A McDonald's Menu from the US

My neighbors recently brought back a McDonald's menu from the US. Some of the items are probably unfamiliar to Taiwanese so I listed them below. Menu item is in bold.

Quarter Pounder with Cheese: basically a cheeseburger. (1 quarter pound = 114 grams, before cooking)

Premium Chicken Club Sandwich: a club sandwich usually has 3 slices of bread with turkey, lettuce, bacon, and mayonnaise in between.

Premium Chicken Ranch BLT Sandwich (Ranch refers to a sauce that is similar to Ranch Dressing. BLT = Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato)


Ranch Snack Wrap: crispy chicken, cheddar jack cheese, lettuce and ranch sauce wrapped in a soft flour tortilla.



Photo of Snack Wrap from Fast Food News






Chipolte BBQ Snack Wrap: chipotle is an American Spanish word for "A ripe jalapeño pepper that has been dried and smoked for use in cooking." As defined by answers.com.

Newman's Own Ranch Dressing: Newman refers to Paul Newman, an American movie star. As his website states: "All profits after taxes go to progressive causes."

Hash Browns: these are "chopped cooked potatoes, fried until brown." see answers.com for a photo.


Fruit 'n Yogurt Parfait: a parfait is a dessert made from different flavor ice creams, nuts, cream and other sweets. In the US it is usually served in a tall glass.

Photo of American parfait from answers.com







McGriddles: This is McDonald's brand name for a sandwich that may have eggs, bacon, or cheese. These are placed between two small "griddle cakes" which are like pancakes.

Photo from McDonald's.

Periods of Life

Infant: Usually from birth to about 12 months (before they can walk).

Baby: a very young child (includes infants and slightly older children).

Toddler: 12-36 months (after being able to walk).

Preschooler: 3 - 5 years of age (a child not old enough to attend kindergarten).

Child: Between birth and Puberty (in the US around 11 for girls and 13 for boys).

Adolescent: Between the ages of 12 or 14 to 19 or 21 (in the US).

Teenager: From 13 to 19 years of age.

Adult: In most countries the legal definition is usually someone over the age of either 18 or 21.

Middle Age: Between 35 and 54 years of age (according to the US Census).

Old Age: Roughly after 65 years of age (this age group is also known as the elderly, seniors or senior citizens).

Centenarian: someone who has lived to the age of 100 and above.

Possible Chess Moves

The lines indicates a piece's control over all the squares through which the line runs. The power of a piece ends at the square the arrow indicates. For clarity, the origin of some knight moves have solid red circles. Unlike other pieces, the knight must move to the square indicated by the arrow. Other pieces can move to any square the line runs through.

As complicated as it looks, there is one important simplifying factor. The "lines of force" of chess pieces do not interfere with one another. This is unlike real physical phenomenon in which the influence of different forces on one another complicate analysis immensely. For example, the interaction of gravitational forces make the three body problem very difficult to solve.

The above diagram is based on the position below.

Frequency of Words

Three Useful Sites:

1. WFWSE frequency lists
2. Children's Printed Word Database
3. British National Corpus (for sample sentences)
   

You can find many kinds of word lists at http://iteslj.org/links/TESL/Vocabulary/.

I found two particularly useful. The first, and perhaps the most authoritative, is based on the British National Corpus. You can either go there directly by clicking on frequency lists, or get to it through the main site at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/bncfreq/.

The British National Corpus includes a wide variety both written (90%) and unwritten (10%) material. The nice thing is that you do not need to download any files to use it. The disadvantage is that it focuses solely on British English.

Note that many of the frequency lists have two versions, by lemma and not lemmatized.
A lemma is a headword in the dictionary. This is the "main" entry that you will find. Other forms of the word will be grouped underneath it. On the lists, a lemmatized word means that all forms of a word (derived or plural) are counted as a lemma or headword. For example, when you check the Frequency list of verbs (by lemma): list, you will find no entries for woke, but a frequency count of 41 for wake. All other forms of wake were counted as wake. The not lemmatized versions of lists simply count words as they occur.


The second list is the Children's Printed Word Database based on reading material of children between 5 and 9. Developed by the Department of Psychology, University of Essex in the UK.

Finally, if you would like to find sample sentences using a word, you can use the British National Corpus website. The source of each sentence is given (book, magazine, newspaper, etc.).

Indebted Taipei bakery shuttered

Wecare was my favorite bakery in the Gongguan (Tiida) area. It was the only bakery that sold good Western style bread.

The Taipei times article generated some of these question about Wecare's closure:

1. Which was a bigger factor in their closure, higher commodity prices or competition from lower priced cafes?
2. How much of a factor was the increase in rents?
   
