Happy birthday to Teacher. 孔子誕辰不放假，但萬世師表常在心中。

Today we were visited by a very small moth.

How small? That huge pink blob in the photo is my left index finger.

You learn something every day. 紅樓夢本為清朝禁書，由和珅勸乾隆解禁。

怎麼說呢？和珅是惡名昭彰的貪官；做官的動機就是要貪污；可是如果他沒有那麼貪，我們今天讀不到紅樓夢。

怎麼說呢？當時被他糟蹋的人一定不希罕甚麼賈寶玉林黛玉。可是現代人如果沒有紅樓夢，生活就是有那麼一點貧乏。(加上，臺大中文系的多少教授就得另謀飯碗。)

好比，If it were not for Mussolini, today we would probably not have the chance to enjoy Vivaldi. His music had been forgotten, but Mussolini, in his quest to inflate Italian pride, prompted musicians who dug out these almost extinct scores. The first people in the US to hear Vivaldi's music were FBI agents monitoring Fascist radio broadcasts.

塞翁失馬，焉知非福？禍兮福之所倚，福兮禍之所伏。

管它碳不碳，中秋烤肉有甚麼關係？請看:::

Hope everybody is having a wonderful moon festival. We've come in after an evening of admiring the moon, drinking tea, and eating moon cakes.

Just at dusk, the dogs sang out to alert us to moonrise.

What is the wind in a typhoon like? you may ask. The east coast got Force 17 gales, but in Wulai, the winds were much tamer. But not gentle.

A big wind blows down trees, as they discovered recently in New York. A typhoon wind snaps the little bamboo: much more impressive than toppling a tree.

For some preliminary gusts, please click here:::

We put a fitted tarp on our car and parked it in a protected place. The wind blew off the tarp, but luckily it wrapped around the mirror. Otherwise, they would have picked it up on the radar in Vladivostok.

Bawnay said, "Strange, it didn't rain in our village." Yeah, they're drying out there, they got only 90mm of rain yesterday.

They lost their electric power. Bawnay said, "有時候過沒有電的生活也很不錯！Sometimes it’s nice to spend some time without electricity."

一九一八

Please remember that today is the most sacred of holidays, Talk Like A Pirate Day, and be sprightly about it, matey, if you know what’s good for you.

We celebrated TLAPD by hunkering down as this typhoon poured water all over us. Then at around three in the afternoon, the wind came up to blow. That's when I really got into the spirit of TLAPD, because the wind blew down a clump of my 巨竹 giant bamboo, which was finally, after how many years? getting gigantic: AARRGGHH!

Fortunately it fell away from the house, but the stalks were crushing a couple trees, so I got out a good saw and my laraw (headhunting knife) and went out to hack them down a bit, singing

Blow you winds in the morning,

Blow you winds Hi Ho,

It's clear away your giant bamboo

And Blow, Boys, Blow!

all the while ruminating on the deep question, what does Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD) have to do with the pirates on the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)? Worth considering.

An excellent essay on a subject I have wondered about, as I suppose most reading addicts do: why read so much when you forget so much?

In the NYTimes Book Review, The Plot Escapes Me, by James Collins.

Recording his journeys in Taiwan in 1869, Edward C Taintor wrote, "I had hitherto always held Keelung [基隆] to be the filthiest town in the universe, not deeming it within the bounds of possibility that a place could be worse than it; but a visit to Suao [蘇澳] forced me to confess my mistake. Suao thus far, in my experience, bears the palm, with little danger of losing it."

Not to be disrespectful, but if you look at the English language literature concerning Taiwan before 1945, whether written by explorers, scientists, or missionaries, the words that invariably pop up are 'dirty' and 'filthy.'

Not that everything was cleaned up immediately after the Japanese warlords surrendered. In the summer of 1973, Josh came for a visit. One day when we were coming out of the mountains, we reached Suao, which in those days was as far as the train from Taipei went. Near the train station, a lady by the road was selling sugar cane, which is delightful, delicious, and refreshing, so I asked Josh if he’d like some. Sure. We ordered a cane, and the lady began peeling it for us. She broke off one section a bit too vigorously, and it fell to the ground, almost landing in the putrid open sewer by her stand; the sewer was fed in part by a broken pipe flowing out of a 騎樓的柱子 pillar next to her.

Before the sugar cane had bounced, Josh said, "No, ask her to wash it." So I asked her to wash it. She was completely befuddled. "Wash it? What for?" "It fell on the ground." "So? Is there something wrong with that?" "But it’s dirty." "Dirty??" "Yes, it fell on the ground so it’s dirty." You could see she had no idea what I was complaining about, and kept on peeling the cane. I said, "Look, if you don't wash that piece, we aren't buying the sugar cane." She gave me a look that said, What won't these crazy foreigners come up with next, and washed the sugar cane for us… in the grey sewage flowing out of the pipe. Josh immediately lost his appetite for sugar cane.

So you see, progress has been made!

