The other day I was looking at the High Speed Rail schedule I have at the office, and I noticed that the HSR chose to print the label the southbound train schedule in green, and the northbound one in blue. I wonder, is this deliberate or just some kind of Freudian Slip? If the former, do we really need the HSR to contribute to the political polarization of Taiwan?

Perhaps the HSR seeks to reassure potential passengers that they will indeed be approach the pan-green/pan-blue bastion of their choice when traveling in a certain direction. A color bar installed in each car would gauge the political climate of the country the train is passing through for the passengers’ reference: “Ooh, look at how deep the green is here, this rice field must be a pocket of TSU supporters!” or “Look, honey, this village is PFP!”

They might even include soothing messages on the trains themselves, a la “Yes, valued passenger, you are truly on your way out of the dark tunnel of national political intrigue to the verdant, green, pro-independence homeland, land of the DPP, land of Chen Shui-bian and Frank Hsieh, and the thriving port-metropolis of Kaohsiung” or “Relax, honored guest, this train is bearing you away from the chaotic south towards the solid, reliable, ordered north, back to economic surety and practical values, home of the glorious capital and its convenient mass-transit system, orderly traffic and international style.” They could have “pan-green” cars with Minnan and Japanese announcements, that serve sweet-potato-based meals have extra storage space for, say, chickens, while “pan-blue” cars would have announcements in Mandarin and English, featuring iced taro desserts and waterproof floors for umbrellas to drain on.

Of course, both types of cars would have pictures of dancing aborigines.

UPDATE:

“This is Customer Service Center from Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation (THSRC), as for your inquiry：

‘You have printed the schedule for southbound trains in green and the one for northbound trains in blue. Is this intended to reflect political demographics on the island of Taiwan? Or is it a mere coincidence?’

THSRC has replied as follows:

Dear Mr. Lin,

Thank you for taking the time to e-mail Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation.

A double-track line is installed on the entire route. Under normal operations, the trains should travel on the tracks on the left-hand side. Passengers seated on the left side of the southbound train are able to enjoy the mountain view, therefore the southbound timetable is represented in the color green. It is the ocean view on the left side for northbound trains; hence the northbound timetable is shown in the color blue.

Should you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Sincerely,

Taiwan High Speed Rail

Customer Service Center”

Happy 6th blogiversary to me! It’s not hard to believe that it’s been six years since I started this thing, as so much has happened, but you’ve been reading the whole time and don’t need me to go into it now, right? Right?

In other news, the site may be down temporarily over the next couple of days. I’m upgrading my hosting and will have to re-upload everything.

Taiwan should ensure its international reputation with a show called “Who Wants to Be President?” I’m wondering if anyone does. Both parties seem to be tripping over their own feet, making colossal mistakes even though the race is still in the primary stage. Su Zheng-chang and Frank Hsieh have been at each other with such animosity that it will hard to believe they could ever share a ticket. Hsieh, in any case, has made it clear that he has chosen Yeh Chu-lan as his running mate, with the whole “Say Yes!” campaign slogan all picked out (”Hsieh-Yeh” sounds like a Taiwanese person trying to say “Say Yes”). Su has wasted no time in pointing out that he is “cleaner” than Hsieh, who has been involved in several corruption cases in Kaohsiung concerning the MRT and the city council elections. Hsieh says Su is a bad premier, and Su says he would be a better premier if the last premier (Hsieh) hadn’t left such a mess behind him.

One of the interesting things about this mess is that Su is favored by the New Tide faction of the DPP, which has historically supported every winner the DPP has had (including Chen Shui-bian, who is from the Justice Alliance faction) while Hsieh belongs to the less influential Social Welfare faction. Su has all the resources of the premiership available, yet Hsieh, who doesn’t have the experience Su has, remains more popular in the polls (Su threw a fit when the pan-green camp published polls suggesting Hsieh was more popular, and the party has passed a rule that candidates cannot publish polls in the future). Su also successfully dodged Losheng-related accusations that he did nothing to obstruct the plans to tear down the leprosarium when he was Taipei County magistrate by deciding as premiere that it should be saved. We’ll see how that works out.

