Popped in to the Estrogen Mall last night on my way home from work to see if any interesting movies were out, and to my surprise, Star Trek: Nemesis was playing. In fact, a showing was starting right at that moment, so I bought a ticket and rushed upstairs to find myself the only patron in the largest theater in the complex. The previews had been playing to an empty room, and I had my pick of any seat in the house. So I sat down and watched, experiencing a little thrill of pleasure when the familiar theme music rolled out with the opening credits. It’s been a long time.

By the end of the flick I was generally pleased. Star Trek, as Dean says, is like sex. Any Star Trek is good, or at least better than no Star Trek. But this one was pretty good, I thought. Lots of nice battle scenes, nifty special effects, a relatively interesting story with a minimum of Troi (only one scene, which provided a nice bathroom break opportunity). Almost every scene felt eerily familiar, not rehashed, but definitely familiar. The villain’s motives were spotty at best, though. He could have been a lot stronger, but the genetics/environment theme was interesting. I did not particularly appreciate being made to think I’d get to see Worf nekkid at the wedding at the end and then not. A potential DVD extra, perhaps? One can hope.

All in all, though, I liked it. A good, solid Star Trek film, not the best in the series, certainly no Wrath of Khan or First Contact, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Final Frontier or Insurrection, so I was happy. On my way out I ran into Mindcrime, who had tickets for the very next showing for himself and H.G. Janice. I was surprised to see them, as I knew they’d both seen it already. I might want to see it again as well, but I didn’t want to see it again at that particular moment. Knowing Taiwanese theaters, though, it will probably close within a week.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a wailing sound coming from the square downstairs. I didn’t pay too much attention to it as wailing sounds aren’t that uncommon when you have a public area where children and teenagers get together. But the wailing continued on such a hysterical note I finally went over to the window to see what was going on. Turns out that the noise was coming from a young Taiwanese woman who was rolling on the ground having an extremely bad fit. We’re talking Sigourney-Weaver-floatin’-in-the-air shit. Next to her stood a man who seemed resigned to this development; indeed, I think he’d seen it many times before. Periodically the girl would run over to a nearby trash can and start to dig through it, whereupon the man would rush in and pull her away. Cue more wailing and thrashing about, followed by another rush to the trash. Maybe he tore up her Publisher’s Clearing House entry or something.

昨天再去面試一次. 這是第二次, 如果他們很喜歡我的話, 還會有第三次, 那就差不多確定用我了. 那天穿西裝打

The interview this morning turned out to be the second of three. The whole process is feeling more and more like a computer game of the first-person-shooter variety, where each level has a “boss” you have to get past to proceed to the next level, except of course I don’t have to kill the bosses in this case; I just have to impress them into letting me get to the next level, which is somewhat less satisfying but a lot less work than hammering them down with a BFG9000 until they explode. The last interview covered most of the basics about the job itself, and today’s was a bit more serious, but I think it still went well. At least nobody exploded.

It was a beautiful day out today, warm enough for a T-shirt and jeans to be comfortable but not hot. I picked up a very welcome payment for a translation I did a few weeks ago, and then I met Mindcrime at a nearby teahouse to get some much-needed scriptwriting software from him. After that I went to Fnac to see if Unreal 2 was out yet (it’s not), and then fixed myself some sandwiches to spill on the floor in order to give the tuna that lovely crunchy feel it gets when mixed with ceramic shard, while I finished watching A Fistful of Dollars. After watching all three movies, I’ve concluded that the best order to view them in is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly first, followed by A Fistful of Dollars, and then finally A Few Dollars More. I think this is the order in which they were supposed to have occurred, at least chronologically anyway. The overlapping of actors playing different characters could be a bit confusing, though.

Sword practice was good tonight. I concentrated on reviewing the last few moves instead of learning too much new stuff tonight because I feel I’ve been going too fast and not letting it sink in. It’s not like I’m on a deadline, and I enjoy it more when I get the hang of a series of moves before proceeding to the next set.

After practice we played with one guy’s new digital camera for a while before going our separate ways, so it was after 11pm by the time I got to the Blue Line platform at Taipei Main Station, and fewer trains were running. I was first in line, but I had to wait almost ten minutes instead of the usual four. Just as the train was arriving, a group of three stylishly dressed young women walked up, bypassing the long line of people behind me in a bid to get in and grab some empty seats. Being the polite gentleman I am, I immediately stood in their way, blocking them from entering the car and letting the other people behind me in first. “Don’t you know how to line up? You’ll wait your turn… -oh, no you don’t, get back there,” I said as they tried to slip past me and onto the train.

