I'm already late for the picnic thing, I'm doing the live update thing for new viruses, and I'm running water for my bath and checking my closet for clothes I can actually wear. Ah yes, the joys of multi-tasking.

Fried the brilliant moron asks whether teachers should be held accountable for the subsequent dim-wittedness of their students:

“I think it is the responsibility of teachers, and other educators, to evaluate students based on intelligence and competency rather than on regurgitation of textbook mumbo-jumbo. Scientists have taught monkeys, and dolphins, to remember things like sounds, shapes, and words. I think humans, even young ones, should be held to a standard a tad higher.”

True, there is a lot to be said for this country’s state of education as well. It’s not so much as a dumbing down, but perhaps a tendency to be more lax, to allow witticisms and the ability to bluff pass as I sign of intelligence. We only need to look at the kind of game show contestants crowding our television sets. You can be sure that each of those contestants had been in school at one point in their lives, and most of them with college degrees. But given questions that require, in the very least, knowledge of trivia and common sense, they all seem to be newly lobotomized.

It can be argued that game shows flourish for fun and the possibility of earning a quick buck, and I don’t think such questions as “discuss and differentiate the quantity theory of insanity as culled from the text of Will Self and Hedda Gabbler” would figure in prime time television. We may complain and wrinkle our noses at all the game shows, the extra sudsy soap operas, dubbed or otherwise, and proclaim all of these as unspeakably jologs. It is. They are made that way because the target market is specifically and undeniably masa.

Jologs is not an invention or a byword but a demographic: It is the product of research, the countless studies and focus group discussions involving that specific audience. No matter how baduy we may think those shows are, as long as a large number of people watch them with zest, and discuss the plot points on the jeepney or in the MRT, their existence will be assured. The advertisers will continue to sell their products to us in between the gaps, just when you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see who gets voted out, slapped or raised from the dead.

Elsewhere in jologs land: Mark plays with his Jolina dolls and provides us a backstage view of a formerly leather clad Kris Aquino.

200 inmates were evacuated from a fire that broke out in the maximum security zone of the National Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa. The cause of the blaze is unknown, although it is suspected that an illegal wiring set up by one of the inmates could have caused it. The affected building holds those serving life terms or those awaiting execution. Police Superintendent Tesoro dismissed reports of the being part of an escape plan: "We did a headcount and all of them are accounted for."

Haven’t these guys ever watched a prison movie?

The UP Film Center held a three day Nida Blanca Retrospective which started Monday, 26 November. The featured films showcases Nida Blanca's best performances in over five decades of acting: Nonoy Catindig's Walang Sisihan (1962), a Nida-Nestor comedy; Miguelito, Ang Batang Rebelde (1985), Eddie Garcia's Magdusa Ka (1986), Maryo J. Delos Reyes's Saan Darating ang Umaga (1983).

I caught this evening's screening of Sana Pag-ibig Na (1998), directed by Jeffrey Jeturian from a script by Armando Lao. Sana Pag-ibig Na examines the emotional turbulence that rocks a university professor's family when his infidelity is discovered after his death. Whose loyalty should you choose? Who is the better woman -- your mother or your father's mistress? The professor's wife, their son, and the mistress shift allegiances and learn to live with the harsh situation thrust upon them.

Given that the situation is staple melodrama, the actors turn out very fine and understated performances. Nida Blanca's wronged wife is pitiful, angry, mean and then finally at peace with herself. Gerald Madrid manages to convey the confusion and anger he initially felt at his father's betrayal, and then later the guilt for having befriended his father's other woman. And Angel Aquino is surprisingly non-hysterical in a role that could have ended up in complete shout- and slapfests.

Sana Pag-ibig Na was produced on a shoestring budget as part of the pito-pito movie trend from the late 90s. Although critically acclaimed, the movie never really found its audience. It is therefore a bit sad that the theater was only half full, which could be expected since the university has only a handful of classes on Wednesdays.

Dubya is watching you: A Durham Tech freshman gets a rap from the Secret Service for alleged "anti-American" paraphernalia in her room. What? Dubya-as-hangman posters aren't allowed in dorm rooms anymore? Via Boing boing.

I was in the Music Museum last night for New Voice Company’s re-staging of The Vagina Monologues when a friend informed me that the Republic of Malate got burned. Both the Music Museum and Roma are owned by singer Kuh Ledesma. In 1992, the Music Museum burned down. It's as though Ms. Ledesma's business motto is burn down the house instead of break a leg.

"Ideolohiya! Ideolohiya! Nakakain ba ang ideolohiya?"

I think I had that for breakfast somewhere and spit it out. But I'm not too sure. Let's not discuss this so early in the morning.

Dropped by the blog's guestbook. It's good to know that people out there are actually reading this. Aside from the stalker, of course. If you have any violent reactions, you can leave me a message on the guestbook or send me email. If it still doesn't work, you can resort to mental telepathy.

Hell, I'm all for justice, freedom, and liberty for all. That's what democracy is all about, and I'd rather have all the weird stuff that happens in this country than live in fear of getting dragged out of my house and never be seen ever again. But I'm not going to set myself on fire.

Heard on this afternoon's Twisted on Sunday: The government of East Timor invited U2 to perform at their Independence Day celebrations next May. Whoa. Hm. I wonder if we can have Michael Stipe and the rest of REM for Labor Day or something?

I haven't read Harry Potter, I haven't seen Harry Potter, and I have no plans of fighting for seats inside a crowded theater just to ride the wave. I know that a lot of kids and adults find the books riveting, and that's good. But the mania is just overwhelming: Look at the merchandising. All we need is a toilet line -- they can call it Potter Potties.

I was dangerously close to the edge of boredom this afternoon. My first option was to hop on the next bus to Baguio and crash on the production shoot. It wasn't my episode, nor had I anything to do with the work at hand. But my headwriter was there. Some of the other writers were there. And to top it all, I could save on busfare because the service van was empty, and they were leaving around 9pm. I started scrounging around my room for clothes to last me until Tuesday. So I let them know I was coming, until another writer told me that both of us had to be back by Monday morning because of a meeting. Argh! No sense travelling for twelve hours for a half a day stint. I really just wanted to get out of the house. This is becoming a habit. The buses are just there, waiting. But I found other distractions. It'll do for the moment.

I glanced at some of the older blog entries and discovered to my dismay that I still have lapses in the use of prepositions. It bothers me because things like when to use on/at/in should be a breeze, especially for an alleged English major. There is nothing more annoying than bad grammar. I like words to flow with ease from whoever is speaking/writing. Most of the time, you go with the first thing that comes into your head. Then later on you will realize that there's been a slip, a lapse in tense, aspect or an awkward preposition, you want to slam your head against the wall. How could you have missed that?

It occured to me that perhaps I should take up French again. A foreign language allows you to see things from a different perspective. You will have to assume another frame of mind where a particular language and culture makes sense. Abandon all thought in English, and then it makes sense why "au fond de la salle" is "at the back of the room." Of course. An action continuing, yet to be completed requires a form of verb different from that action that's been long over.

But this presents a handicap: We live in a country with so many tongues that does not in a way resemble French or any of the Romance languages. It would be more pragmatic to take up Cebuano or Ilocano and actually understand what's being said around you. But I've long found out that I can never go beyond saying Para and Magkano ito in any of the regional languages. It's always the wrong curling of the vowels, the hard stump of consonants and nasal intonations. I tried to listen to the flow of the words, and attune myself to the rhythm of speech and syntax, and failed miserably in that pursuit. It makes me feel like a stranger, in my own land, with all the conversation going around me and I couldn't understand why everyone was laughing. There is no other choice but to watch the unfolding of arms, the occasional nod, the knotted brows, or the wide smiles.

This is the downside of being raised in Manila all my life, with no province to go to on summer vacations, of not being let out of the house to play tumbang preso with the neighborhood kids, and learning how to speak Tagalog in preschool. Somewhere here is an anomaly. While I can process both speech and thought in both English and Filipino, the end product is something of a hodgepodge. The thought conceives itself in one language and then comes out as speech in a fractured, two-pronged, broken eludition of words. The flaw manifests itself in the writing: while conversation can sustain the imperfection, seeing the lapse standing out from a page renders the imperfection real and subject to scrutiny. You seek to amend it, and take refuge in the idea that perhaps, the third language will solve the problem. But at the back of your mind, you are resigned to your fate that you will forever be burdened by the confusion of tongues.

It's the fourth week that Pahina goes on replay. Why can't they show a season in its entirety without interruption?