The main reason for Hsieh’s popularity, which many say was exhibited in the Taipei mayoral election, is that he is simply more charismatic than Su. Another is that he panders more to the moderates and undecideds. He recently caught flack from deep greens when he suggested that he didn’t have a problem with the constitution’s China policy. I suspect he isn’t actually that moderate, but he does recognize that he needs those votes to win an election. The reason I say this is because Hsieh’s GIO minister appointment, Pasuya Yao, was a lot more aggressive about controlling the media than Su’s man Zheng Wen-tsang, who is scheduled to leave his office soon after being caught suggesting that TTV should be sold to the pro-DPP Liberty Times Group.

The way the DPP primary works, however, is 30% party vote and 70% opinion polls. Hsieh is favored to win the opinion poll, while current party Chairman Yu Shyi-kun has an advantage in the party vote, though he is last in the popular polls (being bested by Lu has to hurt). Where does this leave Su? Something tells me that Chen Shui-bian, though he would prefer to see his man Yu take over his job, he knows that Yu is not as electable, and that Su is the next best choice. Chen and Hsieh have been rivals for a long time, and I can’t see him supporting Hsieh if Su is still in the race. Chen’s influence is waning, however, so there may not be much he can do at this point. In the spirit of the tradtional DPP male/female tickets, I’m guessing that Su would most likely choose vice-premier Tsai Ying-wen as his running mate. Everyone’s waiting to see what happens in the primary. When that’s settled, many things will be able to proceed, e.g. the budget will have to be settled before a potential new premier takes office, requiring a new budget review, and a new GIO minister, presumably hand-picked by the new premier, as is the usual custom. The new powergrid will affect things like the current power struggle about who gets to control the CEC and the NCC. The opposition is trying to gain the upper hand by pushing a bill to make membership of the CEC party-proportional, rather than being entirely picked by the ruling party. The fact that the NCC’s makeup was chosen in such a fashion rankles the DPP to no end, resulting in a ruling that such a method was “unconstitutional.”

Meanwhile, back at the equally disorganized opposition camp, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng was apparently not content to just wait for Ma Ying-jeou’s corruption trial verdict, and came out a few days with a bizarre set of comments straight out of the DPP’s campaign book. He said, all but pointing to himself as he did do, that a “majority” candidate should lead Taiwan rather than a “minority” candidate (guess who that’s directed at). Imagine if Rudy Guliani said people shouldn’t vote for Obama because he was a minority (or just wait; you might not have to imagine it). In any case, it was a poor choice of words. But Ma couldn’t be graceful about it and hinted that Taiwan would be “lucky” to have a minority leader, when he should have quoted Chiang Ching-kuo and proclaimed himself Taiwanese. Which he later did. Though I have to admire the man’s pure testicular fortitude in saying he’ll run even if he’s judged guilty of corruption, I wonder how much of it is balls and how much of it is cluelessness. Perhaps we’ll find out. Similar investigations into the special funds of all four DPP hopefuls has just begun, but I can’t believe that after seeing what happened to Ma they haven’t made moves to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen to them.

The KMT, fearing a guilty verdict, has moved its primary up to later this month, but the DPP is trying to push through a bill effectively barring Ma from running by making candidates found guilty in the first trial ineligible to run at all. Their only hope to pass such a bill lies with the disaffected members of the PFP, who want more autonomy in elections from the KMT.

Wang won’t participate in the primary, because Ma is still much more popular than he is, corruption allegations and all. Are there any other KMT candidates worth mentioning? There’s former Kaohsiung Mayor Wu Den-yi, who is a bit past his prime. Wu lost the position to Frank Hsieh after Hsieh accused him at the last hour of having inappropriate relations with a reporter (later proven false, but Hsieh was in power already. It’s a common political tactic here). Health concerns rule Taichung Mayor Jason Hu out. Taoyuan County Magistrate Zhu Li-lun is a rising star, popular with younger voters and might have a chance for running mate status this time around. But it seems to me that the KMT is just waiting for the trial verdict, just as the DPP is waiting to see who wins its primary. Once we have real candidates to play with, it will be another game altogether.

