Those Huskers, Our Huskers...and Happy New Year!

He still loves the Scarlet and Cream

The one Husker football game I decide to watch this year, and we get handled!  Very disappointing.  Yes, we were playing in a bowl game and should be satisfied with that to a certain degree (look at teams like Tejas who were not in a bowl this year), but the Huskers manhandled the same Washington team they were pushed around by today just a few months ago.  If we could play a game without self-destructing with penalties, that would be a nice start.  Off to the Big 10 next year...hopefully we can fix some things before next season starts.

We're only a couple hours from 2011 here in Taiwan...Happy New Year!

GJS

Long time no post

What gives?

Well, I've been doing a lot of triathlon training, first of all.  Then, we were out of town the weekend before last to Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan.  Right after we got back from that trip, I found out my grandma died and I went back to the U.S. for the funeral.  Now I'm back in Taiwan and headed back to class tomorrow.  More busy-ness!

Back on this side of the Pacific, I'm going to be busy writing term papers, preparing presentations, getting ready for the Taipei Half Marathon later this month, and all the biking and swimming I can manage to fit in!

I did post a bunch of photos from the trip back to the U.S., the trip to Sun Moon Lake, and other assorted goodness over at Flickr (some are also on Facebook, if you are on there).  I'll put up a few here just for fun:

At the Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Village (FACV) near Sun Moon Lake

John at Sun Moon Lake

Barb and Lance on the Sun Moon Lake "ropeway" (cable cars)

This guy likes to ride on trains (at FACV)

On the way to the funeral

An all-grandson casket detail

Mild weather in Omaha means backyard football!

There was a massacre (of Lego men) - at the Fun Fair at John's school

Our new pets (two are still alive)

Folks, that's Carl "Stump" Merrill on the right, former NY Yankees manager (early 1990s).  He was the "guest of honor" at the school Fun Fair.

It was a rainy day at the Fun Fair.  Here's John trying to outleg his best buddy.

John's new tattoo (don't worry folks, it's only temporary!)

Sailboats on the Love River, Kaohsiung

GJS

Chinese character recognition at the Knox County Fair

Remember a while back I talked about having some non-sequential posts coming? It's time!

Let's turn back the clock about a month, to the 2009 Knox County Fair. This year's event took place from Aug 12 - 16, and we actually modified when we left Nebraska to come to Taiwan so that we could attend. It was a lot of fun, and I will write more about the fun everyone had another day, but today I want to start off with a look at something that shocked me - the prevalence of Chinese character tattoos on attendees of the fair.

Call me old-fashioned, but Knox County, Nebraska is not a place I expect to see this:

Since I hadn't done much in terms of Chinese in a good couple of weeks at that point, it took me a few moments to decode it, but here are the characters: 友人, yǒurén, meaning "friend." OK, I can understand this tattoo on this person, makes sense to me.

Then I saw this guy:

The first two pictures are of the left side of the back of his neck; the third photo is of the right side. The left character is 恶, è, meaning vicious or terrible, and the right one is 鬼, guǐ, which means ghost. Put them together and we have 恶鬼, èguǐ, or "vicious ghost." OK, this one also makes sense, some characters to put forth a fearsome or menacing message from a man. Interesting how we have a welcoming, happy message of "friend" from the woman and the opposite, "vicious ghost" from the man.

I was at the fair only a fraction of the time it was going on, and I saw two people with visible Chinese character tattoos. This says nothing about the people whose body markings are not visible in regular clothing. We can see from this small sample that a) tattoos are becoming more and more commonplace, and 2) people in Knox County, Neb. like the Chinese language.

Finally, this guy doesn't have any visible tattoos, in Chinese or anything else, but he is about the least-motivated looking person I have seen in a long time! OK, monitoring the bouncy house may not be the most exciting job on the midway, but come on!

"Get me out of Knox County!"

GJS