I was having breakfast when I saw the ad: Barbie's Cradle was going to be on the late show tonight. Since then I've been asking people what time it's supposed to go on, but nobody seemed to know. I was already nodding off when I heard the starting riffs of a guitar, like it was something right out of Moonpools and Caterpillars. A couple more, including one from the Handog anthology. It was called Sunday, I think. After the break was a cover of the Deep song by their drummer. I was totally awake by the time they did Money For Food, and I wanted to jump up and down, if only my mom weren't sleeping already. It always sounds different in every performance. I like my music live. Shiny Red Balloon turned out to be their closing song. I was hoping for an interview, but no, nothing. No details about the new album, or gigs, or whatever. They just came in to sing. I don't sound like a fan, do I? But then again, I wouldn't stay up if I weren't.

Recently got a slew of email of the Let's Celebrate Thanksgiving Day variety. A girl I know insists that we take pause in consideration of this "special day." Now this would have been fine if I were American, or living in the States or in any of the temperate zones. As it is, I don't consider it a special day that requires religious or national celebration. Thanksgiving is an American holiday of the WASP kind. As far as I know, I'm no White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I'm descended from a line of working class Pinoys, no hypens included. None of them ever came close to the Mayflower. We don't share the same cultural symbolisms with Americans. It's like snow. No matter how many times you watch Home Alone or Holiday on Ice Castles, or dream of a White Christmas, you can't and won't ever appreciate the codified reaction of someone who has actually experienced snow. We can watch the movie, sing the song, but there is no shared cultural memory, no experience of snow. We live in a tropical country with no snow and no raspberries.* We don't really eat turkey. Therefore it makes no sense for me to partake of turkey and cranberry sauce.

The natural rebuttal to this would be to trot out the old globalisation bit. We all live in one giant global village blah blah. But what does that mean? If you try to be a citizen of the world, disregarding all cultural, social and economic boundaries, what's left is a hodgepodge of people who don't know exactly who they are. In a time when everyone's being pushed to be a cultural sponge, it becomes necessary to retain a distinct national identity. Know their holidays, their language, their pop culture references, their excesses. But I draw the line at celebrating Thanksgiving. To do so would be to bow to cultural imperialism. Or as a guy friend pointed out: We're brown; and they ain't our forefathers. What I really want to say is: Why would I want to take part in a celebration that has no meaning for me? So they can sell me Hallmark cards?

[The snow explanation came from poet-critic Isagani Cruz in one of his columns somewhere. The "no snow and no raspberries" bit is from Butch Dalisay's Killing Time In A Warm Place.]

My headwriter sent me my own spam 19 times. If not for the preproduction meeting later this afternoon, I'd think that the draft I submitted must be that bad.

Philip Medel Jr owns up to the murder of Nida Blanca. More things have turned up, and the bizarre quotient is swiftly escalating. Theories included a casino mafia, an old grudge, insurance policies, a bizarre love triangle. Glenn Chua of Fridae reports a new twist to the story. So is this leading to a forceful coming out or what?

Entrailsreader is online. I'm not sure if blogging is the next step to posterity, given that servers go down and might eat up your blog. Will it outlast paper and publishers? It doesn't matter. As long as the word is made flesh. Watch out for more tekstong bopis.

Just finished with the white slavery project. Barnone, this is one of the most draining scripts I did. The case itself isn’t that emotionally draining – I have learned to detach and desensitize myself from other people’s pains. What is more difficult is trying to write something substantial when you have to proceed from research which is perhaps the classroom equivalent of borrowed notes. For news and documentaries, it is extremely important to experience the event itself, to be in on the hunt. Watching the news on cable or reviewing another team’s electronically gathered data don’t count. News can survive with soundbytes. But docu-realism takes hours of interviews to achieve a certain kind of veracity to it. You need depth and a sense of narrative. Otherwise, it’s like cutting class for the entire term and then cram on notes which you barely understand. You have a lot of questions to ask, but since you weren’t there, you will have to go with what you have and hope that you don’t flunk.

I've started reading Hubert Selby Jr's fabulous novel Requiem for a Dream the other day. I found it in a Booksale bin, and never let go. Darren Arenofsky's film of the same title was based on this one, with the screenplay also written by Selby. I have nothing but praises for this one, and Ellen Burstyn should have won that Oscar. But we all know who took it home. Feh. Anyway, I haven't seen Pi yet, his first film, but on the basis of Requiem, I'm almost totally sure that it was just as paranoid and disturbing.

