Machine Gun Sarariman: A Chinaman by any other name...

It's been raining here for the past 4 days. We had a massive thunderstorm, like only Asia knows how to have - my favourites. It kicks serious ass being able to feel the thunder when a bolt hits close-by. Think I'd like to avoid feeling the lightning though.

So the raining pouring down makes driving (or at least being driven) all the more fun. You just know when the car is shooting down the road (that feels like it suffered an airstrike in some places) at 80, with everything drenched that if something bad happened, there's no way the car would stop or even slow down in time. The fact that the driver is the only one who bothers to wear a seatbelt also means that we're in a timebomb on wheels. Half the time in taxis the rear seatbelts are actually removed, or at least the bottom clips are pushed so far into the cushion there's no way you'd get them out (this is also common in Japan), so you don't even get to choose your peril. Stats in Japan say you're 4x more likely to die in a car crash if you're in the back without a seatbelt than if you "make it click" (0.01% vs 0.04% if I remember correctly). So I had a brief pondering of my fate in the carride home tonight, secretly praying that the last minutes I had on Earth were not packed in a car with 40-year old grumpy Japanese.

Anyway, my post today was supposed to be more chipper. With the rain and nothing to do but work its hard to look on the bright side, but even work has its moments. Such as the giggles I've been working hard to stifle when receiving business cards of the Chinese correspondants we have. I don't mean to be rude, and most of the time the guys are pretty neat, but there are some pretty cruel names kicking about.
Without further ado, for your viewing pleasure, here are some examples:

I would pay this guy a lot of money if he would only marry
Miss Tang.

Now Mr. Poon (snicker) didn't have a say in his name. But Chinese and Koreans love to give themselves an alternate English name, so that when they talk to foreigners, they don't slaughter their Chinese one with ignorant pronounciation. And that name, they DO get to choose. It's moments like these when you get to meet 5-foot guys named:

His hobbies include beehives and porridge.

I'm fairly sure that the staff of SpeedTech are descended from the Navajo, which explains the nature names. My personal favourite, not least of all because he looks like an Asian Peter Pan, is:

That's a surname. His first name is actually "Lo".

Beautiful.

Ooh. I just got some spam. Subject: "URGENT: I Costume".
People don't even try with spam anymore. Spam got weird on us while we weren't looking; took some bad acid or something.