Ah, the Christmas season is upon us, which even in Taipei can put one in a somewhat buoyant mood. This will be Josh's first Christmas, though he is really too young to appreciate the full majesty of the holiday. I'm sure he will not be totally immune to the wonder of the flashing lights, strange sights and scents.

We'll be returning to California to spend two weeks with my parents. Ojai, California does not quite possess the Christmas cred of, say, a small town in New Hampshire, but it serves the purpose just fine for me. Just the idea of being able to sit in front of a crackling fire with a big glass of zinfandel--fireplaces and zins being seriously lacking in far Formosa--sends me into fits glee.

So now begins the mad rush to get all my loose ends tied up here before heading back. Christmas shopping in Taipei presents its own unique challenges. Perhaps a trip to Yinge is in order. Never can go wrong with pottery.

I shot this video of a public art installation across the street from my office on Bade Road in Taipei. The video really doesn't do it justice. It is made up of several LED screens attached to the side of the building (I can't remember the name but it is the performing arts hall behind the stadium and physical education college). Throughout the day the screens run through several different programs--UFOs, Pacman, dancing monkeys, street scenes. They add new routines every few days. At least one screen has been placed on the opposite side of the street, which is the the one you see at the beginning of the video with the little man snoozing. Very bizarre.

Great editorial on Salon about the proposed buyout of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering by Carlyle Group. The one thing writer Andrew Leonard overlooks the fact that in July Carlyle also bought a majority stake in one of Taiwan's biggest media companies, Eastern Multimedia Company, parent of ETTV and Yoyo.

Typhoon...Durian?

One of the great challenges that comes with living in Asia is trying to decipher the names of each year's tropical storms. Unlike hurricanes, which mostly seem to have mundane English names, their western Pacific cousins can be slapped with monikers drawn from any of the regions languages. Every summer and fall, a procession of exotically named tropical storms march up out of the warm waters east of the Philippines to threaten havoc on the nations of East Asia. Well, they seem to have run out of the exotic or poetic titles. Durian, may sound exotic in the Americas or Europe, but anyone who has been around a Asian fruit stand in summer knows that there is nothing patently poetic about theses spiky rugby ball-sized stinking monstrosities. I suppose it is, after all, late in the storm season. So, one supposes, that they must in times like this fall back on fruit. Could typhoon mango or wax apple be on the horizon?

Grievous Angel

I grew up hating country music. I endured long hours of pop-country radio while working in a rural grocery store during my teen years. Now I have a selective love for certain artists like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker and the late, great country rocker Gram Parsons. I picked up copies of his two classics with The Flying Burrito Brothers--The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe--as well as Parson's two solo albums--GP and Grievous Angel.

This morning, I found this on video of Parsons singing "Sin City" from his FBB days. Great stuff.