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Tennis

I've recently picked up tennis. I'm slowly moving away from the more contact heavy sports like basketball and going for the longeivity sports. Tennis is fun too. I've always admired Pete Sampras for his style and ability to just win. I frankly don't think there's been a better tennis player..though having never won the French Open does take a bit out of the argument.

So my recent trip back to Taiwan was short but sweet. Two weeks only but packed full of activities. I went back to help out with an interesting program encouraging 2nd generation Taiwanese to go to Taiwan to intern and get to know the land. More info can be found here. I think it's great that a program like this has begun, and I fully intend to support it any way I can. I also came back feeling I need to do more to help Taiwan's cause. So I'm going to try to get more involved.

One thing that put a dent on a great trip was getting some negative press. I was actually in the news and the media being the way they are, had to find some negative things to say without actually doing any homework. And when we sent info to correct them, they didn't respond with any full apologies, rather, just a small correction. I think there is a culture, at least in Taiwan, of the media not being responsible with their reporting and definitely biased in terms of the their political beliefs. The bigger problem though, is the inability to differentiate editorial from news reporting. Editorials are free to take stands, just as the NYTimes editorials are clearly more liberal than conservative. But regular news reporting should be free from that kind of bias. I think the newspapers in Taiwan, and forget about even talking about TV news, just don't get this. Hopefully this will change as the democracy slowly matures. For one thing, we at least have a free press! Anyways, just venting a bit.

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