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I don’t think those two were related.

I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.

I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]

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Now that the Taiwanese presidential election is out of the way, the already pretty boring Taiwanese news has hit a new high in boringness, today asking if closer ties to the PRC (with Ma Ying-Jeou’s promise to open up the Three Links (三通)) means we can have a panda now. No seriously. The people have been waiting.

This, together with my currently daily train commutes, have led me to further explore the world of podcasts. I’m now a proud subscriber of “The Bugle: the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” with John Oliver of Daily Show fame and Andy Zaltman, distributed by The Times of London. Like a weekly audio Daily Show, except more British and thus more ridiculous. It’s fabulous fun, and perfect for those of us who hate reading.

Here’s a snippet from this past episode:

USA and Britain are once again at the top!, of the western world’s teenage pregnancies – also called the two countries most committed to the war on terror. … What it also suggests is, as nations, we get overexcited in the prospect of an easy conquest without really thinking about the long term consequences.

So true.

Thanks.