“Yeah! That’s right!” some of the people who had stood in line behind me said as they boarded.

“How can he do this to us?” one of the trio whined, but the other people were smiling. I realize it’s a drop in the ocean, but hell, sometimes you just gotta do something even if you know if probably won’t do any good.

When I arrived back at my building the guard informed me that I had been a regular feature on the ETV news a few days ago. What happened was this: on my way back from location scouting, I ventured inside the Idee Department Store near Zhongzheng Station out of curiosity. It seemed to me that sooner or later I must be able to find a shopping center on this island that isn’t totally devoted to the needs and desires of teenage girls (Of course I was disappointed yet again by this one, but I plan to keep looking). As I exited the store, I noticed that a news camera set up on the sidewalk was following me as I walked, so on an impulse I went up to the thing, stuck my ugly mug in the lens and said “It’s cold!” Apparently the director of the news program liked it and put it in every hourly weather report the next day. Heh.

In other news, my publisher and I have settled on a Chinese name for my book, and the layout is nearly finished. Hopefully it will be out on schedule in early April. I called Boogie to tell him the news, and he told me that his wife Amanda is on her way back to Taiwan. Apparently most of Boogie’s family has been called up for the coming war, and Amanda feels a bit left out. Hopefully it will be a short war, and everyone will be back home soon. I do wonder why Iraq is even pretending to show that they are satisfying demands now; surely they realize the war is going to happen no matter what they do at this point? When they do realize this, I expect some real shit to start happening.

A car alarm just went off outside. I went over to look, and saw someone drive off in the car in question, lights flashing, alarm going. No problem. Someone remind me again, why do people bother spending large amounts of money on car alarms? I could put that money to much better uses.

A younger man and an older woman got on the crowded subway tonight as I was headed from work over to Dean’s to watch some TV. The man saw me and said “Oh, it’s terrible” in English. As the older woman complimented his English ability he automatically looked over at me for acknowledgement of his elite language skillz, but I just stared at him blankly for a few seconds before looking away. “He doesn’t get it,” he said in Chinese to the woman, who tittered.

The weather was extremely nice today, a welcome break from the awful stuff and typical of Spring in Taiwan. I worked a full day today, at both of my jobs. Tomorrow morning I have another interview at still another job I hope to snag, this time with a fairly high official. Suit-and-tie stuff. Hopefully it will go at least as well as the last one. I’m also supposed to get paid for a bit of translation I did a while back, which is good because I got my credit card bill today.

I had thought that the Dancing Women didn’t do their thing on weekends, but recently they’ve started waking me up on Sunday mornings, possibly in a bid for revenge on me for lighting up the reflective bits of their tennis shoes with a laser pen and shouting “Dance!” from my window as they do their thing at night. I suppose walking right through their formation as if they weren’t there several times is another possible motive. I haven’t yet thought of how to deal with the Unbearably Similar Beat Every Time drum goup or Mr. Portable Karaoke, but I’m sure I’ll think of something suitable, especially if I watch a few more old Bond movies. “Well, Poagao, do you expect me to talk?” “No, Annoying Drum Person, I expect you to die! Or at least go somewhere else to play, like a small deserted island!”

Or I could just wait for my landlord to install thicker windows. Or I could move. We’ll see.

Unreal 2 is out in the states, apparently; I’m looking forward to this game, as I really enjoyed the original five years ago. Reviews haven’t been too hot, but I’m more interested in exploring the environments than just running around shooting creatures, so I’m sure I’ll like it.

最近做了一些修改與調整. 我的首

I came quite close to overdosing on old disasters yesterday. For some reason, everywhere I went online yesterday led me, lemming-like, to a website concerning some tragedy or other. First there was a Metafilter thread on disasters old and new, which led to extensive examination on my part of the Morro Castle, the Beverly Hills Supper Club, the Cocoanut Grove, the Iroquois Theater, etc.

