Taiwan’s dog-poo situation has hit the international media again.
The last time this happened, it involved the notorious Nakamuras. They were the elderly Japanese couple that embarrassed Taiwan by fleeing their long-stay tourist program in Puli (埔里), Nantou County, saying the streets there were overflowing with dog scat and they just couldn’t take it anymore (“Keeping the red carpet rolled up,” May 6, 2006, page 8).
So what’s the excrement problem now? Reuters had the, er, scoop.
“City officials in Taichung, which has a population of one million, said on Wednesday the environmental protection bureau would give vouchers worth 100 Taiwan dollars [US$3] for every kilo of dog poo collected. In areas of the city especially affected, the reward will be for every half-kilo.”
Cash for trash, shekels for shit, shillings for scheisse — whatever you want to call it, the city’s hit on a brilliant plan, it would appear.
I just can’t wait for the Scat Wars to break out between rival scavengers, trolling the streets and duking it out for some brown gold.
The program even inspired Examiner.com’s Helena Sung, a New Yorker, to a soul-baring cri de coeur over her own dog-owning woes. It’s a good thing her dog, unnamed, can’t read — otherwise it would be pretty darn embarrassed.
Exclaims Sung: “The streets of Taiwan must be pretty dirty for the government to announce a new cash-for-trash policy that will pay its citizens for bringing in everything from dog poo to plastic bags to Styrofoam cups. That, or the island nation has an obsession with cleanliness.”
Memo Ms Sung: Have you seen one of our night markets? For “obsessed with cleanliness,” you’ve got the wrong department. That’s down the hall, 2,000km to the northeast — in Japan.
Then she really gets to the nub of it: “New Yorkers are already required by law to pick up our dog’s poo or risk a hefty $250 fine, so if I lived in Taiwan, I would definitely do it.
“Only problem: my dog weighs a mere eight pounds. His poos look like Tootsie rolls. It would take me a month to collect enough dog poo to merit a trip to the drop-center to collect my $3 voucher. There is no way I am going to hang on to my dog’s poos until I have enough to haul it to a center to collect my money. Can you imagine?”
As you Americans are found of saying, Helena: Thanks for sharing. (I can actually hear her “Like, ohmigod!” from Taiwan.)
She may have a point, though. Imagine what’s going to happen in penny-pinching Taichung households. Mounds of festering dog crap — but not enough yet to be worth cashing in — will pile up in their apartments, next to towering piles of jumbled receipts for the bimonthly lottery.
Which is all fine and good, until Fatty Wang stumbles home one night blind drunk on Taiwan Beer and can’t find the light switch.
Speaking of crap, I had the distinct displeasure of seeing the latest Chinese imperial abomination ... er, exhibit ... at the National Palace Museum. One of my foreign “friends” tricked me into seeing it, claiming we were going to a scrumptious catch-your-own-shrimp joint.
Instead, I was subjected to the exhibit “Harmony and Integrity: The Yongzheng Emperor and his Times.” The exhibit is the first collaboration between the Chicoms’ Palace Museum in Beijing and our own National Palace Museum.
I don’t know what all the hubbub over the collection is about. According to all the “experts,” the pinnacles of our own museum’s collection — and thus, of Chinese art — are a piece of jade carved like a wimpy little piece of bok choy and a tiny rock carved like a hunk of pork. Neither “masterpiece” is even edible.
We’d be better off selling all our useless imperial Chinese crap to the Chicoms and using the proceeds for a national trip to Palau and turning our museum into a “taike” theme park. But anyway.
The first sign of the “artistic” tortures awaiting me was a note by the entrance saying that the museum would now be using the Chicoms’ Hanyu Pinyin system and ditching the old Wade-Giles Romanization system.
Surely simplified Chinese can’t be far off now — followed by the five-star flag a-flyin’ on the rooftop.
Then, in the exhibit, we were introduced to Yongzheng (雍正, on the throne 1722-1735) who, aside from a few murderous shenanigans typical of any run-of-the-mill autocrat, had an unremarkable reign. The damn guy wasn’t even Chinese, for starters (he was a Manchu), so why the Chicoms go banging on about him and other Qing emperors and their supposedly glorious “Greater China” empire is anyone’s guess.
Yongzheng’s reign corresponded roughly with the life of my great-grandfather’s grandfather, Julius Neihu.
Julius was known for participating in badly conceived and poorly executed guerrilla raids against Qing outposts, drinking copious amounts of an early, mountain-brewed precursor to Taiwan Beer and railing against the Qing occupiers from the editorial pages of Ye Olde Formosa Times, an English-language newspaper established in 1701 with funds from Japanese pirates and a few opium-addled Ming loyalists.
I’m no art critic, but the Yongzheng exhibit was a snoozer. It was a dank, poorly lit tour past a bunch of dusty old books, imperial records and worthless-looking knick-knacks.
Speaking of Tootsie roll-sized shits, they even have one of Yongzheng’s seals, engraved with the characters “Being ruler is hard.”
Well cry me a frickin’ river.
My verdict: Yawn-zheng.
Speaking of a lot of hoo-ha over not much, it turns out our National Palace Museum has also, in a craven if obscure bit of Beijing ball-licking, declined to exhibit two misshapen animal heads.
These bronze objets d’art are so ugly they wouldn’t even be welcome on the Neihu homestead’s mantle — except, perhaps, for use as spittoons during betel-nut-juice target practice.
Nonetheless, collectors appear to attach value to them — US$23 million, to be exact — because they were part of some ancient Chinese fountain or some such.
China’s knickers twisted into particularly painful knots when they went on sale in a private auction, only to untwist slightly when some patriotic Chinese bozo had the winning bid. (The catch: He had no intention of paying).
Now the owners of the looted heads want to donate them to the National Palace Museum. But the latter is in full-blown Chicom collaborationist mode, and wouldn’t dream of pissing off Beijing.
Agence France-Presse had the money quote:
“Pierre Berge, partner of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, said he offered the two heads — of a rat and a rabbit — to a Taiwan museum, but was rejected because the museum feared triggering Chinese anger.
“‘I wanted to give them to the Taiwan museum, but they didn’t want to create a bone of contention ... with mainland China,’ Berge told French radio station RTL in a programme aired on Monday.”
Then the wire got the museum director’s lame excuse:
“‘In accordance with professional museum ethics, we can’t collect disputed artefacts,’ said Chou Kung-shin [周功鑫], director of the museum which boasts the world’s largest collection of classical Chinese art.”
That might make sense, were it not for the fact that the entire National Palace Museum collection is disputed — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) looted the whole damn pile, and Beijing still claims it all.
None other than a KMT legislator summed up my thoughts nicely.
“‘The museum is spineless. [Berge] wants to give the relics to you and you won’t even accept?’ said Lee Ching-hua [李慶華], a lawmaker from the ruling Kuomintang party.”
Yes, being director of the National Palace Museum is hard — especially in the touchy-feely era of “warming cross-strait relations.”
But it’s still not as hard as collecting dog shit for a living.
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