Some friends and I were discussing the Star Wars Phantom Edit the other night. Editors and audiences can now stage their own re-imaginings of films via the digital technology and the internet. There are lots of complaints about Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and JarJar Binks is not the least of them. The Phantom Editor got rid of some annoying JarJar sequences, and even managed to make him seem wise via re-supplied dialogue. I have a sneaking suspicion that Episode 2 might be an even bigger fiasco. Attack of the Clones? It sounds like a B-movie, but I want to see it anyway. I haven't seen the trailer yet, but Mike says that theaters showing Monsters, Inc. would also show the Episode 2 teaser. Count me in on that. On my way home, I get off a block from my usual stop and I nearly ran into a lifesize replica of JarJar Binks standing outside a barbershop. I'm not kidding.

Yesterday's discovery: Glorietta is just php12.00, 30 minutes away from my house via commute on a really good day. That's good news for me, as I'm starting work on a new show that will most probably meet in Makati most of the time. I have yet to take note of my stops though, and as most people know, I'm horrible with street names, but can find my way around by smelling the air. I have feline qualities. Heh.

With the conviction of Mary Wolstonecraft, I say this verily unto you:

She's alive! Argh!!!

That's all you need to know.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines erotomania as "A delusional, romantic preoccupation with a stranger, often a public figure." Unless I am suffering from a reverse delusional paranoid disorder, I am wont to believe that somebody is suffering from de Clerambault's syndrome. I am not a public figure, heck, I'm not even a semi-celebrity. Please go stalk someone else.

Salon considers 2001 a great year for movies. Crowding the list are neo-noirs, supernatural gothics, dream explorations of the psyche, love stories. Films that mix and bend time and space, films which blur reality and fantasy. The art film resurgence is kicking Hollywood's ass and it feels good. I have no qualms with letting loose my inner elitist tendencies.

Of the films in the list, I've only managed to see Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. It's a well made, well shot exploration of repressed urges in 1960s Hongkong. There are no flashy experimental quick cuts, no MTV craziness. But it breathes melancholy and lush visuals, and it might just be the best film I've seen this year. Also on the list is Memento, which I have not seen. From the reviews it sounds like Harold Pinter with amnesia.

What troubles me though is that It's nearly the end of the year, and I expect top ten lists of everything soon enough. I'm looking at my list right now and it seems that if things don't change, mine won't even reach ten. My list is a mixture of festival viewings and carryovers from last year's lineup. Requiem for a dream is still way up there in terms of mind blowing sadness and woe. Time and Tide with its frenetic visuals and violence seems like a Tarantino-Wong Kar Wai coproduction, and Booba threatens to be the most interesting Pinoy film seen this year. There were interesting experiments, like Radyo and Sa Huling Paghihintay which tried to use arthouse style visuals, editing and atmosphere, but they somehow forgot that for all of those to be useful, they must have a story. Narrative content still wins over style. Style is nothing without story, no matter what the cigarette ads tell you. I've seen nearly a hundred movies so far -- arthouse, festival circuit, commercial blends, everything -- and to echo Pauline Kael -- Why are movies so bad?

A gerbil is clawing at my brain. It's been there the whole day, gnawing, clawing, squeaking. It refuses to let me sleep, or read and do something productive that will contribute to the betterment of humanity. I cannot even work on my freaking draft and another deadline is just around the corner. I've run out of paracetamols and aspirins. There must be something out there to rid me of this headache. Please pass me the jackhammer so I can rid myself of a head. Thank you.

Hot damn! I left the server still on while I had dinner. Now there is hell to pay. And how. Argh!

I have no discipline when it comes to writing. I cannot get up in the morning and have ten pages of fiction done by noon, unlike Lolo Ray Bradbury, or even Stephen King. Whenever I write, it is a slow process of gruelling disembowelment. I sit down and force myself to focus, and achieve a particular state of mind that will allow words to follow a coherent fashion. It helps a lot if I have a deadline, an end date for which I will stop everything else in my life and do nothing but write. The cramming makes me feel as though I am a mere poseur, someone just claiming to be a writer and failing to get the discipline. But believe me, even cramming for the deadline is a lot of hard work. You can ask Tom Stoppard:

I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is Catch-22. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern.

When I grow up, I wanna be like Tom, or at least, David Mamet.

An American Airlines commercial flight bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in a residential area in Queens, NYC two minutes after take off. The plane separated into at least four pieces, spreading fire in the nearby buildings.

