La famille s’agrandit
Après l’arrivée de Jeanne la Mexicaine jaune il y a quelques mois, la famille accueille maintenant Serge le Japonais noir. N’en déplaise à Claude Lévi Strauss.
Aberration ethnologique : une Mexicaine jaune et un Japonais noir
à gauche : Jeanne (Fender Telecaster Road Worn 60′s)
à droite : Serge (Gretsch Duo Jet 6128T)
Rattle & Roll
Just exchanged a handful of rectangle-shaped bits of paper for this plank of wood:
Rattle & Fucking Roll
I’ll know for sure how good the trade was in the coming weeks, depending on how the beast behaves, but I can already tell one thing: Taipei is going to rattle and roll.
You hear that, Taipei? RATTLE & ROLL!!
Taipei’s MRT through the eyes of Microsoft’s Photosynth
It is rare enough to be mentioned: I find Photosynth, a Microsoft-owned program, to be impressive and pleasant enough to use.
It would have been awesome and great and “I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butter”-good if only the feature it was built around in the first place was usable outside the app, though. Considering it’s an image-based app, it would only have made sense that you could share the pictures in a way that enabled you and your friends to navigate 360 degrees through the pics. Cause that’s what it does within the app.
Once saved to your drive, the pics look like this:
Above is a 90 degrees view inside the metro in Taipei (MRT blue line)
Here is a 180 degrees view of a station (also on the blue line of the MRT):
So you see, it does look nice. But I sure as hell would like for you to be able to navigate through the pics!
Angry Birds glitch
See the little piggy tryind to hide among my birdies? The strangest thing happened: it was propelled here by the explosion of the bird I’d just sent, and did not die from the impact!
The pig eventually died when the birds jumped up to the slinger and it fell to the ground. My highscore on this level is now around 220 000.
Follow-up: we kick major ass
So, the skies are clearing out.
As said in my previous post, we got our money back from the Bitch. It took the right amount of perseverance and just a touch of “Lady, you’re fucking with the wrong guy” but in the end, the deposit has been handed back.
As for Evil, the lazy-ass public servant “in charge” of my wife’s file at the Préfecture, confronting her was clearly a dead end. Instead, we chose to take the matter into the hands of someone that can reach higher into the Administration and it seems it’s going to pay off. That person is now shaking a few branches and getting it all sorted out; I hope in the process some rotten fruit falls onto Evil’s head. But it would have to be a heavy, spiky, imma-whoop-yo-ass kind of fruit so it blows the bejeezus out of her skull. Just for kicks.
Right. Normal life resumed. </bullshit>
Follow-up: the Bitch surrendered!
That’s right. Bitch couldn’t stand her ground when she realized I wasn’t fucking around.
Die, Goliath, die!
The French Administration had gathered for war against Yu-Ting, refusing to grant Yu-Ting access to her official papers, although they had been ready for about eight months. The fucktards at the real estate company in charge of Yu-Ting and Antoimn’s previous residency had joined forces with the French Administration. The two armies faced each other, camped for battle on opposite sides of a steep valley.
A French administration clerk measuring over nine feet tall and wearing full armor came out each day for forty days, mocking and teasing Antoimn and Yu-Ting about Yu-Ting’s papers. Her name was an anagram of Evil (I’m not shitting you). Antoimn and Yu-Ting, and the whole army were tired of having to deal with morons like Evil.
Also bullying Yu-Ting and Antoimn was frustrated, yellow-bellied manager of a franchise of the real estate company named after a period of time straddling from 2001 to 2100, based somewhere in the armpit of France: the Parisian suburbs. The Bitch plainly refused to pay them the gold she owed them.
One day Antoimn and Yu-Ting thought they were going to just fucking fly out of the shithole France had turned out to be. Antoimn was like “Fuck it, the worst that can happen to my wife if she’s caught without papers is to be flown back to her country, which is exactly what we plan to do anyway.”
While thinking these happy thoughts, it occurred to Yu-Ting that maybe without her papers she might not make it through the toll booths at the airport. So Antoimn picked up the phone again and tried to kick the anthill in the balls to see if anything would come his way.
So Antoimn had volunteered to fight Evil and the real estate Bitch. It took some persuasion, but eventually everyone agreed to let Antoimn fight against the giants. Dressed in his simple but still badass tunic, carrying his shepherd’s iPhone, wits and a head full of convictions about Good and Honesty prevailing in the end, Antoimn approached foul-smelling, decaying Evil and the Bitch. The giants cursed at him, going “Dude, I’m, like, the fucking French Administration. You’re just, like, a citizen; and your wife is not even French” and “Yeah, sure, I’m just gonna send a check over to you, so basically, shut up now”.
Antoimn said to the Philistines, “You come against me with hate and foul intentions and the mouth of a half-assed snake, but I come against you in the name of Truth Almighty, the God of the armies of Good and Honesty, whom you have defied… today I will give the carcasses of the French Administration and of Millenia 210 to the birds of the air… and the whole world will look when my wife and I, papers in hands, money in our pocket, fly the fuck out of here… it is not by hate or resentment that the Truth saves; for the battle is Hers, and She will give you a spanking and hand over your ass in the end.”
As Evil and the Bitch moved in for the kill, Antoimn reached into his mind and slung two of his witty arrows at the beasts’ heads.
Will Evil surrender? Will the Bitch be slain?
I’ll keep you posted when the story unfolds. Or you could read the news. You know, some official building might suffer a micro-earthquake or some kind of localized catastrophe.
O Fortuna!
Ô Fortuna, ô Coincidence, ô Surprise!
How you shook me when, as I was grocery shopping and when, looking up from my shopping cart, my brain took in the data being sent over by the object that had just entered my sight!
For it was thou, O Goddess-That-Spins-The-Wheel, who put this man and his accoutrement in a space-time continuum close enough to mine on that fateful afternoon.
Reader, fret not for I intend to put an end here and now to the sense of expectation that has been gnawing at your insides and making your limbs numb ever since you bravely set about reading this post. Despite the stupor I’d been thrown into, my mind succeeded in ordering my arms and their appendices to make the few moves that made it possible for you, Reader, to contemplate the vision which threw me in a fit I am sure you are starting to measure now:
Ô Fortuna, you spinned the Wheel so his and my presence coincided in the same space-time continuum!
But… What… This flag!… Could it be!?… Well, yes! It is the Taiwanese flag!
Fortuna, you knew! You knew that Taiwan is precisely the place my wife and I are moving to right by the end of this month, and you chose to place right in front of me this bold man, waving the Taiwanese flag in the midst of an ocean of Chinese-made junk!
Ô Fortuna, do you think this corsair, sailing between the “garden furniture” and “plastic-wrapped pots” aisles, knows the true nature of the thing he is proudly sporting?
I dare say I do not think he does. Not any more than those people who get Chinese-looking tattoos without even knowing about their hypothetical meanings, applied to their flesh by professionals not necessarily knowing how to write Chinese either.
He does not, just like the marketeers in Taiwan hoping to transfer the prestige of foreign-looking wording unto the products they wish to sell better this way.
Proof:
