Mr. Rogers is leaving the neighborhood. He started his show in summer 1968 to console kids who were being bombarded with reports of Robert Kennedy’s assasination. A few months later I was born. Now, over 30 years later, he’s finally going to end the series. Good job, Mr. Rogers.

I don’t know how to feel about this. One one hand it makes me feel old, dated. I grew up watching this guy’s program, as I suspect a lot of other people my age did, on one of only 3 channels, each one accessed by clunking a heavy dial with backlit numbers on a TV encased inside a wooden cabinet-like box. He was the impossibly good parent, someone who was ok with everything and ok with me, sure of himself and anxiety-free, which was no doubt the exact opposite of not only my parents but those of most kids, then and now. Sure, the generality of his expression was a little banal, but it felt safe, and that was what mattered. It feels like the end of an era, but that era really ended long ago.

Speaking of nostalgia, there’s a TV crew in one of the offices, interviewing one of the bigwigs. I was just starting out as an assistant cameraman 10 years ago. I even visited this very office for some of the projects. I look back at all of the stuff I’ve done since, but it still seems like the time has just flown by nonetheless.

I’m going to stop here before I get really sickeningly nostalgic and depressing.

You’re welcome.

I’ve been feeling very unmotivated lately. Very frustrated, for some reason. Last night I went out to dinner at Grandma Nitti’s with friends Dean and Edward, and then to Roxy Jr. for one of my favorites: Bailey’s and nachos, but as much as I enjoyed the food and company, I’m afraid I ended up being rather bad company.

This could have something to do with the situation at work, when every time I close a document in Word here at the office, my computer crashes and then takes 10 minutes to boot up again. This only happens when the job is urgent, of course. I’ve been after the IT department to correct this problem, but all they do is give me that blank stare I usually associate with recent lobotomy patients. It’s the same look I get after I suggest to environmentalists here that burning ghost money just might contribute to the air pollution problem.

What’s really sad is that so many people in this company seem to be under the illusion that they are part of a large, international advertising company, when in reality we are quite ill-equipped to deal with anything above a the level of a small-scale Taiwanese business. The constant computer-crashing, spotty Internet connection, whining and pretentious ‘Bad-English dropping’ (when two Chinese people try to impress each other and any foreigners that happen to be in the vicinity by inserting inappropriate English into their Chinese conversation in an attempt to appear more cosmopolitan and sophisticated) are all starting to really get to me. I spent a lot of time yesterday wandering aimlessly around the office, kicking things and muttering threats while my computer rebooted after one of its several more spectacular crashes. An impromptu piece of art resulted from turning my monitor, proudly sporting the Blue Screen o’ Death, on its side and draping the radiation protector over the top for all to see.

Yesterday a taxi driving ahead of me spotted a potential customer and stopped so quickly I almost did a flip over the handlebars of my motorcycle trying to avoid crashing into him. As it was I almost managed a handstand; it was all quite dramatic. Ordinarily, though, I really enjoy riding around this city, especially on Sundays and around nice park areas. I should take a trip further afield, though, perhaps over to Wanli or up to Bali, both of which are on the coast. This is an island, after all. I was wondering why so few people who live on this island know how to swim, but if you look at the ring of pollution that surrounds Taiwan, much like the ring around a giant toilet bowl, I guess it isn’t such a surprise that people aren’t generally enthusiastic about getting into the water. Also, Ghost Month is coming up, and ghosts are known to like hanging around dark, watery areas. Too bad Ghost Month isn’t during the winter, when it’s too cold to swim anymore, but I guess it’s hard to schedule around ghosts.

There’s been a bit of debate on the romanization of Chinese lately on the Oriented website forums. My opinion is that, basically, the standard has already been set, and that standard is Pinyin, so there’s not much use in arguing over whether Taiwan should use something else or not. Some people see Pinyin as a ‘mainland China’ system, but hey, we’re speaking mandarin Chinese here, and that’s how it is romanized worldwide. Yet the political sparring continues, and Taiwan slips ever more surely into the backwaters of third-worldom. Surveys show that most people on this island support ‘the status quo’, but if this route is followed, China will surpass us, militarily, economically, socially, and in many other aspects, in the near future. My friend Steve says that the people’s will alone should dictate policy, but sometimes I wonder whether this is the wisest course to follow.