As I sat in the office yesterday I came across a report of fireflies massing in the forests of Bitan. As my usual Tuesday-night activities have been canceled, after work I went directly home, picked up my camera, and headed to the river-crossing to Wantan, hoping that the ferry was still running. Most of the riverside restaurants were closed, giving the area a spooky, haunted feeling. Most people were inside, no doubt in part because the air was filled with dust from a storm sweeping the island. It left a gritty taste in my mouth.

I saw the ferry moored on the other side of the river, but as I approached the makeshift dock a woman’s voice called across the water, asking me whether or not I wanted to take the boat. I waved, and a tiny figure climbed into the boat and began paddling slowly over. A few fishermen braved the dust, sitting on the bank next to tied-up poles, watched by children and cats.

The Southeast Asian girl punting the ferry spoke with an accent, though she spoke both Mandarin and Minnan pretty well. She said she’d been here for five years and wondered why anyone would want to take pictures of fireflies.

As I walked into the wooded areas of Wantan, I was encouraged to see a few fireflies flickering about by the road, but as I progressed, they grew fewer and fewer. The spot Sandman had pointed out to me last year was devoid of the insects. I walked on, hoping to come across some small hillock or glen covered in their light, but I saw none.

The normally lonely, empty temple on the side of the hill was swathed in canvas and lit from within, as if it were full of revelers eating sumptuous meals. It reminded me of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, where an abandoned country town comes to life at night with various ghosts and spirits.

My presence in the small village further down the road alerted the local Barking Unit, and people left their soap operas, coming to their windows to see what all the fuss was about. I was reassured that the dogs did not actually bite, but they followed me suspiciously anyway, until I was out of their territory on the other side. Occasionally I would come across a frog waiting on the road. I tried to move the first one off, but he wasn’t having of it, so I ignored the rest.

Still no sign of fireflies. I took some solace in the fact that, even if I did come across a field full of lightning bugs, I couldn’t really photograph them properly without a tripod.

As I walked, the dogs of each little house would wake up, bark, and follow me for a bit. This got pretty old pretty fast, and I imagined that all of the fireflies were probably at a meeting somewhere, or at a bar drinking Japanese energy drinks. The dust was making my throat sore, and the last ferry was at 9pm, so I turned back, passing all of the indignant dogs again, and back to the ferry. I took some pictures of Bitan from the riverbank, as well as around the area of the Dimu Temple, where a few latecomers were praying and meditating among the candles, before going to the makeshift restaurant to seek the ferry operators.

The Southeast Asian girl was summoned to take me back across the river, along with an elderly couple. I tried to take some pictures from the boat, but it was moving too much for a clear shot. The elderly couple chatted with the girl in Minnan, praising her language skills, which is basically code for “We picked up on your accent.”

On the other side, I walked down the deep, dark canyon of Xindian Street, noting the addition of a couple of elegant new apartment buildings along the way, as well as a new sushi bar I’ll have to try out sometime. At the end I bought rotis for dinner and made my way home across the bridge, which still held the scent of hot wood after a day in the dust-weakened sun.

Later that night it stormed. Summer’s here.

I’m coming up on the 6th anniversary of this website, which began in early 2001 as a way to show people my photography without kidnapping them, tossing them in the back of a large van and hauling them up to my apartment, possibly with construction equipment, and subjecting them to a stack of dusty albums with overly cute Engrish titles like “Happy Primate Want to Elegant Cornucopia.”

That was almost the site’s title, actually.

Anyway, I added a blog just for the hell of it, and before I knew it I’d written several novels’ worth of questionable prose in the thing. Then Flickr came along and eliminated any need for a Photos site of my own. Blogrolls and other sidebar elements surpassed the usefulness of the Links, Contact and About pages, and the Writing page was made obsolete simply by the pure volume of drivel I write here (and would be better used as a “favorite posts” option on the blog). The Films page became Renegade Province Productions when I got poagao.com. The only thing left is News From the Renegade Province, which I still have a soft spot for even though I haven’t updated it in a while.

