Academic editing for those whose first language is NOT English (or, for that matter, for anyone else)

Dear International Students, Faculty, and Scholars:

I edit documents for students, faculty, and scholars whose first language is not English. My goal is to make your document read like it was written by a native English speaker. Most of my clients have been from China, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Latin America, but I will work on documents for clients of any nationality. I edit statements you write to apply for grad school and for faculty positions, papers you intend to submit for publication to an English journal, business reports, letters, white papers, dissertation chapters, job applications, statements of purpose, and research proposals. 

I edit documents in all fields. I have edited papers in engineering, nanofabrication, statistics, plant pathology, city and regional planning, food science, history, plant genetics, biotechnology, plant breeding, wildlife biology, biomedicine, near eastern studies, theatre arts, psychology, and more. Clients simply send me their document (tag1@cornell.edu) as an email attachment, I edit it in MS Word using Track Changes, and I return the document, usually within 48 hours.

Most documents take less than three hours of editing to complete, unless they are unusually long. My clients pay me by sending me a check or depositing money in my PayPal account, which is very simple to do. Also, if you want to send me your document, I can provide an estimate of how much it will cost and how long it should take me to complete the job. As I edit, I also suggest ways to improve your writing in English generally. If desired, I can provide references from recent clients.

I am currently Professor Emeritus from Cornell University.  I have published dozens of papers in refereed journals over the past 40 years, and I served as Associate Editor for the journal Ecological Applications for three years. I taught university courses for 30 years, and I conducted ecological research throughout the U.S. and in Costa Rica. I lived in Korea and Costa Rica for one year each and, recently, I have been visiting Taiwan to teach short courses on conservation biology at National Taiwan University.

All correspondence between the author and me, including the contents of any document, is kept strictly confidential. So if you think this is valuable, please pass the word along.

My charges for this service: individuals-$50 per hour; institutions-$75 per hour.  When I return your document, I inform you how much the bill is and I can provide an invoice if desirable.  I also have an express service.  For $75 per hour, I will guarantee that I return your document within 24 hours of receiving it.

Occasional Holiday Letter #6 from DrTom and Robin for 2017!

Friends, enemies, even Republicans:

You will have to excuse this group letter, but it is the only way to go. If I were to send each of my FB friends a letter in the mail, it would cost about $650 in postage, and no holiday letter is worth that much. And I hate licking stamps, and I don’t have most of your addresses, and my postman would start spitting in our mailbox. Actually, I think he does that already, because the mailbox door is difficult to open and I refuse to replace it. I can’t think of any other way that the inside of that box could get so moist and putrid.

Most of us are utterly bored when we get one of those family-oriented letters. So let’s dispense with that part. Our kids are fine, our grandkids are even finer, we are fine, the chickens are fine, but our black lab, Zeus, is old and ailing. There, you are all caught up.

So, what a year, huh? You just knew that I wouldn’t be able to refrain from mentioning THAT man. But one interesting thing has evolved from the existence of this bizarre person. I now have a new item on my “bucket list”. I hope, somehow, to be included in one of the Donalds’ middle-of-the-night tweets about how much he hates me, and how I am going down, and how old and decrepit I look, and how my wife will never want to have sex with me again. I’m not yet sure how to arouse enough ire in him for me to make his tweet list, but I’m working on it. One idea is this: he can’t seem to get any musician to perform at his inauguration ball; they all refuse. So, eventually, my name will come up as one who plays a mean conga drum. And when he asks me to perform on that important day (and you know where this is going), I will haughtily refuse, which will piss him off to no end, and he will tweet about it at 3am that night while sitting on the toilet. Bucket list—check!

But the good news this week was the annual letter that Robin and I received from the Social Security Administration that tells us how much of a raise we will receive beginning in January. Raises for American recipients will be 0.3% in 2017. That’s right----3/10%, or about 1/3 of a percent raise. In my case, that amounts to an increase of $4.50 per month, about the cost of a LARGE bottle of ketchup. So look out homemade french fries in 2017, cause I am going to slather you in that red stuff like you have never been slathered before. And every time I do that, I will remember to thank the SS system for this dietary enhancement. Robin and I have been paying happily into the social security system for 53 years, and we are still paying into it. This raise is more than we deserve, and I sincerely hope that the fiscal conservatives in Congress will keep a tight rein on these increases; we must not let these raises get out of hand. A raise of 0.2% would have been sufficient, more than enough for a SMALL bottle of ketchup.

