedagh Merchant found intact

70 feet off Dominican Republic in 10 feet of clear blue water.

Garrrgh!

Poohat's back! Click for other worldly reading!

Adding link to sidelines.

Jazz legend Oscar Peterson with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown performing A Gal in Gallico, 1958

I love these old black and white jazz vids

RIP Oscar

Missing land link to the whale found . Hippo remains closest living land relative.

.22 - LA Nightmare - Nuno's

.22 live at Nuno's on Dong Hai in Taichung, spring 2004 -

Poisoned

Chalk penguins drawn by Captain R.F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton have been found in a basement at Cambridge.

"This is a penguin?", is noted on Shackleton's drawing.

What was with the question mark?

Top Twelve Astronomy Pics of 2007 from APOD. Some gorgeous shots.

New Scientist has more than 200 vids up on youtube.

This one caught my eye - Zombie Cockroaches, Prisoner to the Jewel Wasp!

New Scientist has a short video report on Jerboas in the Gobi

The War on Democracy by John Pilger (documentary 94 min)

More from the Nuno's show, 69 Across' Wo Xi Huan...

The Jerboa - Dumbo of the Mouse World filmed for the first time

69 Across live at Nuno's - Dirty Water

I know Imagine is over played but it is the anniversary of John's death and this video just looks so cool... live in NYC, 1971, acoustic...

John Lennon and Bob Dylan drunk in a taxi in London, ca. 1966. Part I and Part II.

This is a shorter, subtitled clip.

John Lennon - Working Class Hero

Halifax Explosion, 90 years ago today, most powerful non volcanic explosion in history prior to the atomic bomb.

and Explosion survivors are few these days.

69 Across - No, I Haven't Nuno's May '04

69 Across live at Nuno's May 2004 - Seed the Clouds

Evel Knievel's life in pictures

On Tuesday singer Kevin Dubrow of Quiet Riot fame died in Las Vegas at 52.

When I was in 7th grade, Quiet Riot was the shit. I searched for some QR vids and watched a couple. No disrespect to Dubrow but, man! these are hard to watch without laughing. The spandex, the hair, the posturing, everything a 12 year old boy needs to confuse the hell out of him...

This is Mama Weer All Crazee Now...

Aerial views of Antarctica released.

69 Across Live

Finally! Some 69 Across videos up on the net!

The first of a series from Nuno's Live House back in May '04... opening for .22

Here's Snowjob.

Antarctic cruise ship retracing Shackleton's voyage strikes iceberg and sinks. Passengers and crew rescued. After years in the tropics, I don't know if I could have withstood the cold.

I definitely wouldn't want to really retrace Shackleton's true journey



and another, more modern looking trailer for a documentary called Endurance

Wolfgang's Vault packages live music concerts from the ages with a big nod to the Bill Graham era.

The Medusa Nebula by Dan Goldman

Though the she-wolf that supposedly suckled Romulus and Remus was probably just a euphemism for a woman of "low" moral character, I came across this wiki article on feral children in fiction and mythology

Italians say they've discovered the mythical cave where the she-wolf suckled Romulus & Remus.

Scientists have evidence of Ancient Giant Sea Scorpion. Watch the video when you get there. Scary sea creature day continues.

in news of the freaky, Jellyfish attack and destroy Fish Farm

_______________________________________________________________________________________

and in case you hadn't heard the US beat Cuba 6-3 for the gold on Sunday.

Asia Cup starts next week. Games in Taichung.

Pool B games, Thailand, Philippines, Hong Kong and Pakistan play a round robin Tues to Thurs. I'm blown away that Pakistan has a team. That's definitely Cricket counrty over there. The winner gets to play in Pool A with big dawgs Japan, Korea and Taiwan over the last weekend in November.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Finally, .22 Superfan Zillafag figure skates to Dry Humpin. Hilarious. Gut wrencher of the week.

Finals set. Cuba v. USA. Cuba downed Japan 5-3 and the US handled Netherlands 5-0.

World Cup Quarterfinals Set

Well, the Thais aren't any better than the Filipinos, near as I can figure anyway. They gave up more than 100 runs over 7 games. Good on em for tryin though, eh? Maybe they should put kick boxer at third for, you know, intimidation purposes. South Africa stunk it up too, as did Germany, Spain and Venezuela. Italy actually beat the U.S., the only team to do so, but did not advance. Panama made it but then got tossed when some players were declared ineligible. Mexico took their place.