Only a couple of weeks until opening night. To be honest, it looks to me like we’d better get busy on a lot of things if we’re going to avoid completely embarrassing ourselves. My part went pretty much hitchless at today’s rehearsal, thank god, but we mucked around far too long and ended up not even getting through the whole play. They also want me to play the fanfare pieces on my trumpet, so I have to come up with that as well. Occasionally I have to remind myself that I’m just doing this for fun, and it is fun, but sometimes people need to be reminded of that, lest we take it as well as ourselves too seriously. Some of the people there are interested in filmmaking, and it would be really cool if we could get together after the play to help out on each other’s projects. Paul, a tall bloke who plays the Common Man, is an excellent actor and expressed interest in doing a project which could be interesting later on, and of course Dean seems to be interested as well. Ha ha! Little do they know that I pay my cast and crew in instant noodle coupons!

After rehearsal we all went down to Saints and Sinners, near the Far Eastern Plaza Hotel, for drinks, and then to an Italian restaurant near where I live. The ensueing discussion on methods of sexual aids was, shall we say, frank, and I found myself wishing for the application of a few more well-placed metaphors. The Chilean wine, a sip of which reminded me of various odors found wafting around my high-school biology class, did help.

Every so often, mosquitoes will invade my room. They never do this alone. No, they always work in groups. It’s as if they are on contract and have to work together to enter my room and annoy me as much as possible. I can’t figure out why evolution hasn’t eliminated that whiny buzzing noise from mosquitoes, since this, above all, is why you slap them. You’d think that mosquitoes that didn’t make that noise, or ‘stealth mosquitoes’, would have been better equipped to not get mushed and survive to breed more.

I finally got Snatch on DVD, as well as a Marx Bros. movie and the latest in the Half-Life series, Blue Shift. HL:BS has gotten bad reviews since it is too short and uses three-year-old graphics, but I still think that Half-Life has given me the best first-person-shooter experience I have encountered so far, with the Jedi Knight: Dark Forces games coming in a close second. Also I need something to tide me over to more interesting things like Unreal II, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the next Duke Nukem Forever or whatever else is just around the corner. As you can see, I am rather partial to First-person Shooters. Ever since I first saw a Doom demo at a software exhibit, I was hooked on the things. Now I’m just waiting for the true virtual reality plug for the back of my head. I figure we’ll all become zombies sooner or later. “Enslave the world by turning everyone into mindless zombies(as opposed to thoughtful zombies)” has got to be on the To Do list of at least seven or eight of the top-ten major global corporations. The other two or three probably just want to go the “Kill everyone for a quick profit” route. Oh, I’m sorry, did I mention that I can get a tad cynical at times? Well I can, particularly at the beginning of another work week.

It’s the ‘Guess what TC stands for’ Contest! Over the years, many people have expressed interest, curiousity and even the occasional psychotic obsession over what the hell the TC in my name stands for. So I decided to give everyone a few choices and let them try to figure it out.

In other news, the medicine seems to be holding the evils in my stomach somewhat at bay, so I might try a small excursion to Hsintien today to celebrate the impending immigration of a Taiwanese director to Canada, as facilitated by friends Dean and Kay.

Oh. And China ‘won’ the 2008 Olympics. Rah. I’m thinking that the IOC was simply trying to avert causing the widespread chaos in China that surely would have occurred had they not gotten it. In any case, we’ll see in 2008 whether this was a wise choice or not. I’m all for giving China the chance to prove themselves, of course, and I do actually hope that Taiwan can host some of the events.

There’s some idiot foreigner guy who wrote a book on ‘the China Threat’ scaremongering in Taipei recently. ICRT interviewed him, of course, and while I agree that he knows a lot about the military situation, he seems to know fuck-all about the socioeconomic situation here and on the mainland. He can’t even pronounce ‘Beijing” right, for cryin’ out tears!

Perhaps ‘alive and kickin” was a bit of a premature description. I felt downright awful today at work, and I think I even nodded off a few times while editing a particularly boring piece. I went to a clinic after work and they gave me some medicine, but damn! I skipped sword practice and now all I want to do is sleep. I might even just throw all my fantastic weekend plans out the window and just laze about, trying to recover.

I changed all the text on my site to a light gray color. Let me know if this is easier to read or not. I know, it’s not a breathtaking design breakthrough, but it seems to work. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to feeling awful.

