Melissa Neylon was a passenger in her boyfriend’s car back in February 2009. Her boyfriend, Jayke Baldwin was speeding.

Not surprisingly Baldwin eventually lost control of the car and hit a tree. Melissa presumably wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown out onto the road upon impact.

The car Baldwin was driving then crushed her to death as she lay on the road.

All of the above is factual and there’s no disputing of the events as they occurred. Despite this however, when facing the Australian court system, Baldwin was found guilty and received a three year suspended sentence.

For no other reason than Jayke Baldwin is a cross dresser. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Foreword>: The following article is a continuation of ‘Taiwanese girls and crazy ex-boyfriends‘. You’ll probably want to read that to get the proper context of this article.


If you want to experience the worst of a culture, forget travelling off the beaten track, forget booking holidays to places you’ve never heard of and forget moving there and hoping a country’s real culture eventually exposes itself to you.

All these methods might work, but if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty of certain aspects of some cultures – just do what I did.

Start dating the locals. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Religion is a funny old thing in Taiwan. In day to day life you almost don’t see it. There’s the odd temple here and there blended into the landscape and outside of certain religious days/events, there’s no real schedule to attend them or anything.

It’s almost as if for most of the Taiwanese, religion is more of a superstitious convenience. It’s easier to attribute luck, Buddha, ghosts or something else for anything good or bad event that happens I guess.

That said, quite like the west you have the token religious populations but then you also have the die hards.

A few months ago now I was cycling through Hsinchu county and came across a place called Emei lake. As I cycled through Emei lake, out of the blue and seemingly in the middle of nowhere, popped up the biggest freaking Buddha statue I’ve ever seen. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Simply put, the last 24 hours of my life have had me going out of my mind.

When I came to Taiwan I’d heard a few stories about Taiwanese girls and their sometimes crazyness. Stories about extreme jealousy, being bombarded with phone calls and SMS messages and wanting marriage commitment after a few months were all in the back of my mind upon arriving.

Thus far my journey into Taiwan’s dating scene has been hit and miss. I’ve been yelled at, watched girls fight over me, been dropped like a hot potato for no apparent reason, had some girls try the subtle ‘buy me this!’ hints dropped at every opportunity they get and so on and so forth.

Mind you I’ve also had some wonderful times too, but thus far the negatives far outweight the positives. Well, almost. I guess the positive of feeling connected with someone overrides the negatives while it lasts.

Anyway, I digress. When I arrived in Taiwan I believed I was more then prepared to face the challenge of the local dating scene. Conscious of the cultural differences and aware that I’d be fighting stereotypes at every turn I thought I had a good shot.

Nothing though, not anything I’d read or heard about prepared me for the crazy ex-boyfriends though. I guess I’ve just been lucky thus far in that regard as it’s never come up. Until now.

Here’s how it went down. [Read the rest of this entry...]

For the most part, the debate on whether Australia should become a republic or not seems to have largely died.

In the lead up to recent election, Julia Gillard stated it wasn’t something she wasn’t prepared to bring up until the current Queen died and Tony Abbott has declared himself a staunch Monarchist. Regardless of who eventually gets into power it seems the republic debate is off the table for a few years yet.

This fact was recently picked up on by Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry. McGorry entered into the Australian republic debate today by claiming that ‘the nation’s political leaders are too worried about focus groups to push for a republic‘.

With minorities having an increasing power wielding capacity in our political landscape (one only needs to look at the current hung parliament to see the evidence), it’s easy to not only see where McGorry’s coming from, but also to agree with him.

…but then came the fineprint. [Read the rest of this entry...]

This story broke a few days ago and upon reading the initial reports in the early hours of the morning, I secretly hoped that fourchan or some other online vigilante group would get involved.

For those of you that came in late, so the story goes that Stephanie and Darryl Mann found their cat Lola sealed in a rubbish bin. The couple heard Lola meowing from the bin and came to her rescue.

Luckily the Mann household was equipped with a video security system and upon watching security footage, the couple witnessed one of the most brazen acts of animal cruelty I’ve ever seen.

Watch the footage for yourself; [Read the rest of this entry...]

Last week I found myself walking along the beach with the girlfriend. We’d had a nice dinner and gone for a scooter run around the place and decided we wanted to walk it off some.

With the sun down and the mercury still at a pleasant 28-29, a walk along the beach seemed the perfect way to end the night.

So we thought.

Walking along the boardwalk at a casual pace enjoying the atmosphere, being Taiwan most people were either still working or had family business to attend to. Save for a few lonely teenagers we pretty much had the boardwalk to ourselves.

As we discussed life in general just did the happy couple thing, out of the corner of my eye I suddenly realised we weren’t alone. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Aside from the detrimental health effects of being overweight, one of the other main changes one experiences when they pack on the kilos is the obvious change of appearance.

Infact most people raise more then eyebrow when they see someone they haven’t seen in a while who has undergone a sizeable weight change. In the extreme cases there might even be shock at the change of appearance.

I know this has happened to me personally but thankfully it’s never extended past the ‘holy crap’ gaping mouth open stage.

With this change in appearance comes the obvious need to maintain anything that relies on your physical identity. Doctors records, a photo ID for work perhaps and of course if you’re using it – your passport.

What should be common sense to most seems to have been oblivious to one Derrick Agyeman. So much so that after being refused re-entry into Britain after a weekend away, he’s now suing in an attempt to try and make a buck off it. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Internet scams have been around for as long the internet has existed itself. It must have been roughly what, a few seconds after email was invented that people realised that was a lot of money to be made by sending out phishing emails.

These emails usually contain some rubbish story and then ask for money. Despite evolving to use creative language and ever interesting storylines, they always come down to sending money somewhere. Always with the money.

Despite this template design though, fast forward to the year 2010 and people are still falling for scam emails en masse. So much so that last week NSW Fair Trading commissioner Virginia Judge issued an alert on online scams to the general public.

The irony being that the alert was only issued after Judge herself fell for the scam. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Despite the hysteria of political correctness and health and safety in the workplace, it remains a constant that employers are simply unable to control what their employees say.

Employees are human and if history has taught us anything it’s that humans can be unpredictable. This isn’t some kind of modern breakthrough in the social sciences either, infact it should be kind of obvious.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Ali Iskafi for taking Telstra to court. He’s crying racial vilification over being called a ‘fucking terrorist’ at a work function. [Read the rest of this entry...]