Christmas Gift Idea

If you’re looking for gift ideas for yours truly this holiday season, here’s something I’d really like to have:

Oh, and by the way, the Rockies beat the Phillies in Game One of the NLDS by a count of 4-2. Jeff Francis and the Rockies bullpen made Rollins, Utley, and Howard look foolish by hanging them with an 0-11 and eight strikeouts. The Rockies have effectively taken home field advantage away from the Phillies and ensured that there will be at least two games played at Coors in this series. Hopefully it won’t come to that, however.

Rockies win; Mets choke

It’s a great day to be a baseball fan.

Bonehead

I just spent the entire day completely oblivious to the fact that I had my shirt on inside out. Luckily, no one else noticed either. I’m a clown.

To Tell You the Truth…

The Braves inability to be a consistent team is completely maddening and the #1 reason why they’re pretty much out of it this point. Yeah, I know 4 1/2 games back with a little less than a month to play isn’t insurmountable but there ain’t no way they’re going to leapfrog four teams to win the wild card. To do so, they’d have to put together some kind of winning streak longer than three games. This team, however, has shown on numerous occasions that they don’t know how to do that.

At this point, I’d rather watch the Rockies than the Braves. At least the Rockies seem to be able to get up for an important game or series. Taking 2 of 3 off the Padres this weekend was huge. Let’s hope they can keep that going against the Phillies and Marlins this week.

Another Quake

There was a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan last night at 1:51am. It was followed by a 5.7 magnitude aftershock four minutes later. I slept through it but I vaguely remember my bed on the third floor of my house shaking a bit last night. Wish I had been fully awake for it. This is the third quake I’ve felt in the 2+ years I’ve been in Taiwan.

New Site

Today I spent some time moving my weblog over from my personal web space to WordPress.com. It’ll probably get updated about as much as the other site did but what the heck. At the very least it will save me $50/year.

At any rate, welcome to the new site. It has a new look but you can be assured it’ll still have the same boring content. Enjoy.

Happy Birthday, Rupert

Wish you were here.

As Long As It’s English, Who Cares What It Says?

I was in a fairly nice western style restaurant the other night and couldn’t help but notice when I heard the familiar beginning to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song Baby Got Back. I realize that there are a few of you who are not familiar with the song (for which I envy you) but I will not be posting the lyrics here. Let if suffice to say that the first four words of the song are “I like big butts…”. From there, it goes on to wax poetically about the posterior region of the fairer sex. All in all, it’s quite a marvelous choice for dinner music.

This is hardly the first time I’ve witnessed a display of inappropriate music in a supposed family environment. Usually the main offender is rap “music”… or hip-hop or whatever the hell they call that trash these days. For instance, I was in a department store not to long ago and as I passed the electronics section, I couldn’t help but have my attention drawn to the stream of vulgar language coming out of shelf system that was on display. Of course, that could have been because the volume was cranked up to about 11. I have to admit, it was somewhat amusing to watch family after family meander by and have some uneducated-sounding thug yelling “eff this” and “eff that” without said families ever batting an eye.

As Gwen Stefani once informed me as I visited a local hair salon, “This sh** is b-a-n-a-n-a-s!”

A Multi-cultural Evening

Last night, Vanesa and I went to the home of a friend of ours. His name is Martin and while he’s an American citizen, he was born and raised in Vietnam. While we were there, Martin and his roommate, Vincent, taught us how to play a Mah Jongg (the real version, not the computer solitaire version). It’s a very interesting game and has a lot in common with the card game Gin. It took a bit of explaining to get the hang of it but once we did, it turned out to be a pretty fun game. Actually, Vanesa seemed to get more of a hang of it than me as she ended up winning four games in a row and wound up teaching our two instructors a thing or two. I, on the other hand, didn’t manage to win any games, to which Vanesa was ever so kind to point out on a number of occasions. But now that I know how to play, I’ll keep practicing and maybe one day I can get lucky enough to come out victorious.

Oh, and if you’re keeping score at home, at the table we had one person from the United States, one from Portugal (Victor), one from Vietnam, and one from the Philippines all playing a game from China in a house located in Taiwan. Also Martin’s other roommate (Richard), who is from Belgium, stopped by to observe for a while. It was like our own little United Nations.

Ahhhhh… Baseball

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been desperately out of the loop when it came to the only sport I truly love… Major League Baseball. So yesterday I did something I rarely do and decided to purchase a little gift for myself. What did I spend my hard earned cash on, you ask? A season subscription to MLB.TV. Now I can watch my favorite team, the Atlanta Braves (and any other team I darned well please) any time I like via the internet. Last night I watched the March 2nd Braves/Pirates game and tonight I’m enjoying the March 5th Rockies/Rangers game. The internet is truly a wonderful creation. Thank you very much Al Gore United States Department of Defense.

Edit: I’ve had this thing for about two full days now and I’ve already watched four games (and I’m watching another one right now). I think this is gonna turn into the best $100 an ex-pat ever spent.