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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

Long time readers of OzSoapbox will no doubt know that my relationship with the clothing brand American Apparel has been a turbulent one. By far my favourite brand of tshirt out there, for years now I’ve been caught between loving the style of American Apparel’s plain fine jersey tshirts and learning to live as a [...]

With a depressing estimate of nine billion people set to inhabit Earth by 2050, it’s no secret that we as a global civilization are going to have to ramp up our food production methods to keep up with demand. The days of livestock grazing on open rolling plains is fast becoming extinct and more then [...]