Well, I’m still alive and kickin’, after ‘Le Procedure’ today. Basically they took the ‘front door/back door’ approach to viewing my inner workings, and, happily, they found nothing worse than a couple of infections in my stomach. Last night I had to drink 2 liters of medicine called “Kleen-prep”(just so there was no doubt as to what effect it would have) that tasted like cream soda with everything that tastes good removed from it and replaced with noxious liquids. Now the world has 3-5 years to come up with one of those little pills with the camera in it so I never have to do this again. I’m not saying the clinic was bad; on the contrary, they were great and really knew what they were doing. But there is only so much you can do to make it a pleasant experience, you know. Even now all the air inside me is shifting around and making noises I personally would not want to hear in a crowded restaurant.

Anyhow, enough of that. I’m sure your appetite is sufficiently spoiled after reading the above. “Poagao’s Journal…now with Diet Control!”

You want to know what really grosses me out? The fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow. At least tomorrow is Friday, though. I’m sure Henrik has charmed the socks off everyone in that office, as is his wont since he had the job before I did. I’ll hear tomorrow is people wishing I weren’t so crude and scary, but hey! I gotta be me.

For the benefit of those of you out there that aren’t me, there are actually two Brian Kennedys who live in Taipei. One of them worked at the News as the senior sarcasm editor when I was there, and the other is a cool bearded lawyer dude who used to be involved with Amnesty International. I had lunch with the latter today, not the former, and I apologize for any confusion or economic downturns that resulted from my previous vagueness on this point.

“Trami the Tropical Storm learns the true meaning of Christmas” is still coming, but all of the weatherpeople just sort of pet it and chuckle good-naturedly instead of putting on the stern, panic-inducing expressions they usually reserve for the approach of such systems, which in Taiwan happens about every couple of days. One of these days we’ll get a real typhoon breathing down our necks, one that looks more like a huge spider-like monster, and the weatherpeople will break into more kneejerk hysterics. You know, of course, that weatherpeople live for really bad weather. Imagine what their jobs would be like without it, eh? They’d never have any opportunity for drama or hysterics, two of the very things that make watching weather reports so much fun.

Our server is down, so that Lotus Notes doesn’t work. I am convinced that the IT guy was trying to fix it so that my computer would explode the next time I tried to use ICQ and accidently screwed up the whole system. I don’t care, so long as it stays broken until after 6 so I can go get a meatball sub and watch Star Trek DVDs at home.

For some strange reason, whenever Whiny Woman calls her home and talks to her son, who is apparently(I hope) no more than 5 years old, she calls him “Mommy”.

Whiny Woman talking to son on phone: “Mommy! Are you being good, mommy? That’s a good boy!”

Me: *turns up Green Day CD*

It just occurred to me that maybe Whiny Woman has her own blog, and in it she constantly complains about me. Her journal would be full of things like “The scary guy with the fedora and the black Chinese jacket in the cubicle next to me had another swearing match with his computer today. This time he was even swinging his mouse by its cord like some sort of lasso, threatening to let it go. Now I kind of wish he’d go back to taking everyone’s phones apart.”

(note to Henrik, who is filling in for me tomorrow while I have me innards plumbed: the black Chinese jacket is in my drawer. Feel free to put it on and scare people)

I added several photos to the photo page. All of these were taken with my Nikon film camera as opposed to my Canon digital camera, and while they made me realize I can still do things with film I couldn’t do with digital, the sheer hassle of film makes me wonder how much I am going to actually use my film camera in the future. I’ve always liked the feel of film, though, so I hope I can stick with it for as long as is feasible.

This, I think, means that cell phones are now officially everywhere.

There’s another storm on its way. This one is called “Trami” and is a cute, fluffy little cottenpuff of a tropical storm. It looks like it was designed by Disney. I just hope it doesn’t get in the way, like a small dog under foot at the kitchen table. I can’t imagine it causing much trouble. It’s just too cute-looking.

My computer at work crashed three times today, every time was as I was closing a Word document. I emailed the IT department. Well, actually I replied to one of their company-wide emails about safe emailing, etc. I replied “Don’t you think you should be concentrating on the crashing-computers-and-Word problem?” Later in the afternoon the head of the IT department was fuming over my shoulder in my cubicle.

“I see you have ICQ,” he said. “You can’t have ICQ.”