And what about this coming year? I’m told that we should all be full of hope, and good cheer, and optimism. After all, that is what humans do. We always hope for something more, for a better future, a brighter tomorrow. Maybe that brighter tomorrow is not going to happen in the location where we reside now. So these past few weeks, I have been researching what life would be like as a retiree living, at least part of the year, in Italy, Spain, Uruguay, and Chile (look out Silvas of Valparaiso). Costa Rica is always on the table, but we have been there, done that. It all sounds doable and encouraging. Good wine, good food, Cuban cigars, the music we like, mountains (except Uruguay), coasts, culture, interesting history, and that latino zest for life. Let’s at least stick a toe in the water. The worst that could happen is that the toe gets bitten off, but that leaves nine (see how this optimism thing works?). And with the recent social security increase, finances shouldn’t be a problem at all.

By the way, a couple of months ago I eliminated about 500 FB friends. These were people who I didn’t know at all, or they seemed to have no presence on FB any longer, or they were too right-wing for me to bear. Most of these were people I befriended years ago when I was truly a Facebook slut. Therefore, those of you who remain can consider yourselves the cream of the crop. Congratulations. Not sure how many deleted me for being obnoxious, too opinionated, or too far left, but it all works out.

Anyhow, Happy Holidays and have a great 2017. No need to send gifts to Robin and me this year (unless you really, really want to). Your clever comments on FB are all we need. And you old people, enjoy that extra ketchup!

Tom, Robin, and Zeus
December 2016

A Tale of Two Cities and of two places in time

I had three excellent English teachers in high school in the early 1960s, but Mr. Robinson, during my senior year, was my favorite.  He was a middle-aged man with whitish hair, bespectacled, soft-spoken, and the kind of guy who exuded mild manners with every word.  He had a gentle smile that he sported often, never a belly laugh, and an acceptable sense of humor.  He always wore a sport jacket; I remember it as gray or brown tweed.  He was the personification of what we all envision when we think of a college English professor at an Ivy League school.

That year in English, we mostly read great books and practiced our writing skills.  Unlike his usual outward demeanor, Mr. Robinson was a ruthless editor, which we thought was somewhat unfair at the time.  But he knew that freshman English in college was not a cake walk in those days, and that most of us would be facing that trial in only a few months.  For example, I was bound for Ohio State that fall, and a high percentage of entering students got Ds or Fs in freshmen English on a regular basis; about a third of OSU frosh flunked out of school during their first year.  So we wrote, and Mr. Robinson edited, and we rewrote, and he re-edited, and slowly but surely most of us got better and better at composing a readable, logical piece. 

That fall semester in college, I found out exactly what Mr. Robinson had been trying to get us to understand.  No matter how hard I tried, it was nearly impossible to get higher than a C on an English composition.  Those who had not had Mr. Robinson seemed to do even worse. But eventually, my scores, and presumably my writing skills, improved and I survived that academic year more or less unscathed, in no small way due to my mentor’s efforts the year before.

Perhaps the most vivid academic memory of that class was reading and discussing Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities.  How can anyone who has ever read that book not recall at least parts of the first and last sentences of that wonderful story.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times……..” and “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…..”  Oh, to be able to write a book, or an essay, or even a paragraph of prose with elements that have resounded through the ages like that.  Those words are certainly famous and timeless in their own right, and millions of people around the world are familiar with them.  But would they have left their indelible imprint on my soul if it had not been for Mr. Robinson’s ability to bring out the richness of their import?  That is what a great teacher can do, and it is a wonderful thing.

I have not reread that classic since I studied it in high school all those years ago.  But from time to time I think about that story, its characters and the beautiful expression of their powerful emotions through Dicken’s talented hand.  And then today, while I was a substitute teacher in a high school class, I realized that a copy of that gem was sitting on the desk at which I was sitting.  I stared at it for a long moment, not quite sure what I should do.  But I picked it up, and I read that incredible first sentence (which was much longer than I remembered).  And then I turned to the final page with all its sadness and I read Dickens’ last sentence. The memories of sitting in my high school English class only a few seats from Mr. Robinson’s desk, and waiting with anticipation for his clever way of getting us to dig for the depth of meaning that cemented that book forever in my mind, poured over me.