When I finally broke away from these facinating yet gory stories (The Morro Castle in particular would make for an excellent movie setting, wouldn’t it?) and escaped to my usual daily reads, Wendy starts going on about disasters, which of course sends me back to the Exploding School in Texas, etc. It didn’t help that the weather yesterday was cold, windy, rainy and generally dismal. Workers are dismantling the entire ninth floor of a nearby building with amplified jackhammers, apparently in the hope that the 10th through 14th floors will magically stay up until they build a new ninth floor in its place. I tried to cook dinner again but realized that my culinary success the other day could be attributed to luck and a good appetite after missing lunch that day. I was smelling imaginary smoke everywhere.

My online experience today has been relatively disaster-free, unless you count the cross-cultural marriage crises in Taidong . Instead, I’ve been looking at old Howard Johnsons, a move prompted by the news that the Hojo’s in Times Square is finally closing down. I spent a lot of my childhood in a car, either moving somewhere or another or driving up through Texas to visit either my grandparents in Oklahoma or my sister at college in Nacadoches (recently in the news because bits of Columbia tended to fall there) or my brother at college in College Station. On the longer trips, we would stay and eat at roadside motels, and often these would be Howard Johnsons. I developed a Pavlovian warm feeling every time I saw the huge, low-slung red roof, because it invariably meant food, rest, TV, a much-needed piss break (although those tended to be in anonymous fields or disgusting gas stations), and, if we were lucky, a swimming pool. For some reason, the food always tasted better at the Hojo’s, although I cannot recall a single dish I had there.

My co-workers are marvelling at a portable stereo someone brought in to the office. “It’s got 3D sound!” the manager who sits behind me exclaimed as he shuffled through the stations on the radio. I try to be objective about such things, but there seems to be an endless line of such occurrances lining up to prove that Chinese people cannot function without something Very Loud nearby. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Chinese people in the US got that “quiet and studious” rap…

Ah, they’ve set it to 99.7FM, my favorite local station, which plays classical by day and jazz at night. Much better. I’ll just shut up now.

You won’t believe this, but I actually just cooked a decent meal. I made a tomato-and-ham omlet and then followed up with potatoes and a few gulps of wine. It was the first truly delicious meal I’ve ever made for myself (or anyone else for that matter).

Things have been going well lately. Work was uneventful, but everyone seems glad to see me back there after my month-long hiatus. I am meeting with another potential employer tomorrow with the hope of expanding my income via a second job. This evening I met with Tall Paul at the restaurant where he wants to film his next project, and we set up shots and lighting to see what would work and what wouldn’t. The more I use my new camera the more I love it. All of the controls are just where I want them, with very little need to go digging around in the menus. I’m also very happy with the picture. Tall Paul’s production won’t happen until next month because Dean is doing The Maltese Falcon at the moment. This upcoming project will be his third appearance on Triggerstreet in nearly as many months.

My landlord is comparing prices for new windows. Hopefully he’ll get the kind that stick out a little, thus increasing at least the feeling of space in here. He said to expect an answer within the next couple of days. It seems like I am awaiting all kinds of answers these days. My publisher can’t release my book’s media materials at the moment for filming, so I have had to postpone the FTV interview until the end of the month, if they’re still interested by then. It’s ok, though. I’m just happy the book’s coming out at all.

Got another picture up on The Mirror Project. It’s of the dedication plaque at the Danshui Port bridge we visited on Sunday evening. I’ve often wondered why people (and animals) are so attracted to shiny things. Perhaps it’s because we have been evolutionarily trained to notice changes in our environments, and in nature shiny usually means new and different as opposed to dull things that have been noted and dealt with. Not that I have any idea what I’m talking about.

I’ve been having some trouble with my archives for the Chinese blog. I can’t get them to work. Does anyone have any idea what I’m doing wrong here? If so, let me know.

前機天天氣好好, 我跟幾個好朋友上陽明山去洗溫泉. 洗泥巴

I met some friends at the Tower Records in the West Gate District on Sunday morning. In the car was a hefty older Polish guy named Jan who teaches people how to teach floristry here. I tried to chat but we ran out of conversational topics in a matter of minutes. Not long after that we met up with another carload of friends including Harry. Our destination on this beautiful day was the hot springs at Huayicun. Unfortunately for us and our schedule, the spring weather meant that everyone and his entire family would be heading up Yangmingshan to see the flowers. We took one shortcut but still ended up inching along the main route over the mountain. Traffic cleared up past the peak, though, and the hot springs weren’t that crowded. At first the other side of the mountain was shrouded in mist, but the sun came out while we were soaking in the pools. I spent a long time in the mud baths and almost fell asleep in the surprisingly boyant liquid while a couple of kids tried to collect all of the mud in a single bucket that turned out to be woefully inadequate for the task.