3. Wecare sold many breads unavailable elsewhere, especially not at lower priced cafes. So were such cafes able to take away so much of Wecare's business?
4. Even if this was the case, was it impossible for Wecare to become even more specialized and concentrate only on baked goods not sold by other bakeries?
5. Were all eleven Wecare bakeries doing badly or only some?
6. I've noticed other bakeries have been raising their prices, could Wecare not compensate for higher commodity prices by also raising its prices?
7. How have low priced cafes been able to survive the higher costs of dairy products and flour?
   
8. Can Wecare reorganize and then reopen some of its bakeries (especially the Gonnguan one) again?
   
9. The article indicates that Wecare had debt. But most companies have debt. Was Wecare's debt larger than that of other bakeries?
10. What is the value of the voucher's held by consumers?
11. Governments often want to interfere in markets by bailing out businesses. For those who believe this is an appropriate response to badly run businesses, why not bailout Wecare instead of urging consumers to call The Consumer Protection Commission's hotline and complain about unusable vouchers. In fact Wecare's closure would be a good opportunity to come up with a litmus test for which kind of businesses should receive government assistance.
    

Social/Political Divisions

Below are political social and divisions in ascending (形容詞) order of size and/or complexity. The divisions are in bold. Divisions that are roughly equivalent are on the same line and separated from other divisions by solid lines. Examples of some political divisions are given in regular text underneath the division name where it seems useful or helpful to do so.

Family(1)
Nuclear family
Extended family
Clan
Tribe
Village
Town
City
County
Westchester County (in New York state, U.S.A.)
Los Angeles County (in California, U.S.A.)
State		Province			Canton		Prefecture
N.Y. (U.S.A.)		Fujian (China)		Zürich (Switzerland)			Tokyo (Japan)
							Hokkaidō (Japan)
	Autonomous Region				Reservation
	Tibet (China)			Navaho Nation Indian Reservation
Jewish Autonomous Region (Russia)					Hopi Indian Reservation
Nation	State	Nation-state		Country		City-state(2)		Statelet
					Ancient Greek city states
					Medieval Italian City States
						Vatican City
Federation		League		Confederation				Union
U.S.A.	League of Nations			Swiss Confederation(3)				The Soviet Union
Germany	Hanseatic League
				The United States(4)				The United States(5)
			(1781-1788)					(especially the Northern states during the Civil War)
			The Confederate States of America
			(the southern states during the Civil War)
		Empire				Commonwealth
	British Empire					British Commonwealth
	Roman Empire
	Chinese Empire

The names of political and administrative units are often used in a variety of ways so some political divisions are excluded from the hierarchy because they did not fit anywhere easily.
Below are a few examples of some terms which are used in more than one way:

• Commonwealths: For example, four U.S. states, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, are commonwealths. But much of what was the British Empire is now called the Commonwealth of Nations. It is also a synonym for a nation or state governed by the people.
  

• A municipality according to answers.com is "A political unit, such as a city, town, or village, incorporated for local self-government." Under the same entry it says that a municipality can also be reserved for large or important cities. The wikepedia article on municipalities says that a grouping of cities, towns or villages may also be called a municipality. Therefore the size of municipalities can vary considerably.

• Cities should be clear enough but in China "cities" is used to denote rather different entities at three different political levels.

• District: This clssification is used in a myriad of ways in different countries.

(1) We often hear of the decline in family values in conjunction with the replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family. But apparently the nuclear family has been far more common since the fourteenth century, both in Europe and in China, than previously thought. See Francis Fukuyama's Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity, 1996 paperback edition, p. 105.

(2) Some important city-states of

...ancient Greece were Athens, Sparta, and Thebes.
...Italy in the Rennaissance were Pisa, Florence, Venice, and Genoa.
...the German Hanseatic League were Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck.

(3) Switzerland is also often referred to as the Swiss Federation. In fact, their governing laws are called the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation.

(4) The United States Articles of Confederation were in effect from 1781 until the U.S. Constitution was adopted the year following Rhode Island's ratification (the ninth state to do so) in 1789.

(5) The United States is comprised of 50 states, one district (Washington D.C.) and a number of territories , of which the better known are Puerto Rico, Guam, United States Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. Washington D.C. and the territories are not part of any state.


In addition to the multiple usages listed above, the words designating a country are seriously deficient in that they make no reference to ethnicity (名詞). Dictionaries list country, nation and state as synonyms. But the idea of a state as strictly a political organization seen as separate from the ethnic background of its inhabitants is different from a political organization established by a large ethnic group that claims the right to self-rule precisely because of its ethnic unity and large numbers. The Nazi state was not just another European country: its nationalism can only be understood in light of ethnic chauvinism. Pierre L. Van Den Berghe's elucidated far more precise definitions of states and nations with respect to ethnicity in The Ethnic Phenomenon (p. 61), which unfortunately have not entered the mainstream.