And I sat there, looking out over this class of 20 or so students, and I felt just like I remember Mr. Robinson looking.  We have all experienced something like that.  I have white hair, I’m sitting at a desk staring pensively at all those young minds with a curious smile on my face, and I’m feeling how important it is to open the minds of those teenagers, to make them feel something, to make them remember something beautiful about the great literature of the past.  For that fleeting moment, I WAS Mr. Robinson.

I have often wondered whatever happened to Mr. Robinson, but I’m sure he passed a long time ago.  After all, he was my teacher more than 50 years ago.  A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859 (the same year that Darwin published Origin of Species), and it was about 100 hundred years old when I first read it.  Another half century has passed, and students are still asked to read it.  How incredible!  Another half century, and I’m hoping there are still Mr. Robinsons out there.  Thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, because the world needs them—every last one.

Probabilities and the perception of danger

There is now a petition in Parliament to prevent Donald Trump from entering the UK because of his hate-speeches about Muslims (UK debates a ban on Trump), and Canada and Australia are now routinely warning their citizens about traveling in the U.S. because of the danger due to the gun culture here . This is like the warning to U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen or Libya, or other such places, because of the danger of violent crimes against Americans. So should we be worried about dangerous Muslims in the U.S. or dangerous Americans in general?  While Trump rails against Muslims and their potential danger to Americans, we have experienced slightly more than one mass shooting (defined as a killing of 4 or more people in a single incident) per day in 2015 (Mass shootings). Of more than 300 such shootings this year, only 1-2 were perpetrated by people who were foreign-born; the rest were done by wacky Americans with guns. In addition, another 30,000 people were killed by shootings in events that do not qualify as a mass-shooting. Of course, the Republican politicians’ uncreative solution to this problem is for all of us to carry more guns. How absurd!

Perception is nearly everything, when one has to triage what is safe and what is dangerous. In my case, I fear Americans with guns the most, with foreign-born terrorists following at a very distant third. I can’t even list number two, for fear of alienating some friends and relatives. I’m guessing that many people would put my number 3 as their number 1. But the data do not support that ranking. I almost never worry about foreign terrorism, because it is very rare in the U.S. But every time I walk into a 7-11 or a public school, I think consciously about some deranged guy who bears a grudge or has some kind of mental derangement, and I scan the area for suspicious people, escape routes, doors, and windows. Even though I know that the probability that I will be harmed violently is still exceedingly small, it is now on my mind much of the time. And this is no way to live.

The irony is that of the dozen or so countries where I have spent significant time in the past decade, the U.S. is the only place where I am somewhat preoccupied with the perception of possible violence. The only other place that matched this feeling was Nairobi, Kenya, although my travels through the rest of Kenya did not elicit this feeling. And in Uganda, I spent a week traveling from the Kenyan border on the east to the Rwandan border on the west, followed by a couple of days in Kampala the capitol. On that trip, I had total peace of mind about my safety, even though I was the only white guy for tens of miles in any direction during most of that week. For me, the main reason for this feeling of safety in foreign countries and my feeling of non-safety in my own country is the incredible difference in the availability of weapons. The number of small firearms in the U.S. now numbers more than 300,000,000, which represents more privately-owned small handguns per capita by far than any country in the world (Number of guns per capita). These numbers do not include rifles and shotguns, only handguns.

So what to do? I’m really not sure how to solve this problem. But let’s at least start by trying to match our perception of danger with the actual probabilities. The chances of being shot by a native- born American with a gun is on the order of 10,000 times greater than being hurt by a foreign-born terrorist, using the numbers cited above in the referenced article. The chances of being killed by someone who is driving while texting is probably even greater than that, but this form of mayhem never even makes it to the front page. My conclusion is that all this hype about dangerous immigrants and Muslim terrorists is overplayed, given the actual facts, but it resonates with the xenophobia that is so curiously common in the U.S.

If I can’t write like Steinbeck, why bother?

For the past couple of years, I have been reading some of the classic novels of the 20th century. Did you know that you can go online and find what the literary experts in this country think were the best works of fiction published in the 1900s by any author in the world, actually the top 223. My goal is to read them all, but I still have about 200 to go. It’s like a never-ending bucket list of words and sentences, and ideas, and philosophy, and turns of phrases and a sprinkling of sex and violence that every educated man should experience. When I initially skimmed the list that I so dutifully printed out, I noticed that Ernest Hemingway (5) and John Steinbeck (4) had several volumes that made the list, along with many authors of whom I had never heard. Of course, everyone has some familiarity with these two American giants of the literary world and, perhaps, most of us have read at least one of their novels, probably in high school. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men come to mind.

