[misadventures in taiwan podcast]: orwellian Taiwanese schools, what's chinese, funny notebooks

right click the icon and "save link as" to download the mp3, or click it to listen right away (9.7mb audio)

topics:
1. a Kaohsiung high school/ vocational school principal who checks Yahoo! Knowledge (Y! Taiwan's equivalent of Yahoo! Answers)and other websites for negative mentions of his chool. he'll then summon teachers to hunt for which student posted those offending (to him) items to punish (lower grades, etc).

2. teachers at that school have to eat at the same table in the cafeteria with students during lunch time. they're also not allowed to bring their own food from home or buy from outside.

3. sunburned badly for the love of art-- photographing sand crabs at the beach.

4. notebooks with funny Engrish blurbs on the cover-- more photos

notebooks with really funny blurbs on the cover

5. Masons inviting people to tour their lodges to drum up publicity-- NYTimes article link (since this is an archive article, you'll have to pay to read the article in full. luckily, the NY Masons reproduced this article here ← click to read.)

6. taiwanese split over identity as "chinese" or "taiwanese". big news a few weeks ago when people discovered that many major government offices changed all instances of "china" or "chinese" in their english names to "taiwan" or other words (like "Overseas Chinese Affairs Council renamed to overseas Compatriot Affairs Council) original chinese names were retained, though.

OCAC renamed Overseas Compatriot Affairs Council
2006/10/9
The China Post staff

Few may have noticed this, but the Overseas Chinese Affairs Council (OCAC), Taiwan's highest authority serving citizens living abroad, has been renamed as the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Council.
While officials with the council said the name change was meant to make a clearer distinction between Chinese and Taiwanese, opponents said the move was yet another indication that the government wants to "de-sinicize," or get rid of all words of phrases associated with China.
........
This time the council only changed its English name -- its Chinese name remains the same. The move was criticized as a way to bypass review of the Legislature.
"What we want to do is to achieve the biggest denominator for all overseas Taiwanese compatriots," said Cheng Tung-hsing, OCAC vice chairman and spokesperson. "There are Taiwanese independence groups who simply can't stand the word Chinese, and there are others who can't accept the name Overseas Taiwanese Affairs Council."
In fact, the government has already changed the English names of various overseas offices as part of its de-sinicization campaign. What used to be the Chinese Cultural Center in places throughout the United States are now the Cultural Center of TECO (Taipei Economic and Cultural Office).
Here in Taiwan, the government has also changed names of agencies in which it has a stake, without telling the public about it.
Chinese Television System, for example, is now part of the Taiwan Broadcasting System group.
"The Legislature didn't even know about the name change," said Kuomintang lawmaker Hung Hsiu-chu, member of the Legislature's Education Committee. "We'll ask for a clear explanation from these people when we review their budget next time."