Then my blogs began to multiply in a manner not unlike that of the Baldwin family, introducing a plethora of substandard, half-formed accounts on various aspects of my life that I felt would attract a different audience. I added a Chinese-language blog. A film production blog. A Tai-chi/Tuishou blog. I even have another blog where I write whatever the hell I like regardless of propriety (yes, I do hold some of my thoughts back, most notably the darker and scarier ones, from seeing the light of day on this, my public online presence). The other blog is not private and is protected by the simple anonymity of being one of several brazillion blogs out there. If you find it, good on you, but keep in mind that I have plausible deniability.

Time went on, and Blogger began to show its age. Other, more intuitive blogging options became available. On today’s popular resolutions, my icons, once disparaged as inordinately huge, seem tiny and lacking of any cohesive theme. I still like the black background and Liao Tianding running across the rooftops of this account, camera in hand, but I think the time has come for a major reworking of this site. I’m not the same monkey I was in 2001; I’m older, fatter and hairier. This site should reflect that somehow.

I’ve been encouraged by Mark and Prince Roy in this regard, both of whom would like to see me migrate to Wordpress. My host Doteasy, however, reminded me that they would have to transfer me to their US$7.95″Ultra” package to enable PHP/MySQL options that Wordpress requires. On another server. Which means re-uploading…everything.

Did I mention that my directories are a complete mess? Or that I actually don’t have any directories? Yeah.

But it’s that or continue on Blogger with limited options. In any case, I would like to do a re-design, not just of this account but of the entire site. And here’s where you come in: let me know what you like about the site, as well as what you find completely useless and depressing. I’m thinking of a new splash page featuring the blogs and not much else, but I haven’t really come up with a useful design, or indeed if I even want a splash page (actually, I probably do). But I have no clue as to what kind of accessibility people desire beyond this page. Do visitors here want to go read my other blogs? Look at thousands of my photos? Read fake news? I have no idea. Technorati indicates that you don’t, but I feel I should link to them anyway.

Anyway, Recent Internet Trends indicate that I should keep my posts short and sweet. Too late for that, but I’ll stop here anyway. Let me know what you think I should do with this place.

I was recently interviewed via email by a racy local art/design magazine called “X-CUP” (no, I don’t know what the name means). For some reason, they were interested in my High Speed Rail photography. It seems to me that I am involved in far more interesting things than HSR pictures, but that was what they were interested in. The topic was part of a series of interviews with foreign artists in Taiwan. I pointed out to them that, technically, I wasn’t actually a foreigner, but that didn’t seem to bother them. I think they found it quaint.

In any case, I was happy that among 16 individuals they only found me worthy of the much-coveted black background. Also, I managed to work in the Muddy Basin Ramblers as well as a reference to “The Age of Crap.” If you want to read the interview and my inane, random answers, you can download the .pdf of the interview here.

Actually, I’m glad I did the interview, because I am interested in getting to know more artists, even though I don’t think train photos are exactly the apex of my artistic abilities (or maybe they are. Lord what a depressing thought). The weekend after next I’ll be attending a film festival that will be showing Clay Soldiers. Hopefully other people will attend as well.

We had a four-day holiday last weekend, three and a half days I spent at home editing. It’s good weather for it, in any case: more-or-less constant rain. On Saturday I went up to a teahouse in the mountains above New Garden City where my friend Ray lives, along with Sandman and his relatives who are visiting from Scotland. We had a nice meal, took a lot of macro photographs of wet plants, and watched in horror as Sandman’s nephew took a nasty spill down the wet steps. Actually, I didn’t see it, but I did listen in horror to the thud as he hit the ground. He was ok, though. One of the benefits of being 17.

Mark has recently stirred a hornet’s nest by daring to express his preference for content quality over deliberately massaging a site’s code to garner the most hits. I can see where he’s coming from; obviously this site, which hasn’t really updated its design since 2001 and doesn’t have any of the traffic-gathering features that are de rigueur in these days of Google searches, is a testament to the low priority I place on getting millions of people to read my site. My trackbacks don’t work, I don’t know what pingbacks are, and I can’t even figure out how to get post titles to appear.