So with a few detours along the way, I dug into the works of Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa. Not all of these novels made the list, but once I began following the spoor of the great Ernest, I continued on a bit farther. And I enjoyed every minute of each of those reads.

Hemingway is famous for his style of writing—short, terse, no-nonsense sentences. His are stories of war and bull fighting and big game hunting, and the ever-present personal turmoil, but there is often plentiful drinking by the main protagonist, apparently based on prodigious time engaged in similar pursuits by the author himself. The drinking in Death in the Afternoon was so prolific and colorful that I found myself wanting bourbon right after breakfast. He made drinking seem as essential as brushing my teeth, and it sounded like fun, with all that camaraderie with interesting characters in exotic bars and hotels around the world. It all blended liquidly with my fond memories of carousing with pals in the army in Korea, of drinking tequila in some cantina with locals in Costa Rica, of knocking down beer with my grad school colleagues at Squirrels in Corvallis. So, I had hit pay dirt early in my reading crusade of the top 223, and the stories themselves were pretty good as well.

Enter Steinbeck. Not Hemingway at all. Longer, more involved sentences with commas. Sometimes even a semi-colon. And thoughtful, about poor people, sad or happy landscapes, how loneliness actually feels, what it must be like to be truly hungry, or truly angry, or pleasantly surprised. Wonderfully insightful descriptions. The kind of writing where I read a line or two, and then have the need to simply stare out of my den window into the forest so that I can think and digest what I just read, and how it relates to my life and decades-old memories of family, and friends, and deep feelings. That is what won me over. I want a writer who makes me spend almost as much time thinking about what I read as the actual time spent reading. I’ve never encountered an author who does that better than Steinbeck. He makes me laugh (Tortilla Flat), and cry (The Grapes of Wrath), and ponder the meaning of life (Cannery Row), and wonder why people are the way they are (The Pearl). I absolutely love every sentence of his as I read it. There never seems to be a throw-away line-never. Every word and combination of words means something, and carries weight. What a gift. I am green with envy. Much better than Hemingway!

But I’m also somewhat dismayed, because Steinbeck was so wonderful, so much better than any other writer, that I now have little desire to read anyone else. It would be a disappointment, almost a waste of time. As for writing anything else myself, I am tempted to forget about it entirely. If one cannot be as good as the best, then why try?

Let me explain something about my personality. I suppose it is a fault, but an interesting, quirky idiosyncrasy. I used to be a competitive tennis player. I played tennis in high school and varsity tennis at a major university. My senior year in college, I was the Number 1 player on the team for both singles and doubles. I was pretty good, but it is all relative. I was nowhere near the best or even 100th best, and I always knew this. I would never get to play in a major tournament, let alone win one. But I kept trying to improve, to get better, and to move up the pack. I loved the sport. I was hopeful. However, if someone had had perfect vision of the future at that time, and they told me that it was a certainty that I would never be the best, I would have quit the game on the spot. I actually knew that I would not, could not, ever be the best, but the 1 in a million chance that I might become the best someday is what kept me going.

And that is the way I now feel about writing. I am now wise enough to know that I will never be as good a writer as Steinbeck. It is impossible. It ain’t gonna happen. A few years ago, I outlined a book I had thought about writing for a long time, but I would be disappointed if I ever completed the damn thing, because I would constantly be comparing the result with that of the master. That would be frustrating and pitiful. It would leave me with a hollow gut. So why waste my time? After all, there is gardening to do, and bourbon to drink, and cigars to smoke. Those activities almost never disappoint me, because I am good at those things. Why spend time in an activity where you are mediocre compared with the best, when you can spend that time doing a thing to which you are well suited?

And think how efficient the entire process of publication and book hawking would become if every author adopted my “fault”. Certainly, less than 1% of the books that are published these days are worth reading. So I would say to these thousands of aspiring authors, “Read Steinbeck. Then, forget about writing. Don’t embarrass yourselves. Save trees and time. Take up bowling. Streamline your life with wise choices and increase your energy efficiency.” I doubt that anyone will take my advice, because they think there is that 1 in a million chance that they might be as good as Steinbeck. But I have seen the other side, and I now have perfect vision of the future in this respect, and I’m telling you in no uncertain terms that you will never be that good.