三十九年

念無常
Originally uploaded by Yugan Dali

和尚珍藏祖師傳的古瓷缽。一天，師不在，小沙彌玩缽，一不小心，落地碎了。正好師歸，小沙彌拾碎片入懷中，問師，「師父，為甚麼有生有死？」師父說，「因緣際會。因緣具，則生；因緣散，則亡。」小沙彌從懷中拿出缽的碎片給師父看，說，「師父的缽的因緣散了。」

我今天一個景德鎮蓋盌因緣散了；民國七十二年老友唐斯芳給我的。蓋子八十九年破了。
庚寅白露

Today when I was cleaning this tea bowl, it slipped and broke. My old friend Tang Sefang gave me this in 1983. The cap broke in 1999. Sic transit gloria mundi

After yesterday's somber commemoration, today we will commemorate the day, September 12, 1940, seventy years ago exactly, that four French teenage boys, some refugees from the Nazi occupation, went for a ramble on a hillside. Their dog Robot popped down a hole left when a tree fell over, and in searching for Robot, the boys discovered the glorious painted cave called Lascaux, with paintings 17,000 years old.

Shortly after its discovery, Picasso visited the cave, and said concerning modern art, "We have invented nothing."

There’s a virtual tour here::: Look on the left for Visite de la grotte.

This is also worth reading.

Capt. Tom Daniel, a retired career Navy man who teaches the Navy JROTC program at W.P. Davidson High School in Mobile, Ala., will share with his students his own experience evacuating from the Pentagon on 9/11. He and his colleagues had seen the news about the New York attacks on television, but when the Pentagon was hit, they thought it was a crash of a VIP helicopter, so many of them left their keys and purses on their desks.

On the anniversary, Captain Daniel says, "the most important lesson is pretty much what we emphasize every day – and that’s being good citizens," not necessarily by joining the military but by doing their best in whatever profession they choose. "That's how you pay back society for the privileges that you have as an American citizen."

for the complete article, read here::

The meter reader comes every two months to read the electric meter. The last time he came, Yumin, as usual, roared and howled ferociously as he approached. I rushed out to call down Yumin. The meter reader came in very cautiously, keeping his eye on Yumin. I told him not to worry. When he turned his back on Yumin to read the meter, Yumin tiptoed up silently and lightly touched the back of the guy's knee with his nose. He practically jumped out of his skin.

I hope he comes back again.

In his brilliant Categories of Medieval Culture, A I Gurevich (Арон _ Гуревич) points out that during the Middle Ages, "value belonged exclusively to what was old."

In Beowulf as well as in Viking sagas, the hero's sword is extolled because it was passed down from his grandfather or generations before. Imagine today's Rambo or Terminator appearing on the scene with an old single shot .303 Lee Enfield rifle.

Nowadays we do not value what is old. Yesterday I took an on-line survey rating a product from 1 to 10, hard to use 1, easy to use 10; unreliable 1, reliable 10; ugly 1, beautiful 10; old 1, young 10. This is how modern society values the old.

Experience is not esteemed in an age where tools do all your work for you. A 毛筆 Chinese writing brush takes years of practice to control, as does a quill pen. You can change fonts with the click of a mouse, and use WordArt and other programs to modify your words. If you don't know how to use WordArt, fiddle with it, you can master it within five or ten minutes.

The phrase 功夫 kung-fu, or gungfu, is often mistakenly used in English to refer to Chinese martial arts, but actually it means the skill developed through time and effort, and does not necessarily have anything to do with a martial art. Martial arts necessarily require years of practice, but any skill requires kung fu, be it sweeping the floor or playing a guitar.

When you have shot a stickbow long enough to wear out several bowstrings, your arrows begin to go where you want them to, more or less. A beginner with a well-tuned compound bow and zero pin gap fiber optic bubble level sight can group arrows within half an hour, and a sighted crossbow practically shoots itself. Our tools are so efficient that they allow for no sense of achievement.

Small wonder that we place little value on what is old. By the time you get your newly purchased software up and running, it is obsolete. Who has time to devote to making your own clothes when they will be out of fashion by the time you finish? The key here is that once you have paid the purchase price for a product, you need to feel dissatisfied, in order for the producer to make further profits on your next purchase. Out with the old, in with the new!

Fashionable modern life is a marionette show. People proudly strut and posture, yanked back and forth by the irresistible demands of advertising.

九十九年九月九日

A stunning display of synchronization, teamwork, and pure skill from 青森大学Aomori University in Japan:

October 2009

Mark Twain said, "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." (although it appears his collaborator on The Gilded Age, Charles Dudley Warner, actually wrote the statement). Okay, now I'm doing something about it: I'm posting another piece of cheerful blather about it on my blog.

North of Taiwan is one typhoon; south of typhoon is another typhoon; flat on top of northern Taiwan is a third. Fortunately, they seem to be canceling each other out, for although we have had rain, they have not been torrential (by Taiwan's standards, at least; if this were Louisiana, New Orleans would be long gone). But please compare these rain maps, one for August 30 and the other for September 1^st. Note how they complement each other; places that got drenched on the 30^th were dry on the 1^st, and vice versa.

Okay, now, everybody, repeat after me in your best American accent: amAAAAzing!!