Week of November 15th, 2013

A week or so ago, received an email from the kids school about heightened security due to some threats made by a former student and have since noticed beefed up security and tightened controls when trying to get on campus.  Was chatting about it with a friend the other day and he told me the former student was none other than the great grandson of Chiang Kai-shek himself.  You have got to read THIS ARTICLE from the South China Morning Post about it for two reasons.  First, to enjoy the picture of the guy.  I know they love to show the most bat-shit crazy picture of people in the press, but my buddy told me he sees the guy on the street all the time shadow boxing and talking to himself.  Also, it is scary to read excerpts from his Facebook posts, not only because of the disturbing threats, but mostly because of the guys horrible grammar.  My favorite..."taipei american school aint nothing but a group of white devils bullying me."  Hope my White Devil kid gets a better grasp of English after attending the school.  And Carolyn can't be considered a 'white devil'...I know some people refer to Chinese Americans as twinkies...yellow on the outside/white on the inside, which isn't a terribly scary moniker, but in an ever increasingly organic and gluten-free world, Twinkie the Kid has seen better days.

Betty is in the middle of a 3 week trip all over the place, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and India.  She called us up today from India and I asked how she was doing bowel movement-wise.  She grudgingly admitted not good...she has been careful to drink only bottled water, but it seems that at breakfast this morning, she poured what she thought was liquid sugar into her coffee, only to later realize it was a small vase where the flower had been removed.  Her tummy has been queasy since and she has over a week to go there.  Haw haw.  I would feel sorry for her, but she does stay in some swanky hotels and is tacking on a personal day at the Taj Mahal at the end of the trip.  When she is gone, do not get to visit the Costco daily, but still need to make the trek over for milk and eggs and try to plan those trips early in the day when the place is slow.  Was hoping to avoid the usual dopes, but think they must wait for the doors to open so they can be first in line at the sample tables, all the while abandoning their carts in the middle of the aisles.  And they were out en masse yesterday.  I think I mentioned in a previous post a couple weeks back that for one of these scofflaws, I took their abandoned cart and hid it down an aisle around the corner.  Yesterday, I put plan B into action...loading up their cart with merchandise.  I hope they know how to cook USDA Choice Heel Muscle.

That's about 10 bucks for a little over 2 pounds by the way.  I always thought this was the kind of stuff they ground up and put in hot dogs, but there you have it.   

 

Another thing I noticed about shopping at Costco at 10:30AM on a weekday is that a lot of people bring their babies along.  There must have been a dozen of them and they all seem interested in looking at me, especially these days as you don't see many Chinese with bushy faces, and am now in week 2 of Movember growth.

Sooo...am waiting in the check-out line looking at one of these little kiddies, and it struck me that Chinese kids have unusually large heads in relation to their bodies.  It doesn't seem that the heads are large in relation to their bodies once they reach adulthood, but they have to be close to 50% head at birth.  Might help explain why Chinese students are considered superior to their western counterparts, and how we ultimately catch-up and (obviously) pass them by intellectually as we hit our full size.  This realization then got me re-thinking about my theories on why old Chinese women seem so angry.  I was looking at bubble heads mom, and she had no hips.  Zero...like a scrawny 12 year old boy, which is very common in many (most?) Chinese women.  The question then is, how do they pass those giant melons during child birth?  This hip to head dichotomy and their astounding success in procreation is truly one of nature's wonders.  When men and women argue about which sex is tougher, the debate usually ends when women throw out the pregnancy card 'cause us fellas only have the passing of a kidney stone as counter point.  Painful I'm told, but nothing close.  So doing the math...giant baby skull + narrow hips = pissed off Chinese woman.      

Last night, went to see Herbie Hancock at the National Concert Hall.  Along with it's sister venue, the National Theatre, it sits in a giant plaza that is bookended by massive gates on one end (seen below) and the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial on the other. 



Yes, the Concert Hall and Theatre look very similar...nearly identical.  Of course we played a round of "do all Chinese things look alike" gags.  It is a very impressive place during the day, but it was the first time I had been there at night.  On a delightfully warm evening headed to a cool show with a couple of beers in me, found it to be a magical setting.

We got there about 40 minutes early, and they had a little kiosk outside the main door that sold snacks along with craft beer and wine, so we sat down and enjoyed a refreshing beverage.  Once again...delightful.  One of the things I love about Taiwan is that they treat adults like adults.  You can have a beer on the steps of their most prestigious music hall and not be cordoned off by barricades from the rest of the world.  If you want to take your beer around the corner to have a smoke, no one hassles you.  Went to a baseball game last Sunday, and not only do they not cut off beer sales in the 7th inning, on the way out, they were offering them two for one.  I don't think it is only due to the apparent lack of a tidal wave of lawsuits that follow when one drunk narcissistic asshole decides to throw his bottle at the field, but hits the litigious mother of three instead, and the resulting government legislation that restricts the rest of us from enjoying a cup of coffee without warning us that the contents are hot, but mostly as a result of a population that behaves themselves. 

As for the show, am not an enormous jazz affcianado, but like it when I hear it, and the opportunity of seeing a jazz legend in an amazing venue was a no brainer.  The inside of the Hall was classy, but not as ornate as I had imagined, probably due to the fact it was completed in 1987. 

I had expected the crowd to be heavier with westerners, but it was almost uniformly Chinese.  They were polite, but by the end were grooving appropriately.  I had read that the acoustics were supposed to be superb inside, but as with a lot of these type of venues, they are not designed with heavy percussion or amplification in mind.  The  sound suffered early on, kinda like music at a convention center, but improved as the night went along.  Herbie's band was top notch.  The drummer cut his teeth with Zappa and spent a decade along side Sting.  The bass player is the guy from the SNL band...you'll often see him laughing his ass off during the opening monologue.  And the guitarist was some hotshot from Benin...more of a texturalist than typical jazz guitarist.  He kinda got lost in the mix most of the night, but his solo was this combination of sounds that were rivetingly bizzare.  As for Herbie, guy is pure genius and legend (Miles plucked him at 20 to be in his 2nd Great Quintet AND he composed all the music for The Fat Albert Show...nuff said).  At 73 years old, he has not lost a step.  He went on long keyboard runs for nearly 2 hours straight.  And he was all over the place with sounds from straight jazz, to space funk, to sounds I have no words to describe.  He did play his "hit" to lead off the encore.  Anyone old enough to be alive during the early days of MTV will remember Rockit.  Not only played it, but brought it funky fresh on the keytar!

And groovy?  As they say, black don't crack.  Still so hip and spry.  I know the trend in African-American music is all about hip hop and such, and I understand that this'll sound like Granpa Gomez talking, but they ain't got nothin' on these jazz legends.  Can you imagine an old Kanye electrifying the crowd at the age of 73?  No way...with rare exception, that stuff is instantly forgettable, but slide Herbie's Maiden Voyages or Head Hunters onto your turntable and they sound as cool as the day he put them out 40 years ago.  They even sound cool coming out of crappy Dell computer speakers off of YouTube.  Am already waiting for Puff Doody to make his first guest appearance on NCIS-Los Angeles Special Victims Unit alongside Ice-T and LL Cool J.  You think Herbie was a repeating character on Banaby Jones or BB King did a guest spot on Mannix?  They were, and are, far too groovy for that.