Just another little irritating thing

Near the top of my list of irritating things these days are those tiny plastic stickers found on fruit that you buy at the grocery store.  There is nothing new about this; these stickers have been around for years.  I try my best to use fewer plastic bags that are clogging up the oceans and landfills but, then, right before my eyes on almost every single banana, tomato, and apple I buy at the grocery is that stupid, shiny plastic sticker, which always appears as if it is laughing at me when I attempt to remove it without damaging the soft skin of a ripe piece of fruit.

Who can remember what those codes mean anyway?  Does the 4-digit code signify organic or is that the 5-digit code?  Does a code beginning with an “8” mean that the product was genetically modified?  Apparently an “8” is supposed to mean GMO but the fruit is often not labeled as such.  If we must have these stickers, can’t the codes just be something like “S”, which means Safe, and “NS”, which means Not Safe, and “NSu”, which means Not Sure?  You know, it is like the weather report with temperature and wind chill factor.  Don’t give me all that Ms. Weatherperson.  Just say, “Wear a jacket”, or “A T-shirt will be fine today”.

In addition, management and I throw all of our kitchen waste into our compost pile in the garden, but those plastic stickers do not decompose.  A year later, I can still read the word “Costa Rica” on an old sticker that inadvertently got past me, and is lying carefree in the garden.  They’re ugly and unsightly; simply put, they diminish the Zen that resides in my vegetable garden space.  And because I can’t stand to leave them in the compost pile, I am compelled to pick them out of that mess whenever I discover one.

So, what to do?  There is nothing to be done if you buy your produce at a grocery store instead of a farmer’s market (sticker-free) except to meticulously peel off each and every one of those damn things.  Buy the fruit, bring it home, PEEL, and then wash and store.  Then, the next time you bring fruit home, rinse and repeat.

(For a nice article that explains exactly what the codes on these stickers mean, click here.  Also, they are now considered an environmental problem.) 

The surgery that almost wasn’t

About 10 days ago I was scheduled for minor surgery that involved opening up my abdomen.  I had never had this kind of invasive procedure done to me before, so I was rightfully apprehensive. My surgeon, who I will call Dr. B, was a man I had met only once, when I had my diagnosis in his office the week before.  He was a young, good-looking guy with a pleasant personality and a sense of humor.  His fingernails were of normal length, indicating that he was not a nervous nail-biter.  He didn’t shift his weight from side to side as he talked, and he looked me straight in the eyes when he explained what was wrong with me and how he could fix it.  And, he didn’t have that habit of raising his intonation at the end of every sentence making it sound like a question (“The infection rate in such a procedure is about 2%?)  So far, so good.  He passed the DrTom’s Do I Trust This Guy To Open Me Up interview.  We scheduled the surgery.

 

 On the day in question, Management and I went to the hospital where I was admitted, and then quickly led to the prep room.  I undressed completely, put on the blue paper gown they provided, and settled onto the stretcher.  The nurse, who was obviously trying to make me feel calm with her almost-too-jovial demeanor, asked me many questions about allergies, medicines taken, and medical history.  She took my vital signs and threaded an IV line into the back of my hand, which promptly spurted blood all over that side of my bed.   I could tell she was not that experienced in all this, so I found myself trying to reassure her that she did a fine job of inserting the IV, I didn’t feel a thing, isn’t it great that I have large veins, etc.  In general, I overcompensated by appearing passive and bored with what she was doing, as if to indicate that I had abdominal surgery two or three times a day.  It is curious how we sometimes pretend to ignore potential danger in the hope that by not noticing the reality of the situation, that very reality will change for the better.

Within 30 minutes, I was all set to go.  I had prepared myself psychologically as best I could.  After all, I had lived a pretty happy life for 66 years, and if this was going to be the end of it all, I hadn’t done so badly.  As I ran through my list of rationalizations for a worst-case scenario, I realized the time was passing and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable on the gurney.  I began counting the drops of saline plopping into the line leading to my hand.  I obsessed about the coffee I was not allowed to have that morning.  I began dreading the 3-week recovery period after surgery when I was supposed to “take it easy”.

Three hours later, the head nurse of the unit and her assistant flung back the curtain to my cubicle, and entered my bedside space.  Dr. B has been detained by the surgery scheduled just before mine.  He was already two hours late in finishing, and he could be another 2-3 hours.  There had been an unexpected complication.  Do I wish to wait it out, with no guarantee he would ever get to me that day, or reschedule for another day?  Management and I discussed it a bit.  Dr. B might be tired after his first surgery, and then he works on me.  And I’m not going to go an entire day without coffee.  And I just couldn’t count saline drops any longer.  Nope.  We will reschedule for the following week.