Still, I can see the benefit in getting a larger audience for your content, as long as such actions don’t supersede the content itself. For example, on flickr.com, submitting your photo to six million voting groups comes across as a bit desperate, but at least the content hasn’t been adversely affected by the effort, unlike, say, deliberately taking photos of nothing but scantily clad young women for photo hits. Of course, I respect most those who produce good content in an elegant fashion without feeling the need to compromise it in the name of making it popular. This, of course, is why I’ve made exactly $9.18 from my experiment with Google’s adsense over the past several years.

Ok, so the site needs a makeover. I’ll meet up with Mark sometime and we’ll see what we can do. I’m surprised the design has held up this long, actually.

Prince Roy, exiled from Spicy Girl’s SOGO shopping odyssey, came down to Bitan on Sunday along with Mark to enjoy the summer-like weekend weather. We met up on the bridge, as usual, and walked along the relatively mouthbreather-free upper sidewalk to the ferry crossing. There we boarded the brand spanking-new ferryboat, larger, cleaner and made of fiberglass, replacing the creaky old wooden boat they had before. The sparkling new white-and-blue boat’s metal railings even sported four bright orange life jackets (capacity was eight people), which, oddly enough, were made in the People’s Republic of China, complete with instructions written in simplified characters.

Accompanying us on the new ferry were two of the punter’s friends. They stayed on the boat, relaxing and chatting with the ferryman. One of them was sucking on a plum lollipop.

We disembarked on the other side and bought some drinks at a local watering hole set up in what looked like a container car, and proceeded to walk across the plain through the bamboo fields. A yellow dog followed us up to the border of its territory, where it spotted another dog, whined a bit and retreated. The air was fragrant with the scent of spring blossoms. It always amazed me that I can find such a rural atmosphere minutes away from my front door, yet downtown Taipei is 20 minutes away on the MRT.*

We walked to the Haihui Temple, where we looked out over the river at Zhitan and its strange Americanesque street layout. Mark wondered at the inscriptions on the balcony wall, which had “donated by” and the name of the donor written in red letters on each section. We puzzled over one character, which turned out to be simplified. I suppose the author didn’t have a thin enough knife to carve the traditional character.

We walked on, PR and Mark talking about investments, and all three of us dissing various dissable bloggers, including ourselves. The road wound through cargo containers made up as homes, with little gardens and barking dogs, as well as an open-air karaoke session. I was surprised to see a brand-new house; I’d been told that construction was illegal there. No doubt someone has sufficient connections in the area.

The mosquitos were beginning to bite by the time we made it back to the ferry. The two friends were still in the boat, still sucking on lollipops and chatting merrily with the punter. He’d told me before that the two ferrymen usually divide the day into two shifts, but I’m not sure exactly when his shift began. This time more people crowded onto the boat, surpassing the stated carrying capacity, but nobody paid that any mind. We had life jackets, after all!

PR’s ultimate goal that day was to have a meal at Rendezvous, so that was our next destination. We got a high table with a nice view of the river and spent the rest of the evening eating, drinking and chatting. I had the risotto this time rather than stuff myself with pizza, and it was delicious.

As the evening was getting on, PR and Mark decided it was time to go, so I said farewell to them at the foot of the bridge. After they left to catch the train back to town, I stood looking out across the river at the lighted buildings on the other side and watching the people coming and going across the bridge, trying to remember what it felt like when I was still living in the city. Eventually I walked back home, on the way taking a picture of one of the local strays lying in front of the gangster KTV palace, surrounded by the detritus of the street in such a way that it looked as if the sleeping dog was being watched over by an array of scooters, plants and traffic cones.

*For all of you considering moving down here, this does not mean that Bitan is a great place to live! It is in fact a nasty, crowded, smelly place with awful traffic, blaring karaoke, packs of stray dogs, a high crime rate, mouthbreathing tourists, noisy construction, scooter gangs and racing ricers, gangsters, random fireworks and no sidewalks. It is also mostly pan-blue, and few people speak English. There’s no Wellcome, no Blockbuster or Asia1 or any DVD rental places at all, and it’s a NT$300 cab ride from the city if you miss the last train. Plus we’re chock full at the moment. No vacancies! Sorry!