After the springs we got back in the cars (I chose the other car this time rather than face more awkward silences with Jan) and drove down to Jinshan, where we had seafood in a busy restaurant where you had to walk outside to the kitchen, which was located in another store, and pick up your food dish by dish. Thus surfeit with shrimp rolls and noodles, we drove up the coast as the clouds returned and the sun set. At one point we spotted an eerie glow along the coast which turned out to be about a dozen fishing boats with powerful lights pointed down into the water. It was a beautiful sight, and we got out to take pictures and video clips.

It was dark by the time we arrived in Danshui, but the bridge across the harbor is open now, so we got out to have a look. It’s quite beautiful now, all white and shiny, but I imagine it will become as grimy as everything else there in a matter of months. Still, Danshui’s made a good effort to make itself more tourist-friendly. More is to come I think. My friends decided I should run for Taipei County Magistrate just to see what happened when a “foreigner” dared run for office here. Although the concept of little trucks driving around blaring “A Vote for Poagao is a Vote for General Oddity” in neighborhoods from Banqiao to Tucheng, I simply do not have the monetary resources to mount such a campaign. And if I did I would no doubt spend them on something more conducive to filmmaking and enhancing my lifestyle in general. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much what politicians do, aside from the filmmaking bit.

I started back at work at my old job today, and things went swimmingly. It was hot and sunny when I finished a delicious lunch at the Curry House with Dean and Mindcrime, but as I was talking with Tall Paul about visiting a filming location tomorrow he mentioned how horrible the weather was. When I glanced out the window, I found an amazing tranformation had occurred: it was raining hard, the wind was blowing and the temperature had dropped a good seven degrees. Even as I type this I can hear the wind and rain pounding on my air conditioning unit. In other words, typical spring weather in norther Taiwan. It will probably hail tomorrow, but to be honest we do need all the precipitation we can get at this point to avoid another drought.

After work I got an urge to sit in a large, dark room with lots of comfy chairs and curtains, so I bought a ticket to see Daredevil. I really wanted to like the film, and while I liked the story in general, I was left confused by the half-assed attempt to make the love interest into a sidekick and then killing her off. Bullseye was a lot of fun in an over-the-top kind of way, but Michael Clark Duncan had a hard time seeming Evil. We went too far with him to not see his character die, and the final ten minutes of the film seemed like a big rationalization/exposition to assuage any strange feelings of disappointment the audience might have. I find it odd that so many movies these days effectively ruin their chances of getting a sequel by so obviously providing for one in the story.

In other news, my publisher estimates that my book should be out at the beginning of April, and that I should hold off on any interviews until the last week of March. Formosa Television, however, isn’t willing to wait because they are afraid their interview might be misconstrued as an advertisement. I’m supposed to meet with the FTV crew the day after tomorrow. I still find it odd that they would want to interview me about something that happened so long ago, but I’m not one to turn down a chance to make an idiot of myself in a public forum. Hey, I do it on here practically every day.

Alert Reader Dawn sent me a link to Navajo Spaceships, Star Mountain and Rez Memories, the “Online Writing Journal, Prose & Poetry of John Rustywire, Navajo”. Lots of interesting stories. It’s Geocities, but read it anyway.

“It’s the way these things always go,” said Dean after we met at My Other Place before going over to Hindustan for his birthday party. “You invite 20 people and 10 show up.”

Not this time. I don’t know how many people Dean invited, but I’ll wager we got a better turnout than the Oriented Happy Hour. Mindcrime and Janice came, of course, and Maoman, Azuma, Fuad, Shirzi, Richard and Tall Paul were all there, as well as many people I didn’t know. The food was good, much better than the stuff you get at Tandoor these days, but when the bill came everyone left thinking No way I ate that much! Fortunately for anti-social individuals like myself and Mindcrime, the table was long enough that you would only have to deal with a handful of people at one time. Maoman gleefully disclosed the news that he had just dropped a wad of cash on a new Yamaha Majesty 250, which I am eager to see and hopefully test drive. Tall Paul and I talked about his next film project. His last one, “The Big Cheese” is now viewable on Triggerstreet. Since Triggerstreet’s policies have changed recently, rendering it almost useful as a tool for judging short films, I can’t review it, but it’s there to see at least. Triggerstreet was a useful tool when I started using it, but so many people were abusing the system in order to hype their own awful films it was screwing up the ratings, so Triggerstreet did the obvious thing and made it so that only the people who were abusing the system could use it. Of course!