During that evening’s Happy Hour, Management and I discussed the day’s events and the pros and cons of our decision.  One observation we made was that people generally spend more time doing some due diligence on the attorney they choose or their auto mechanic than they do the physician who will be administering their health care.  In my case, I needed some surgery, so my personal physician referred me to Dr. B, whom I had never met or heard of.  I accepted the recommendation unquestioningly.  Management, who was an E.R. nurse for years and then a real estate agent, always pointed out to me how people were much more sensitive about their money than their health care.  They readily gave up their body to perfect strangers for repair in the E.R., but always knew better than their real estate agent about all matters financial associated with the sale or purchase of a house.  They got angry about the latter, but almost never uttered a thought on the former.  Do what you must with my body, but never impugn my checkbook!

A week later I returned to the hospital and repeated the entire procedure again.  This time, Dr. B appeared on time, ready for action.  He had now had another week of  practice in the operating room since we almost met, and that couldn't hurt.  And I had now lived 66 years plus another week, so what the heck.  As the anesthesiologist pushed my gurney through the hallways with Versed (that most wonderful drug of colonoscopy fame) now coursing through my veins, I wondered if I could remain cognizant until I reached the O.R.  I wanted to size-up Dr. B one last time.  But I could not remain alert and, therefore, I did not get to conduct a final appraisal of that somewhat good-looking man with a nice sense of humor who was standing there with a scalpel in his hand.  As the O.R. nurse had told me earlier, "Let's rock 'n' roll".

The 7-Elevens in Taiwan are a necessity - not just a convenience

(The 7-Eleven that I used nearly eveyday in Taipei)

My wife and I recently spent a month in Taiwan. I gave some lectures at the University and helped to co-teach a course titled Biodiversity, Agriculture and Culture of Taiwan. We had never been to Taiwan before, so we were not completely sure what to expect about finding the basic necessities of life: coffee, beer, Twizzlers. Within hours of arriving, we were told not to worry about any of this — just go to any 7-Eleven convenience store.

We found the 7-Eleven nearest our hotel room, and that was not difficult. With nearly 5,000 stores in this small country, we came to realize that in the capital, Taipei, there must be a 7-Eleven every couple of blocks. In fact, several times we saw 7-Elevens on opposite corners of the same intersection. That’s right, two stores immediately across the street from one another. Was my mind deceiving me, was I seeing double, had I entered some parallel universe without knowing it? Could the coffee be better in one of the stores than in the other? Were Twizzlers the same price in each? Too many stores, not enough time!

Every morning, I literally skipped to OUR 7-Eleven, bought two American-style coffees (which I learned to order in Mandarin), a couple of hard-boiled eggs that were prepared in a bath of salty tea water (delicious) and, voila, breakfast was ready. After a while, the clerks recognized me (not difficult to remember a white-haired gringo in a Taiwanese convenience store), so they began drawing my coffee before I even placed my order.

But these “convenience” stores, which are spotless, attractive, and nicely lit, offer much more than my necessities of life. You can take your dirty laundry to a 7-Eleven in Taiwan, they send it out, and you return to pick it up. You can order items from Amazon.com and have them delivered to your local 7-Eleven, where you retrieve them. This apparently saves the delivery person from trying to locate your apartment among the sea of apartments in Taipei, and from solving the problem of where to leave the item when you are not at home. You can pay traffic tickets there and, believe it or not, you can pay your federal income tax there if it is not above a certain amount. These stores are also a social gathering place in the evening; all seats are taken and it is standing room only after dark. What more they offer, I’m not sure. Maybe you can find a wife or husband through the place rather than spending time with an online matchmaking service. The possibilities are limitless.  And did I mention that 7-Elevens in Taiwan are open 24 hours a day?

Of course, this all seems in contrast to the image most of us have of 7-Elevens in the U.S. I don’t go to ours after dark, because I don’t want to interrupt a robbery in progress. Ours are not as clean as those in Taiwan. Ours don’t have tea eggs. I can’t even remember where the 7-Elevens are in my town; in Taiwan, you simply walk a block and there one is.

So my impression of this Japanese-based company has changed for the better. People in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, and Thailand have appreciated the value of 7-Elevens for some time. Asians rely on them, they use them daily, and they seem proud to have them in their country. Taiwan also has Starbucks, but it seems that visiting one is considered a luxury, while the 7-Eleven is the staff of life.

