Ice Dancing. Ice. F–ing. Dancing.
(Note: The following ’sports’ included in the winter and summer olympics while baseball, aka world’s fourth most popular sport, is not: luge, snowboarding, an experimental variant of rugby known as sevens, synchronized swimming, BMX, canoe slalom, and beach volleyball.)

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The international alcohol consuming community was riveted by a shocking report that a Taiwanese whisky, Kavalan, defeated its English and Scottish rivals in a blind taste test.
According to a publication called Luxist:
The contest took place in a hostelry north of Edinburgh and when the results were announced whisky connoisseur Charles MacLean exclaimed “Oh my God, [...]

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I saw this story on Marmot’s today and it caught my eye for a number of reasons. The above statue is being built by North Korean workers, in Senegal.
The story in AP doesn’t mention the statue is being built by North Korean workers until the 16th paragraph of this story, which I guess I find [...]

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A Brief aside from news from the Pacific Rim: Tragedy struck Mexico yesterday when twin midget wrestling stars Alberto and Alejandro Jimenez were found dead in a hotel room, apparently drugged and killed by members of Las Goteras–a gang of prostitutes known for robbing and poisoning clients. The dose of poison used to kill the [...]

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North Korean scientists are diversifying. Not only are the busy in secret labs building nuclear weapons to obliterate their neighbors if a conflict arises, they’re also concocting refreshing, delicious beer with a ‘unique scent and fresh taste’. Check out this rather capitalist looking TV commercial for Taedonggang Beer.
Any of you Koreaphiles that want [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQpbT54Urw0

Video from the streets of Taipei of police–and some guy in a white shirt without any proper identification–limiting the movement of protesters without proper reason or legal justification.
This week promises to be a hot one in Taiwan as protesters are taking to the street to oppose Ma Ying Jeou’s increasing legal and economic comprimises with [...]

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From The Sun:

Gavin’s identical brother died in the womb early in their mum’s pregnancy. The 4cm foetus then became embedded in Gavin’s tissue and stayed in his stomach for the next 30 years.
There are just a handful of cases worldwide — with the majority reported in Asia. Former firefighter Gavin, of Witney, Oxfordshire, [...]

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Or so says Bronx Banter in a well-written first-person account of going to the new Yankee Stadium for the first time. I don’t think about it much and I’ve never written it here, but for a brief time I worked right next to Yankee Stadium, at a relatively horrific publishing house called H.W. Wilson.
Even though [...]

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A recent Fu Jen University public opinion poll has concluded that over 2.2 million Taiwanese “have never fallen in love or had a relationship with a member of the opposite sex”.
Yen Han-wen, a sex education professor at National Normal University, attributed the large number of bachelors and spinsters in Taiwan mainly to the lack of [...]

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File it under Never Thought I’d Do This. I’m going to give Twitter a try. It’s an experiment. I like the idea of links, but I don’t like posting large collections of links unless it has a very specific purpose (like the WBC). But Twitter is a different deal.
You can find mine on the right [...]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6oQTgo02as

Taiwanese Justice Minister Wang Ching-feng has been captured in this video at a Taichung prison, mocking inmates and suggesting that they could “hug their way out of jail” and be eligible for parole by embracing State Prosecutor General Chen Tsung-ming. Hug the SPG, get parole. No hug, no parole. Isn’t that funny? [...]

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Jerome A. Cohen, co-director of NYU’s US-Asia Law Institute and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has penned a scathing letter calling the Taiwanese judiciary’s handling of the Chen Sui-bian prosecution case a mockery of the values of clean government.  Is Cohen a DPP party hack? Hardly. He was Ma Ying-jeoh’s law [...]

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From the Christian Science Monitor:
China has the world’s largest number of Internet users – 290 million and counting, with 70 percent under the age of 30. And a recent survey of Internet use by global market information group TNS found that Chinese spend the highest proportion of their leisure time online – 44 percent – [...]

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I don’t know if I think this is a good or bad thing. Could save time by exposing bad relationships before they get bad. Could be useful in catching criminals. Actually, come to think of it projecting images while politicians are giving speeches might be the best idea.
From Pink Tentacle:
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience [...]

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Just when you think there may be one or two things left inconceivable by the human imagination, it turns out that reports of organ harvesting–especially of Falun Gong members–turns out to be real.
I saw a lot of Falun Gong protestors in Hong Kong and New York City, and always kind of dismissed them as wackos [...]

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It’s probably noteworthy that this story has made it into the mainstream news (ie. Yahoo!’s picks-and-pans front page news) even though European countries have also leased land in Africa. Although, according to the article those countries haven’t snapped up such large areas.
Ninety-nine years is a bit long to call a “lease” and 32 million acres is [...]

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You might have to read this one twice.
A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.

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Anyone out there had their communication transformed by Skype? Me too. I used to talk to my parents once a week or so. Usually they’d call me using MCI prepaid phone cards they bought at Costco. Now we use Skype and call each other whenever and wherever. For free. I talk to Jackson almost [...]

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And if they did come out of the water it might be at Jangsaengpo Port, Ulsan, near where I live, where there is a long row of  whale restaurants lining the coast. More on that in a minute.
From the Telegraph:
Scientists in Japan have given a beluga whale a vocabulary of three words, the first time [...]

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A topic I’m personally fascinated by. Replacement level populations, to put it in Sabermetric terms. But this is serious business in Asia and Europe, and I’ll try to link to it more often. I highly recommend Canadian conservative columnist Mark Steyn’s many writings on the subject.
Here’s an article in today’s Washington Post on how Japanese [...]

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