Speed Market

This is not Taiwan, but if you watch through the end you'll get a sense of the malleability of the yieh si. We live in such a regulated society!

New Playsuit (Un-ironed, Unfitted, Unkempt)

Still needs some serious finagling, but my machine is acting up. You can see where I'm headed?

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'Stamboul 2008

Tophane Camii















Süleymaniye Cemetary




















İstiklal Alleyway

Korea Air

Waiting at the gate for my flight from SFO to TPE, I caught a glimpse of some Korea Air and (its subsidiary?) Asiana Air hostesses. I suffered a bit of uniform envy mainly due to their headgear. In the search for these photos, I found this poor soul's website. Good for him anyway.










Airline uniform design is perhaps one of the last undefined pockets of fashion to be explored. Can it be pushed farther? In the modernized Western world (please prove me wrong), we have already lost most, if not all, of our formal trade-worker attire. Can this monotonous current ever be reversed? Shouldn't there be anything spicy about people who work in a certain hospital, or the DMV, etc?

slippers make the scene complete

slippers make the scene complete, originally uploaded by formica.

My friend in Tainan takes really nice photos.

Hagia Sophia in 3D! Part One of Three or Four

Sorry about the size issue. I'm too impatient to solve it at the moment.

The Simpson Tribe of Minneapolis

Ancestral Toys

Wee Winnie Wierdo

Reading about an acquaintance's close encounters with racism in Bulgaria this morning stirred some of my early memories. One, of kids coming up to me or my sister to say "CHING-CHONG CHING-CHONG!" and run away laughing. Sometimes they would stick around to ask me what they had said, with the conviction that it HAD to mean something. Our cousins in Minnesota would do that to us too. After a couple of these episodes, even earnest attempts to learn something from me about my cultural experience seemed vaguely threatening.
Another memory involves a cabbage patch doll I had. It was a love-hate relationship, because they were totally hideous dolls, but my sister was collecting them so competition and convenience of Christmas shopping made them a necessary population in my own toys. One day, I decided to take an ink pen and draw a big red dot on the forehead of my black cabbage patch, Mimi. It looked so pretty! I ran to the bathroom and made one for myself, not as neatly, but...wow, Mimi and I had entered new identities! Later, my dad took us to a park, me with my bold new mark. I met a girl at the top of the monkey bars and said, "Do you know why I have this red dot? It's because I'm Indian!" She turned around and walked quickly away. Why wasn't she impressed? I made no further attempts to recruit others to my Indian club, and Mimi went to the Goodwill when we left Indiana. I hope she was adopted. Her dot was really special.

More Tainan, and Some Minneapolis

CKS Across the Ages

Remindings from The Serpent and the Rainbow

I'm in the middle of a delightful book, on loan to me. The first pages are accounts of an Amazonian trek, which called to mind my favorite Herzog documentary so far.

The heroine of the film is kin (by marriage and profession) of a unique man, author and naturalist Berndt Heinrich. He mentions his connection to Ms. Köpcke at end of The Snoring Bird. Professor Heinrich is also a mentor of my dear friend Mr. Eiseman, who tells us that Heinrich, an ultra-marathoner, once experimented with long-distance racing while imbibing only beer. This man deserves his own Herzog spotlight.

N-E-way...Serpent and the Rainbow deals with the history and ethnobotany of Haiti. So we must pay homage to other great works inspired by these subjects.

Excerpt:






The book seems to prove Attenborough's thesis of "everything is everywhere" - at least in it's discussion of Datura and it's relatives. I'm hoping Mr. Eiseman will soon provide us with an exciting quote on the potency of said plant.

Meanwhile, take a look at this bloke. Henry Wellcome was also into plants, among other things. What a model of man!

Nice catch, EBA!

cell phone peeks in Tainan