Pictures of the Week

In an effort to make this blog vaguely interesting to someone who might read it I've decided to add pictures more frequently. They might not actually be every week, but I'd like them to be, so we'll see. Anyway, these are some old pictures from Taiwan, but they're quite amusing and I don't think I ever got the chance to talk about them. I also just learned that if you click the picture, you can see a bigger version. Just a heads up in case you, like me, are a slow learner.

I apologize for the glare of the flash, but it was too dark to get the picture otherwise. Plus, people tend to look at you strangely when you laugh and take pictures of signs, so I had to do this quickly when there was no one to see me. At any rate, here we see an excellent Taiwanese elevator sign. Even if one cannot read the characters, the pictures are quite clear. The first picture in the upper left hand corner advises talking to a policeman who lives in the wall should any problems occur. Then the picture in the upper right corner advises sitting down in the elevator after a long day's work and having pleasant conversations with your colleagues as a form of stress relief. The lower left is my favorite. It clearly tells an avant-garde and abstractly philosophical cautionary tale of minature twin sisters who lived in a shoebox their whole lives until one day they finally popped the top off and were horrified to find that the outside world consisted only of a bleak, blue abyss. Overcome with grief one sister faints dead away. The last picture may appear to tell people to use the stairs instead of the elevator in an emergency, but really it's revealing that if you go through the green exit of heavenly white light, X will mark the spot to a long lost pirate treasure.

Here's a pic of a dog waiting patiently at a streetlight. It is my scientific opinon that dogs in Taiwan have this behavior ingrained in their genetics as the dogs who don't would not likely live long enough to continue their genes.

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On a random note I would also like to explain why I don't have a Facebook account. The idea of Facebook rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. The first being that if someone is truly my friend, then I feel they'll take the trouble to keep in touch with me in the first place rather than looking me up one day when they're feeling nostalgic. This doesn't mean that I expect constant correspondence from my friends, or that I wouldn't be thrilled to hear from an old friend out of the blue, but I'm presently confident that all of the friends who have completely lost track of me have done so on purpose and due to no lack of trying to keep in touch on my part. Furthermore, when I was younger, I was quite fond of message boards, and I met plenty of internet friends with the same interests there rather than needing to be sorted into a certain category on any Facebook group. I also have grown mostly out of my message board phase and have found a plethora of other things to waste my time on. I still talk on message boards occasionally, but I'm no where near as keen on them as I used to be. Finally there's just something creepily cultish about Facebook in my opinion. Things that are popular tend to detract me automatically and my feelings about a thing only change if I see a good reason for its popularity, but I personally have no use for Facebook. I know that many people use Facebook for purely practical reasons. I want to make it very clear that I am not refering to these people. But so many more seem to use it like some kind of virtual popularity contest. When I hear people having long conversations about who's signed who's Facebook wall and their pleasure at abusing the "hooked-up with/dating/marriage" status options, I just feel like these are people who lead rather small and meaningless lives, and I have no desire to join them.