The crash was ruled out to be a purely technical accident, but of course, when the news got here the speculation was all about terrorists. I was on location shooting when it happened, and the first thing I did when I got home was turn on my pc and log on to the news sites. Then my bloody server was down, Blogger was down. What the freak is happening?

One bleak day in the mid-90s, I stumbled upon Adrian Mole, self-proclaimed teenage intellectual and Poet of the Midlands, among the stacks of the local Booksale and started laughing. All by myself. Of course people started giving me that weird look, and they probably thought I just escaped from the loony bin, but I couldn't help it. Adrian Mole's angst was more or less my own, except for the glue on the nose bit. Sue Townsend resurrects my favorite diarist via her column at The Guardian. Say hello to Adrian Mole, Aged 34, with his new debacles in Diary of a Provincial Man.

I didn't even know this got posted.

Amnon, the sometime psychologically disturbed Fisher brother in Love Inventory debunks Nietzche: "What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger has been disproved. Every tragedy that people endure is a blow to the soul." Never more true than in the world today.

If you have time, head for the Shangri-la Plaza mall and catch the Israeli film festival. Btw, the guy who plays Amnon is a cross between Edward Norton and David Duchovny. Yum. Gorgeous guy, good movies, free admission. It's a good bargain.

The Gulf War is a blur in my memory. At eleven, news of scud missiles and massive evacuations of OFWs from Kuwait came in the form of rap songs by Lady Diane and a fascination with the Book of Revelations. I was in a Catholic school then, and praying for world peace was a big deal, but Desert Storm was an adult preoccupation along with the rising price of crude oil and economic recession. At eleven, you watch with morbid fascination at vague predictions by Nostradamus. Saddam Hussein was the anti-christ.

Director Eytan Fox's Song of the Siren is supposed to be a movie about love in the time of scud missiles. Tel Aviv in 1991 was about gas masks and rushing into bomb shelters sealed with plastic sheets and masking tape. They had advisories on how to decontaminate yourself from possible biological attacks. Talk show hosts were discussing the necessity of intimacy in a time of terror.

It sounded so eerily familiar. Does talcum powder work against anthrax? Can you still get away with big hair and big hips and not get stoned by girls with eating disorders? Is Talila a woman of the 90s who crossed over orange couches, fuzzy robes, buckets of popcorn and morphed in Bridget Jones? Ten years ago I would have dissed Talila and the whole wailing over singlehood thing. As with Ms. Jones, she seemed to be concerned only about getting attached, even if she was a rich and succesful ad girl. She had complete All-by-myself moments and appeased herself with buying a new couch. "At least even if I am alone I would be comfortable." If it weren't a sharp, funny movie, I would have said that this is an authentic nineties nightmare flashback. Maybe I *should* get myself a new couch.

This is from the BBC profile of the Philippines:

The Philippines consists of more than 7,000 islands, but the bulk of the population lives on just 11 of them. The terrain is mostly mountainous and subject to earthquakes and eruptions from around 20 active volcanoes.

Two presidents of the Philippines have been forced from office by "people power" in the space of 15 years.

Talk about population density. 81 million Pinoys squeezed into 11 major islands. I suggest that we find creative uses for the other small, unoccupied islands. We can put deposed dictators and cronies in them, and surround that with sharks. Although I'm sure even the sharks would barf out their putrid flesh.

In true chismis fashion, I first heard about the murders via the UP Diliman chatroom. One of the chatters said that actress Nida Blanca was found stabbed inside her car that morning. True enough, there it was in the Inquirer's late breaking news. It was all over the newspapers, the radio, the tv news every hour. In the afternoon, while I sat in a theatre fully packed with students lounging in the aisles, the trailer for a forthcoming Joyce Jimenez movie was shown, and murmurs spread like bees around me: Nida Blanca is dead, and in a gruesome, truly horrifying way. My sympathy to all her friends and family.

It's a barrage of things: servers were down, the weather sucks, the power supply trips and falls over and over again. I live in an absurd universe.

The New York Times's A.O. Scott finds out why The Simpsons refuses to "jump the shark:"

Measuring the creative entropy that afflicts TV series has become a popular form of do-it-yourself cultural analysis. Recently, the phrase ''jumping the shark'' has entered the lexicon, referring to that point in its run when a series, having exhausted its premise, resorts to desperate novelty to keep itself alive. At the Web site that popularized the concept -- named after a late episode of ''Happy Days'' in which the aging Fonzie undertakes a death-defying water-skiing stunt -- the various ways in which a show can go bad are cataloged by example: ''New Kid in Town,'' ''Special Guest Star,'' ''Singing,'' ''Birth,'' ''Death.'' The part of the site dedicated to shows that never jumped the shark is headed by a picture of the Simpson family squeezed together on their indestructible living-room couch.