Idiots. All they’ve done is make Triggerstreet even more like Hollywood in general (Hello Prince Roy).

During the party I also learned of another possible job opportunity, one I am very eager to follow up on Monday. If I can land this job I’ll be very happy, since I’ll be able to do it in addition to my present job. Anyway, fingers crossed, knock on wood, and all that. The only problem, again, would be the fact that I don’t have a foreign passport. This issue has popped up so many times lately I’m thinking of finding out which foreign nation has the easiest passport to attain and going for it just to have a foreign passport. It’s ludicrous, but that’s the government for you. Any government.

After dinner we walked down to the Shannon. Or rather, we walked and Fuad put-putted alongside on his scooter, spewing smoke and noise as we ambled down the sidewalk. Finally I told him to get off and let me ride it down to the Shannon, where I’d wait for them. The bar was crowded and noisey. Shirzi put forth his idea for a film. “We’ll go to the Bamboo Grove and fight with swords while you film for four or five hours, and then we’ll edit it!” Which meant, of course, that I would edit it, not an easy task if you spurn the very idea of choreography, as Shirzi does. “Oh!” he continued, “We’ll make it a Star Wars thing!”

“What’s Star Wars?” one of the girls at the table asked. There was an abrupt silence as the entire bar turned and stared at this young upstart in horror.

“You’ve never seen Star Wars?” Even Dean was incredulous. The girl was doing an impression of a deer caught in the headlights. “I’m sure I did, I just….I just don’t remember.” This, of course, caused even more stares. Things were definitely getting silly, so I elected to leave rather than risk falling asleep and walking up on a flight to Paraguay and no recollection of how the ambassador to Lichtenstein had gotten into my luggage.

Yesterday I took a trip over to the Bao-an Temple, situated next to the Confucius Temple about a block away from the Yuanshan MRT station. I was location scouting for a little film project I’ve been working on. While the Confucius Temple was quiet and sedate, as usual, things were much more lively at the Taoist Bao-an Temple, where a puppet show was in loud progress in the courtyard. A crowd of older people were sitting in front enjoying the show and the music, which consisted of gongs and other traditional Chinese instruments played by a live band behind the stage and the puppeteers. It was fun. I took a little video walking down the street between the temple proper and the courtyard, which is this week’s Sight of the Moment. In front of the temple was a statue of four monkeys, which is I suppose the full version of the old saying: “Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil, and Shit No Evil”.

After that I took a stroll down Chongqing North Road. passing an extremely thin building, to the traffic circle at the corner of Nanjing West Road. It used to be the site of a circular grouping of grimy little restaurants, but now they’re building another circular building, this one a modern concrete structure surrounded by glass. I can’t imagine them filling it with grimy little stalls again. For one thing, they’d lose their shirts just on the Windex needed to keep the glass in a reasonably transparent state.

I picked up a new joystick for NT$300 at Nova near the train station, and then joined Mindcrime for some steamed dumplings and rice before retiring to a nearby teahouse, where we talked about movies and D&D amid a dozen tables of card-playing gangster types. All in all a pleasant day. Today’s quite nice as well. It seems like Spring is here, but I’ll wager that we haven’t seen the last of Winter just yet. The water levels in the reservoirs are even lower this year than last year, which was the Year of the Great Drought. Looks like more shortages and rationing this year. Perhaps people will take the measures more seriously this time around, and we can avoid too large a mess over the whole thing.

Along with the new Sight of the Moment, I’ve uploaded Chen Lei’s “Natural Beauty” aka Ziran jiushi Mei (¦ÛµM´N¬OŸ), as the new Sound of the Moment. I love this song. It’s all Taiwanese Taiwanese, if you know what I mean. I’ve also got three more Mirror Project pictures up, including Light Mirror, Overhead, and Traffic. Knock yerself out.