“Nobody told me; everyone here has ICQ,” I replied.

“They shouldn’t have it. It doesn’t have anything to do with your work, so you shouldn’t have it. It’s company policy.”

“Could I see this policy?”

“Uh…what do you have ICQ for?”

“Well, to chat of course.”

“Why don’t you use the telephone?”

“Because I can’t very well call someplace like Australia on the phone. It would cost the company too much money.”

“That’s exactly why you can’t use ICQ.”

“What the hell are you talking about? ICQ is free; it doesn’t cost anything. Aren’t you supposed to be up-to-date on computer stuff?”

“You can’t have ICQ.”

“Fine, fine. What about my system crashing?”

“Oh, that’s a network problem. Can’t do anything about that.”

This guy can get anyone he wants fired, though, so I should be more careful. He is the boss’ secretary’s husband and canned one guy who started the same day I did just because he didn’t like the guy’s attitude. I don’t care so much; I feel I will have to leave that job relatively soon in any case, even if I don’t get the GIO position I’ve applied for, but I would rather he didn’t make my time there any more unbearable than it has to be.

In any case, I was very glad to get out of work today. The nearby storm has made the weather wonderful, of course, and the sky was nice and clear as I left the office. I went to Warner Village to finally see Shrek, which was good, but I would have enjoyed it better if I hadn’t just had a hamburger that was seriously playing hockey with my insides.

I am taking this Thursday off to go get the unpleasant part of my annual physical out of the way. Henrik, who did the job before me, is too busy to fill in for me on Thursday, but he knows a guy who might want to do it. I am meeting Brian Kennedy tomorrow near the train station for lunch and T-shirt purchasing. So tomorrow will be T-shirt Haul day for me, since Henrik wants a shirt as well.

When I’m online here at home, every few minutes Explorer refuses to acknowledge clicks for a few minutes. Nothing will happen; it will just ignore all clicks on hyperlinks for about a minute or two every few minutes. I can’t figure it out. The only reason I can think of is that it might be doing that restore function and taking a ‘snapshot’ of my system every few minutes. It’s annoying as hell, but I can’t seem to find where to turn that particular function off. Does anyone know?

When the moon rose tonight, it was so red it looked like Mars.

A few days ago I was at Dean’s apartment and was talking with some other friends of mine who live there, including Catherine and Eoghain. Catherine is from Canada and Eoghain from England, just for the sake of consonant alliteration. Eoghain recently bought a hopped-up NSR150 motorcycle.

Eoghain: We’re going to have to give you a race.

Me: But I’ve already got a race. Two, in fact. I really don’t think I need another.

Catherine is a really lovely woman, and a very cool friend who recently expressed interest in appearing in this account. We used to work at the News together. I wasn’t there her first day, but when I came in the next day, all the guys in the office were talking about her, wondering who was going to be able to sit next to her.

Ach! I’m tired. I stayed up last night sending photos of the rehearsal to people and watching the fifth Huang Fei Hong movie with the highly unoriginal title “Once Upon a Time in China and America”. For most of it I just had to shake my head and laugh, saying “Oh, god, this is so stupid/awful/incredibly bad!”, but while Tsui Hark completely failed to capture any credible semblance of the American West, the fight scenes were still entertaining, and Xiong Xin-xin, who plays Ah-qi and is featured at the upper left corner of the banner on my home page, is always fun to watch. At least they seemed to avoid using too many white guys to play native americans in the film, but it is painfully obvious that they didn’t do any research whatsoever beyond the usual stereotypes. A really, really stupid film, but teetering on the edge of being so stupid it is actually fun.

The first one in the series was great, one of my favorite films of all time, while the second and third were entertaining but flawed. I doubt they will make another. I just wish they could make better use of Jet Li’s talents these days.

I had a craving for a frajita for lunch, so I walked over to the G’day Cafe. On the way, I saw a conservatively dressed woman give me the finger as she passed in the opposite direction. At first I didn’t believe what I had just seen, but what are you supposed to do, go back and ask, “Excuse me, did you just flip me off?” She probably reads this journal. That would explain a lot.

I am going to rehearse again tonight with Jason, who plays Thomas More in our play. The only thing I am afraid of at this point is, come opening night or at any other performance, me freezing up and going completely blank. Now, of course, I’ve sowed the psychological seeds for my next theatrical debacle. Ach! I’m a plodder!