If you've ever wondered why the popular American imagination (i.e. Hollywood movies) insists on seeing scholars as impotent and bitter alcoholic misanthropes, this is an awesome article. Thanks again to Arts & Letters Daily for linking to this.

While you're enjoying the article and last week's awkward turtle, please also have a traffic mantis:



Found on the outer window of my internship office. Traffic mantis says hi, and he promises to fuck you up if you don't read my blog.

So I'm still jostling with my editor on my second travel/culture article topic. I want to write about the Taipei indie scene -- or alternatively, on the "Best Places to Pretend That You're Not the Yupster That You Really Are." I'm a glib little shit, I know. I even booked my overpriced 3-day concert pass to Taipei's 2007 Formoz Rock Festival, which will feature New Yorkers Yo La Tengo and OK GO, Japanese acts QURULI and RIZE, and awesome Taiwanese bands Tizzy Bac, 1976, 8mm Sky (八厘米天空), Sugar Plum Ferry (甜梅號) and of course the ever-androgynous SodaGreen (蘇打綠). These are the bands I'm most psyched about seeing, anyway. For my own good, I want to keep my expectations low, but GODDAMIT WILL IT BE THE BEST 3 DAYS OF SUMMER EVER.

I mean, Taipei's not the most happening place in terms of the arts, but the scene is small and cozy. It doesn't have the frizzy-edged obsessiveness and posturing that seems to characterize the San Francisco scene (a Sufjan Steven and Kaiser Chiefs concert sold out at Berkeley within 24 hours of its announcement; a Yoko Ono exhibition also attracted a huge ironic-Beatnik-revivalist crowd). When I dropped by San Francisco on my way back to Taipei, my sister brought me to this new sushi trendster bar in Haight-Ashbury. I kid you not, the whole restaurant was populated by hornrimmed emo glasses-wearing, trendily bald DJ-lookalikes who wear nothing but the messiest of pin-striped shirts and tornest of jeans. Their girlfriends were either sake-sipping Asian queens or the Kate Winslets of Eternal Sunshine. Maybe SanFran is catching up to NYC in its overriped-ness. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that at concerts here.

Onto more wholesome family things that don't carry the possible risks of deafness and hipsters: I went fishing with my uncle, my mom and my cousins at Keelung, just an hour's drive from Taipei-