The freshness of the Springfield universe has a lot to do with the freedom that animation provides. The Simpsons can go everywhere and go through anything, but Bart will always be ten years old with no impending puberty. And then there is the writing. Each Simpsons episode is nine months in the making -- from conceptualization, first drafts, voicing, animation and lots of rewriting. ''A good 'Simpsons' script is when you change 75 percent and everyone goes, 'Good script,' '' says Matt Selman, who joined the staff, at the age of 25, in 1997. ''A bad script is when you change 85 percent and everybody goes, 'Bad script.' '' The show is also insulated from the outside force of impending doom that is network intervention. Matt Groening says it best: "Maybe the authorities do not have your best interests at heart."

Springfield has it going. In the regular TV world, you better get that script done in 3 days or there will be no show. You do the best that you can, and there's still no excuse for all the trash that's currently showing. Ours is a situation wherein the shark is not even jumping, nor can you jump it. The shark is dying.

I really shouldn't be surprised anymore that a whole island in my country would suddenly plunge into darkness. Two years ago, I was stuck in a very crowded car in the middle of a huge traffic jam in the middle of Tondo. A very annoying girl kept going "Oh my god! This is a coup d'etat! Martial Law is upon us again! Oh my god!" I wanted to kill her. Last year I was in the middle of nowhere in pouring rain with the camera crew when we learned about the Luzon-wide blackout. We thought it had something to do with the then forthcoming impeachment trials. The first time it happened, they told us it was the jellyfish. Next it was some tree falling on a wire. And now they tell us it's the freaking dikya again? Why do them freaking dikya choose to migrate to our power source? Is this an evil conspiracy? Couldn't they have thought of another reason? Attack of the killer dikya was so last season. Only in the Philippines, guys and girls.

I wasn't able to attend my own commencement ceremony. In fact, I wouldn't even know I had already graduated if I hadn't dropped by the college secretary this afternoon to pass a substitution form. All this time I've been going around worrying about the MRR. Heck, I even filed for residency for 3 consecutive terms, and nobody even bothered to tell me I'm done with college! Done! Finis! Tapos!

The Fates dumped closure right on my lap when I least expected it. I am still shell shocked.

I AM 40% GEEK.

I probably work in computers, or a history
deptartment at a college. I never really
fit in with the "normal" crowd. But I have
friends, and this is a good thing.

But then again, the test leans more on the techie sort of geekiness. I'm more from the old school of geek: the kind who read a lot of Edith Hamilton as a kid and considered mythology more lively than the soap opera currently showing on television, the kind who watched, read and nearly memorized everything Woody Allen, who charts a table of all the movies she's seen this year, and would be more than willing to hang out with the teacher.

Take the GEEK Test at Fuali.com! I am a geek, hear me roar. And btw, I don't sport a beard nor do I wear glasses. Hehe.

Are Pinoys really a mental colony?

If we open our heads what will we find? Gilda Cordero Fernando bets that there will be "a quarter pounder hamburger, a beauty contest, a Hallmark card, an apple pie, a ticket to Disneyland, a surgically lifted nose, an English-speaking yaya." The Pinoy believes that the Western life is more superior than ours, and thus buys a first world lifestyle with a third world economy.

The pursuit of everything Western has brought us to every country on the map, and with the distinction of being the best atsay in the world. Sometimes we don't seem to mind, as long as it gets us our dollars, the chocolates and sneakers, never mind that those same sneakers etc are products of sweatshops of likewise indentured races like our own. Of course we are going to go down in debt, like the old mythical island of Lemuria, an ancient civilization that drowned in the ocean of its own abuse of power and spirituality.

Julia Roberts lay down with the dogs. Take a look for yourself. Via ftrain.

Hey, thanks chinita! That's all I can say for now. More if I can gather my wits from the splatter spots in my room. Hmmm...

My friend Joy called just to tell me she's in Baguio for a vacation. While she's raiding the ukay-ukay, I'm stuck in front of my PC furiously working out a script so we can have an episode for airing 2 Tuesdays from now. Blast it. Joy really deserves a vacation. She's been working too hard, and I've been just lounging about doing nothing much. But still. I have nothing to complain about, do I ?