The only two divisions in the above listings that are defined in terms of ethnicity are the autonomous regions and Indian Reservations. Many countries have various kinds of autonomous regions, the two examples are from China and Russia. China has five autonomous regions, one of which is Tibet ("Free Tibet" bumper stickers are commonly seen in California). In these regions the Han Chinese are a minority. In fact, the preamble to the constitution of The People's Republic of China acknowledges the contribution of different ethnic groups as follows: "The people of all nationalities [which I read as ethnic group] in China have jointly created a splendid culture and have a glorious revolutionary tradition." The preamble goes on to refer to China as a "unitary multi-national state built up jointly by the people of all its nationalities."

The other example is given because it is something of an oddity. According to the wikepedia entry and allstates-flag.com the Jewish population of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia is actually less than 5%!

Interestingly, the connection between nation and ethnicity is, perhaps coincidentally, made by the inclusion of the word nation in the name of the Navajo reservation.

Another example of the connection between nation and ethnicity is that the former Soviet Union's passports had a separate entry for ethnic background apart from identifying one as a Soviet citizen (The Ethnic Phenomenon p.77).

Statelets should actually be divided into two categories: full-fledged (形容詞) small states and pseudo-states. The first category would include places such as:
Monaco, Andorra, San Morino, and The Vatican. These have clearly demarcated borders, are internationally recognized and have often experienced years of stability. The Vatican is also a city-state.

The second category would include places to which the term statelet is applied pejoratively. I've seen it applied in this manner to Israel before it achieved nationhood, various areas in northern Iraq controlled by a groups other than the central government, Northern Ireland, Lebanon as well as many others. These statelets are not internationally recognized, they have often been created recently, many of them suffer from severe social disorder and either have no central government or one which is simply not internationally recognized. The Kurdish controlled area in northern Iraq is a statelet hoping to become a "regular" country.

There is no simple rule for deciding which political divisions are good or bad. Tyranny can be found in small city-states as well as large nations. The enormously large Soviet Union (22.4 million km²) was a totalitarian state held together by force, whereas the British Commonwealth (31.4 million km²) is entirely a voluntary association of nations. Economic success also varies wildly among countries and neither a large nor small land mass necessarily determines whether a polity will be poor or wealthy. Many small countries are economic basket cases but by one measure of wealth, tiny Luxumberg ranked first whereas China ranked 108th (see finfacts.com).

Russia votes to allow private armies for energy giants

This development is not as novel as it may seem. Private individuals and companies have even been enlisted to serve governments. According to a Los Angeles Times article, "Although private companies have played a role in conflicts since the American Revolution, the U.S. has relied more on contractors in Iraq than in any other war, according to military experts." This includes the hiring of "armed contractors" by the U.S. military in Iraq. The fact that there is a Private Security Association of Iraq suggests there must be a large number of armed contractors in Iraq.

The U.S. Constitution in Art. I § 8, explicitly allows the contracting out of military duties to private individuals by giving Congress the power to grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Normally these authorized the use of force by a private ship (privateer) against foreign ships (vessels).

Why Westerners Think Confuciounism is a Religion

The following are some reasons Westerners think of Confucianism as a religion, though most Taiwanese do not consider it a religion.

The words "temple," "worship" and "pray" are often used by Taiwanese when referring to Confucianism. In English each of these words is closely linked to religion.

temple: this is usually a building for religious worship and the Chinese word for a building associated with Confucious. In contrast, when in America we wish to show our respect to a great individual without implying that he was a divinity or a god, we would build a memorial, such as the famous Lincoln or Washington memorials, in the person's honor.

worship: this is a deep respect and love usually shown or expressed for a god or divinity.

pray: before a big exam, students often pray for good scores at a Confucian Temple. But normally only a divine power can influence the future so again Westerners will conclude that Taiwanese believe Confucious was more than just a great man.

It is certainly true that Confucious is not regarded by anyone as a creator god, such as exists in the Western monotheistic (one God) religions. But the Taiwanese attitude towards Confucious suggests to Westerners that at the very least he is considered divine.

I should also mention Wing-Tsit Chan's (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy) commentary on K'and Yu-Wei, the Chinese philosopher and reformer (1858-1927): "K'ang was the first to regard Confucious as the founder of a religion, and he vigorously advocated Confucionism as the state religion." This of course suggests my opinion is in the minority.