Canada's out. Korea's in and plays the U.S. tonight in Taipei. Both Canada and Korea finished with 4-3 records but Korea would the head to head and I imagine that's the decider. Taiwan vs. Netherlands at noon. Australia vs. Japan and Cuba vs. Mexico in other bracket. Semis tomorrow and the final is on Sunday. I'll keep you posted.

Leon Redbone

We've been listening to a lot of Leon at my house lately. He keeps me calm before I go out into the madness. Here's Melancholy Baby...

2007 World Cup Baseball Tourney has begun in Taichung. They're playing at both the new Intercontinental Stadium and the old stadium downtown. Chinese schedule here. English PDF here is kinda hard to read.

Highlights this week - Mexico vs. the US tonight at 6 pm ... Taiwan vs. South Africa Thurs at 6 pm and Japan vs. Mexico... Taiwan vs. Japan Friday night... Saturday noon Taiwan vs. Mexico and Saturday night the US vs. Japan. Sunday games Taiwan vs. Mexico at noon, evening games Spain vs. the US or Japan vs. Panama.

The US plays Taiwan next Wednesday the 14th...

The Taipei division includes Team Canada as well as traditional heavyweights Cuba, Korea and Holland. Germany has a team and so does Thailand! Who knew the Thais played baseball! Hope they're better than the Philippines.

Jerry Seinfeld rips Larry King a new one. Awesome. Larry King asks such stupid questions.

Jon Stewart was on once and Larry asked him, due to the nature of his show (a news show), did he almost want bad things to happen, you know, for material.

To which he replied,

"Are you asking me if I want things to be bad?! I have kids Larry!"

Overseas readers.

Re last post. To be clear here in Taiwan kids don't trick or treat. If they happen to go to an after school cram school that teaches English, it's likely they'll have a Halloween party complete with costumes, games and candy, the appropriate seasonal decor, witches, skeletons and pumpkins and such. It's can be a sweaty affair dressed up in a costume surrounded by screaming sugar fed 6-10 year olds. I haven't done one in a while but Sandy did last Friday. I stopped to get the car (in order to pick up the boys from preschool) at couldn't find her for the throbbing throng of kiddies all shouting a random mixture of English and Chinese - English to the teachers in order to correctly answer the question and thereby be rewarded with a treat, and Chinese amongst themselves when congratulating each other and bouncing to the next candy filling station. Parents watching from the street. Good way to promote a small cram school competing with the much larger Hess English Franchise directly across the street. The great interloper. The Wal Mart of Bushibans, to this neighbourhood anyhow.

My students were surprised today when I told them that Halloween was not a holiday in North America. People go to work, kids go to school. After their initial outrage, they pulled themselves together and informed me that it used to be a holiday here.

"Yes Teacher. Our first president's birthday. But not anymore."

And I thought, yes, of course ol' Peanut Head himself, thug and gangster, general(issimo) and born again dictator asshole Chiang Kai-shek. Born 10/31.

The Taiwanese are methodically removing Chiang from view everywhere around the island and have been for some time. When I got here he was on the 1000 NT bill. No more. The high school where I've been teaching for the last four years removed his statue and put in more parking for the staff.

This is an excellent summary from the daily telegraph.

Halloween Music

Top 5 Jazz Halloween Songs

and the the top 5 bound to scare the shit out of any trick or treaters wandering to your door in search of goodies tonight.

from Taichung based brandknewme

Cool Milk Video

Boogie Chillin' at the now defunct 89k

Pangea Ultima. In 250 million years the Earth's tectonic plates will once again fuse into a giant super continent! I'd able to walk home from Asia!

Factory Cats Baseball

Tainan baseball part II starring John Kuhel - video by Les Arthur

Beastie Boys Off The Grid - instrumental Beastie Boys exclusive to Daily Motion

Mimie Chan, live at Spring Scream 2007

PEAS IN THE MOUTH

IVO watching himself in the camera display and answering some of Papa's silly questions... taken in March when Grammie was visiting from NB...

check out John Kuhel playing baseball for the Tainan Factory Cats in a new video by Les Arthur...

