Pryor Week #14:Name games, Grunting Worms, Tigger, and Trees

I love weird names in Taiwan.

There’s a unique pleasure from living in Asia all these years.

Names.

From friends choosing such awesome English names as “Sandwich” and “Meatball” and being placed on their business cards to $200 million massive complexes and malls being named “Taiwan Spinning” and “Amazing Hall” in giant letters above the street.

I’m not sure the exact reasoning behind all of these names other than they grant me a sly smile every time I pass by one.

But the store name above probably takes the cake. It used to be a foreign goods supermarket simply called “Jason’s” for a long time. Recently all the locations were bought out by another supermarket chain, shut down, revamped, and revealed as…Mia C’bon.

The thing is, no one here can say it. No one here knows what it means. Foreigners and locals alike.

I asked my French friend and he figured it was “Mia is good.” Which would obviously be a ridiculous name. So, today I did a bit of digging and finally found out the reasoning, and that amused smile crept up on my face yet again.

Because I was left even more confused:

So, “Mine everything is wonderful” in four languages?

It’s also not the actual translation for French, my friend assures me. Ah, the wonderful world of marketing.

Almost makes me miss corporate life.

Some Cool Things I Learned This Week:

#1. What on earth is worm grunting?

I saw a weird video yesterday that looked so fake I had to look it up—and it turned out to be completely true. A short stick with grooved teeth was shoved into the ground and a person was rubbing another stick up and down it. Then out of nowhere came a bunch of creepy crawly worms wiggling their way towards the source of the sound.

Apparently, it’s called worm grunting or worm charming, and that’s pretty awesome. There’s even festivals and competitions to see who’s the best worm charmer! I was left wondering if the better someone is at charming worms meant the opposite for potential human partner charming, but I digress.

Some posit the sounds mimic those of moles, and the worms are trying to get above ground to escape their potential suitor. Others say it mimics the sound and drumbeat of rain. I say it’s simply magic.

Anyway, you can worm your way into a video of one of the championships if curious.

#2. It’s the eye of the tigers, or yours?

Good news for any Tigger lovers out there, the population of tigers in Nepal has tripled to 355 since 2009. They’re also the only country of 13 that made a similar pledge to have met their goal. The numbers might also be slightly inflated, or rather their initial numbers might have been understated, because monitoring methods have substantially improved over the years.

Either way, that’s awesome to see conservation efforts actually pay off, even if its one country at a time. What’s not so awesome?

Tigers. Eat. People.

“Over the last three years there have been 104 tiger attacks inside protected areas and 62 people have been killed.”—Kathmandu Post

But I wouldn’t let that worry you too much, Tigger won’t be having you for dinner anytime soon—only 1% of the cases involved them finishing their meal.

Clearly these tigers grew up without my mother at the dinner table, because they positively love playing with their food.

#3. Finally, something we can all agree on

While the left-right divide continues growing in America, there’s still a few things everyone can agree on. One of them is trees.

According to Pew Research, over 90% of Americans say they’re in favor of planting around 1,000,000,000,000 trees to help absorb carbon emissions.

That’s not a typo. 1 trillion trees! I did some quick napkin math and I soon got lost in translation.

According to the Ten Tree blog, 1 million trees would take up roughly 20 thousand acres of land. So, 1 trillion trees would take up about 20 billion acres.

According to NPR, the entire landmass of the USA is…1.9 billion acres.

So, perhaps I missed out on something there. Or, 90% of Americans believe in teeny tiny tree forests. Or, 90% of Americans have the grandest sense of grandiosity about how grand their land is.

Not sure.

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This message has been brought to you by a non-lizard-king named J.J. Pryor.

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