Welcome to the New Moo
PANCHIAO, TAIPEI COUNTY, TAIWAN (MPI) — And greetings from the second-most densely populated place on Earth. Taiwan, that is. Specifially, Pan Chiao, Taipei County, where I now reside... Wen Hua Road... Sec. 1. Unfortunately, shortly after I arrived here in late August my digital camera fell into a squat toilet and drowned. I’d show you a picture of the squat toilet but, well, you know.
So we’ll have to make do with the photos I took in those first few, harried weeks, when I stayed in a neighborhood of Taipei County called Yung Ho. Those first several weeks I stayed in a place without air-conditioning, but hey, I had it a lot better than this poor dog, condemned to spend life in a pet store near my apartment as a multicolored display trinket.
They eat food here that seems alien to me. Chicken feet is mundane. I’ve unwittingly eaten jellied pig blood in their ‘hot-pot’ meals (which, apart from the jellied pig blood, are pretty good). I’ve also seen tons of stuff for sale on the street that I just would never eat: lots of mammal entrails; fish cooked with head, scales, and fishy smell intact; chou dofu (stinky tofu) which you will agree from blocks away well deserves its name.
But I think my favorite oddity from these early photos is this poster promoting something or other using the catchy phrase, “Iron Penis.” Click the photo for a larger shot.
I’m here in order to survive. That is, to teach English, since Web-development jobs all but disappeared in my beloved San Francisco Bay Area, and I just couldn’t make it anymore on unemployment benefits and occasional work. Here at least I have health insurance.
Sorry for the long delay in updating this site. Things were moving slowly, literary-wise, even before I left SF. But it’s taken me 6 whole months to get set up here with my old computer, a new (used) monitor, and (A)DSL (they call it ‘ADSL’ here). So I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade the site as well as update it. In addition to the usual new batch of poetry, essays, travelogues and whimsy, I’ve made the following changes:
This new home page! I’ve forgone the random-page-loading function that I thought was so cool in favor of a more conventional ‘home page,’ to ease site navigation by providing a central base from which to navigate.
Made it harder to submit work. “This is an improvement?” you ask? Well, the quality of submitted work has been heart-breakingly poor, and a lot of submitted work has actually consisted of suicide notes. Not worse than that but still bad, I’ve begun to receive bad writing from PRISON INMATES! All of the above apparently submit on the erroneous belief that they can ‘get back at’ their rejecting boy- or girlfriends / uncaring parents / imprisoners by instantly Web-publishing their ...words... without the intervention of a human editor (which has never been the case on this site).
Bios! That’s bios as in ‘biographies’ not as in your computer’s BIOS. Initially I thought I’d present everything without bios, letting the work stand on its own. But then again, nahhh.
This edition also features new material, including:
- A fascinating piece about a UFO hoax written by the hoaxer himself.
- Great new poems from Susan Borie Chambers.
- An amusing light-comic kitty piece from new essayist contributor Byron Vassar.
- Maurice Martin’s hilarious spinning of Cajun mythology, Krawkawkaw Gives a Little.
Enjoy! And please submit some excellent writing!
