Nominal Taiwanese salmon arbitrage

Have your fun while you can:

A Taiwanese official has pleaded with people to stop changing their name to “salmon” after dozens made the unusual move to take advantage of a restaurant promotion.

In a phenomenon that has been labelled “salmon chaos” by local media, about 150 mostly young people visited government offices in recent days to officially change their name.

The cause of this sudden enthusiasm was a chain of sushi restaurants.

Under the two-day promotion, which ended on Thursday, any customer whose ID card contained “gui yu” – the Chinese characters for salmon – would be entitled to an all-you-can-eat sushi meal along with five friends…

The United Daily News reported that one resident decided to add a record 36 new characters to his name, most of them seafood themed, including the characters for “abalone”, “crab” and “lobster”.

Here is the full story, via Jeremy Rubinoff.