Stories better never told

Over the new year we went to Funky, a Taipei gay bar that gives you eight cans of Budweiser for your NT $500 entrance fee. If that sounds like a good idea, then it's your kind of place.

It is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

From The Odyssey, via the NY Times

Primate ethology / Food porn

• Function — How does the behaviour impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?
• Causation — What are the stimuli that elicit the response, and how has it been modified by recent learning?
• Development — How does the behaviour change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behaviour to be shown?
• Evolutionary history — How does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny?

Four questions for ethologists, Wikipedia

Back from a few days in Taipei that were 2/3 a lot of fun and 1/3 less so, the latter because of my lingering inability to join the human race and the trouble that this causes with my wife, a matter that, at 38, I really ought to have mastered.

I've arranged my life so most of the time I can be alone and the apparent disconnects between myself and what other people do cause minimal friction all round - the world is happy enough to leave me alone.

It's embarrassing to admit that I have no idea if people socialize in groups only to maximize some later payoff, or is there an immediate reward in the action itself? Because I'm not entirely cynical, I suspect the latter, that people do hang out for the pleasure that it gives, rather than for money, food, sex, status, aid or whatever at a later date. This could be the basis of all my misunderstandings.

Looking at the great apes, I'm like an orangutan and not a chimp, a solitary rather than a social animal. I honestly have no idea what's going on when people get together. Which is rather disconcerting because I am a person, not an alien ethologist or an orangutan, and naturally part of the scenes that I think I'm only observing. My feelings and actions when in groups shouldn't even be second nature, they should be the thing itself, requiring no thought or reflection whatsoever. How much of this is caused by conversations being all in Mandarin rather than English I don't know, but probably less than I think. Like the Taiwanese often say to each other and me: "You think too much."

In Taipei they have more food choices than in Tainan. Because of my habits we always stay in the same small hotel near Shi Da University, and then have breakfast in Grandma Nitti's. The first visit I always have their large bacon cheeseburger, which looks like this:

Inside it's good and pink, and it comes with fries, small salad and a drink:

Grandma Nitti's
Shi Da Road, Lane 93, #8

台北市師大路９３巷８号

Pictures from Almost Taiwan