Spring Scream starts today down south and for the first time we're not going to be there. We thought about going but in the end it just made more sense to stay home and be with the kids here than carting them all over the concert grounds. I'm good with it. I've got a fantasy baseball team to look after I need to catch up on my sleep anyway. I'll miss some great acts, I know, like the new version of Rocketgirl, Miracle Saru, Mimie Chan, .22 and Charlie Taylor and who knows who else, but hey, such is life. If anyone gets some good video this year, I'd love to see it on down the road. Cheers and have a great time everybody!

simpsons evolution intro

first part is your standard simpsons intro but then it gets pretty interesting....

Milk - SS Monkey

Milk covering Rage Against the Machine. That's Pete on drums and vocals. The crowd really got into this one. Great show. Very fun. Fantastic energy. My fav Milk vid.

Milk - SS monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

.22 SS Monkey

the Mormon Show, left to right Elder Skelter, El Dorado and Elder Fudd...

.22 SS Monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

Miracle Saru Spring Scream Monkey

Miracle Saru Spring Scream Monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

Banjovi Spring Scream Monkey

april 2004

Banjovi Spring Scream Monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

LTK Spring Scream Monkey

Balls out Taiwanese rock! This was an awesome show!

LTK Spring Scream Monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

Mimie Chan Spring Scream Monkey

I've had these guys linked on the sidebar for forever. This was in April 2004 in Kending... A real crowd fav... better vid of them coming soon...

Mimie Chan Spring Scream Monkey
Uploaded by vlogpond

Spring Scream Run

Spring Scream is coming soon! Double Pig over Tomb Sweeping weekend April 4th-7th...
And it's at a different site this year, up around Jia Le Shui as far as I understand...
I hope little Burl will be strong enough to make the trip... we'll see...

As usual, I haven't published any where near the number of videos I'd planned to publish of past performances... youtube's got me kinda frustrated lately... and
I just haven't put in the time, but I'm gonna try to get as many up as I can this month... I know what your thinking - if I didn't find the time with one kid, there's no way I'm gonna find it with two - and you're probably right... I'm opening a new account with Daily Motion, which seeming a little less busy than the tube...

Introducing Burl

Burl was born last Wednesday, Feb 28th, at 6:14 pm in Da Li City.

Check out Honeybees for more details...

chimps just mushrooms short of civilization

Still no baby yet... the waiting, hopefully, is the hardest part... was due the 22nd... we await his arrival imminently...

I just read on the BBC that chimps have been observed using spears (they sharpen them with their teeth) to hunt other primates. I knew they could use sticks to fish out termites and rocks to bash nuts. They've also been observed standing in apparent awe at the sight of a wonder of nature, say a rainbow over a waterfall, perhaps the makings of a spirituality of sorts... just wait till they find magic mushrooms (see Terrence McKenna), then they'll really be showing us evolution in action... story here.

Here's a link to a new Charlie Taylor video - Too Drunk To Drink

I did a little video for Rock when Charlie was on stage at last year's Spring Scream.

Look for a shot of IVO below the stage that they put in the video...

I don't know why but this last blip tv post has saddled me with a much too large thumbnail of Ivo... trying to work out the kinks in the relationship between blip and beta blogger...for now you can just click the pick to watch the video...

IVO DRUMMING! "NO PICTURE!"

Click to Play

Ivo loves drumming and drums on all manner of things.

I'm thrilled he's learned to say "No picture!"

Living in Taiwan he tends to attract a lot of unwanted attention, which drives ol' dad nuts...

Norwegians to Build 'Doomsday' Seed Vault

This just caught my eye. The Svalbard International Seed Vault is being planned to house all the known seed variations of world in the deep Arctic...

Sounds like the prologue of a science fiction epic... "In the year 2007, before the great calamity, the Norwegians had the foresight to deposit a vast and complete seed catalogue in the far reaches of the Arctic...with the nuclear winter dissipating and sunshine breaking through for the first time in centuries, a small band of survivors makes their way to the legendary vault, unsure of the validity of the claim, but pressing on, they alone mankind's last hope..."

or something like that...

Death of a Gold -Digger

Last week I was teaching a lesson on people watching and in the dialogue there was an older man walking with a young girl. The friends assumed she was a 'gold-digger'. I told my students the story of Anna Nicole Smith and her marriage to the billionaire oil man in the 90's to better explain the idea of 'gold-digging'.

