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After Taiwan’s loss to China in Olympic baseball, which is almost as bad as having bunch of missiles pointed at your home ready to be fired, here are some choice quotes from news reports.
On the one hand, Taiwanese people:
“It’s just like in history. Last night we lost to (former coloniser) Japan, and today we lost to the Communist bandits. This is totally outside expectations.”
“They should all go jump in the sea. This is the end for the Taiwan team.”
“It is a day for national mourning. A shame to lose the game and a double shame to lose the game to China. It’s time to disband our baseball league.”
On the other hand, China’s American pitching coach:
“This is Ohio State-Michigan. To win it in the way we won it, it was unbelievable.”
Inspired by parkour and a guy who was walking and juggling at the same time, I present to you And1Walking. It’s pretty self-explanatory, actually. Just watch this and enact it on the streets:
I spent the last month in Australia. First at RSSS where I did a satisfactory bit of work and enjoyed good tea time conversations. I only wish I could have stayed there longer! Then I traveled to Melbourne to attend the 2008 AAP conference.
I presented my paper on centered worlds, and an argument in the paper was met with a devastating objection from Josh Parsons and Wolfgang Schwarz. Unfortunately for me, their criticisms were right on, so that part of the paper has to go back to the drawing board and I need to do some more reading and re-reading. However, the ensuing discussions with Wo was particularly helpful in figuring out some options and also how a Lewisian might respond. In addition to that crushing blow, I also received other useful suggestions and comments from people at the conference and ANU. Let’s call it a learning experience.
Given the packed schedule, I could not even make it to every talk I wanted to go to. But the ones I did go to were all quite interesting. I was especially happy to finally learn about Stuart Brock’s experiments on the fictionality/alethic puzzle of resistance.
In non-philosophy news, I became enamored with Melbourne partially because of my newfound Aussie rules football fandom. Through some arbitrary, arational decision procedure, I am now a fan of Collingwood Magpies and enjoyed watching them come from behind and beat Adelaide at MCG. (In most domains I defer my judgment to David Lewis, but not the domain of the AFL team to support! I was told that Lewis was a lifetime Essendon supporter. Boo.)
Back to the states soon.
I was going to revisit an old post about how I dislike people who say “if there’s global warming, then why am I so cold?” I literally just heard this on TV from a rugby league commentator. Sadly, I could not find the post, so instead I will talk about how I think rugby league is the most boring sport ever.
We went to an aussie rules football match last Sunday, and it is exciting! It’s quick, skilled, and brutal. If I have any athletic ability, I would try to play it. I don’t know why it hasn’t been spread more. So I have aussie rules football as my top Australian winter sport. Second place is rugby union. Australia won’t be playing in the Tri-Nations while I am here, so it won’t get that crazy, but I would like to catch the All Blacks vs Springboks match next weekend. Lastly, we have rugby league. Boring as sin. It lacks both the physical contest for the ball in rugby union and the speed in aussie rules football. Luckily an AFL game will be on soon, so it’ll be time to change the channel.
Update 06/28/08: I also watched some indoor bocce on TV and that was more exciting than rugby league.