Our 7-Elevens seem not as popular as they are in Taiwan. Maybe we have too many choices in the U.S., and we can drive as far from home as we need to get to any store we want. Maybe the name “7-11” is off-putting, because it reminds us of a casino, and who wants to go up against house odds when buying something you are going to put in your mouth. There are many possible reasons why 7-Elevens are not as popular in the states. But I’m putting my money on the fact that ours don’t have tea eggs.


Article first published as The 7-Elevens in Taiwan Are a Necessity - Not a Convenience on Technorati.

DrTom's Youtube videos

The following DrTom videos are available on Youtube:

1.  Lecture to the Cornell Association of Professors Emeriti, given Dec 2011, titled "My life as a field biologist: from deer to digital book in 40 short years".
          A summary of DrTom's 40-year career as a field biologist.

2.  "Impromptu interview at the slide"
          DrTom has some fun at the playground while being interviewed by his son.

3.  "Cornell University's sensational professor, Tom Gavin!"
          DrTom on a field trip with his Field Biology class, where a student filmed his "choir" practice with students.


I hope you enjoy these.  Stay tuned for updates.

I believe in the bucket

(Addressing the porcelain goddess.  Do you sometimes feel like this guy looks?)

Vomiting is not one of my favorite activities.  I'd rather spend my time doing something more constructive than emptying my stomach via my mouth.  But there are times when your body can not be deterred.  When my brothers and I were ill as kids, we would commonly lie in the living room on the couch and watch tv until the disease passed.  My mother always put a bucket next to the couch in case we had to barf.  This was not exactly the same as "praying to the porcelain princess", but it was effective.  Many a messy cleanup was avoided because of this vomitus catchment that was strategically placed within hurling distance.

The first time I was ill with nausea after I was married, I called to my wife to bring the bucket.  My wife did not grow up with this bucket thing in her home, and so she laughed hysterically at me for thinking I could not make it to the bathroom when the time was ripe.  I pleaded, but to no avail.  Some Emergency Room RNs (which my wife was at that time) have little empathy for those of us with sensitive stomachs.  If it's not a heart attack or an amputated limb, get over it!

Then, in the summer of 1969 when I was stationed with the army in Baltimore, my mother and her good friend Rose came to visit us in our small apartment for a few days.  We decided to drive to D.C. to see the sights and to have lunch.  I can't for the life of me remember what it was we ate, but on the hour drive back to Baltimore my mother and I got violently ill.  Obviously this was food poisoning, although my wife ate what I had and Rose ate what my mother had and neither of them got sick.

The Baltimore-Washington Parkway was a busy highway that day, as usual, and there was no easy place to stop or pull over.  My mother was in the back seat with Rose and I was in the front while my wife drove.  My mother and I both felt as though we were going to heave any minute.  What to do?  What to do?  Then, my mother discovered some old newspapers in the back seat.  In what was a more creative move than making an origami stork, and far more practical, my mother quickly rolled up some newspaper into a very tight cone with no hole at the bottom.  She made two of them, and passed one to me in the front.  For the rest of the trip home, my mother and I held this ridiculous 18-inch long funnel of newspaper in front of our faces with our chins perched on the edge of our respective cones, and braced for what we thought was the inevitable.  My wife, the empathetic nurse, and Rose were laughing so hard that Management almost drove the car off the highway twice, as mother and son buried their faces in yesterday's sports page.

We finally managed to pull up in front of our apartment located in a rather large complex, having held the problem internally for what seemed like hours.  My mother rushed inside to lie down on our bed, and immediately called for the bucket, but I couldn't make it.  I held on to a small tree in the yard and began heaving violently, all the while making a roar loud enough to cause the starlings in the tree above me to drop to the ground as if dead.  Neighbors began looking out of their windows on all sides, assuming that the drunken soldier was now paying the price for a well-lubricated lunch.  I had no energy to explain, and all I could think to do was to put as much distance between me and that little tree as possible.  In hindsight, it was a good thing I stayed outside to "pull the trigger", because we only had one bucket in those days, and that one was now assigned to my mother.

People have different thresholds that need crossing before they "liquidate their assets", but my advice is simple.  Lie down flat on a bed or couch when you are really nauseous, avoid watching the Republican presidential debates, and have lots of buckets on hand.  This strategy should get you through.