And now she's dead at 39. Too strange.

update

This is my first day of vacation. Finally. That was a long ol' semester. These last two weeks have been pretty hectic getting ready for the new baby. Sandy is heavily pregnant. We feel that the delivery could come at any time now. My mom flew in from NB last week to help out with everything. She's been a tremendous help already. Ivo's getting to know his Grammie a little more every day and seems to be aware that there's a baby in mama's belly and he's going to come out soon...

ad hoc, chiayi rock

some old changhua friends came into town last night to see chiayi rockers ad hoc at the grooveyard. what a great show! tight solid fun rock n roll. they brought a throng of chiayi fans up on a bus to see the show. go see'em if you get a chance.

here's a link to their site. from there you can navigate to a couple youtube vids or their myspace site...

chickens really do live after their heads are cut off, the 5 second rule is bunk, water drains in the sink according to the size and shape of the basin and a poppy seed bagel may indeed make you test positive for opiates...

live science and the 20 common 'myths' in science...

'Quantum Boggs'

Quantum Boggs: Episode II

The adventure continues as Hall of Famer Wade Boggs goes back in time to help Dan Marino acquire the necessary skills to win Super Bowl 19. POW!

In case you missed the first one, I'm pleased to present Episode I here in its entirety...

edit: I'm linking to the video on youtube... I don't know what's up with youtube lately but i've been waiting ages for some of these videos to load. And often they get cut off in the middle. So here it is, Episode I, all of it, if you can get it.

'Night Owls'

the Vlogpond is happy to present this short film from Albatross Productions, called Night Owls. Sean Scanlan interviews a Taipei noodle lady about the noisy foreigners living upstairs... funny!

The Crappapellis, a short about a musical family by Erin King

back to the link list... i've added a few good ones...

Michael Turton's The View From Taiwan is all Taiwan all the time with lots of handy links. I've been visiting his blog for along time, as has anyone who's even surfed 'taiwan blogs'. He's well known to anyone into the Taiwan blogosphere. A genuine cyber celeb. I'm probably the last Taiwan blog to even mention him. That aside, his blog is the Taiwany-est and well worth a visit. The Blogfather!

The Chocolate President and the Hungry Donkeys is well written, smart and funny. This is the domain of Erin King , formerly of Taichung, currently of Taipei. Erin played music with Taichung live act Milk for years. He's associated with Albatross Productions , a Taipei based film group.

Check out The Crazy 8 - Erin stars as a Taipei pool hustler.

ch-ch-changes

i've redone my link list, finally. changed the font too. now it looks like old school typing. not that this is going to make any of these posts more fun to read but it looks better to me anyway. when i got up this morning the background was pink, or salmon or some kind of pastel color. it looked fine but i've changed it back not 'cause it was gay but just because it was either unintentional or unauthorized. i'm leaning towards the unintentional change. that's what happens when you play with your layout drunk i guess. a friend once advised on blogging, "...don't blog drunk. or high. well maybe high's ok, but never drunk..." i'll try to heed his advice from now on...

anyway back to the links...to be continued cause ivo wants to read a book...

I came across this blog the other day.

Rebel Frequencies' - 'Ten Musical Reasons To Be Cheerful in 2007'

baseball batting robot video

looks kinda like a jedi blocking death rays, no follow through, but hey it's got endurance...

Ramen Man

What would millions of Asian students be snacking on without Momofuku Ando?

inventor of the instant noodle dies at 96.

I'd heard of this man before but didn't realize that he was born in Taiwan and lived here until he was 23 before moving to Japan...

"The Singhsons" intro - the Simpsons are reincarnated as Indians!

speaking of superman IVO loves to pretend he's flying, especially on slides...

shot in Taipei on the 24th, not the the 23rd like the title says

if you haven't seen this yet, check it out... 'how superman should have ended'

IVO in Taipei 12-23-06

Sandy talks to Ivo about his last day as a one year old.

Happy New Year everybody! Let's hope '07 is full of things good and giggly for all!

Yesterday marked my 10th year in Asia... I landed in South Korea on Dec 31st 1996...

In retrospect, it wasn't the best timing for arrival in a foreign country as everyone was away on holiday and I had to sleep on the floor... but young and impatient I was as opposed to old and cranky I am...

Blue skies today and we're taking the boy to the park!