Goodnight to the sun

This must be musty news for some people out there, since the dateline for this piece was nearly two weeks ago. But anyway, am dusting my fangirl shoes for this:

Barbie Leaves the Cradle.

There are no words. Just lotsa gossip--that the girl left the band to "pursue more evangelism for her church." (Wtf, right? That's like Elvis getting drafted. Anyhow, prayer warriors please don't flame me.) Then there's the management issue: Ms. Almalbis will now be handled by the same team who does Kitchie Nadal. Kitchie Nadal, who was in Mojofly, which was the spinoff band with Ricci Gurango, who was with Barbie in Hungry Young Poets. What a weird musical daisy chain.

Pero Kitchie Nadal? Wah! Don't ever ever tell me.

Wala lang, nalungkot lang ako. I'm not jumping up and down with the thought that they're still coming up with a "best of" album. Or that I actually missed their last gig. (Potah sa Makati naman kasi. Makati is a bad word for me now.)

Anyhow, here's a toast to whatever's left:



UPDATE: "Alas who sings/ for the Cradle now / Barbie Almalbis is gone" is a line from a poem which I think was written well before the disbandment. The Inquirer also carries the news, and I thought I learned about it really late. And oh, here's a linkie for that Close Up commercial that I mistook for the Tropicana jingle. Get it before it disappears. Okay, over and out.

I Labia Sabado

Marby's take on that old Jollibee jingle kept ringing in my ears all weekend. But here's the lyrics:

Ilang tulog na lang,
Jollibee nanaman
Ang araw lulubog
Bukas mabubusog

Sa Chicken Joy manok
At Yum Burger bilog

I Love You Sabado,
Pati na rin Linggo
Hintay ka lang Jollibee
Andyan nako

Panlasang Pilipino
At home Sa JOLLIBEE

The official Jollibee website doesn't carry info on past ad campaigns, so I had to make do with lyrics taken from online forums. I've been trolling the net for an mp3, but no such luck. In my opinion, this jingle is one of the more enduring of its kind, back from the day that Jollibee was establishing itself as *the* food service company to beat this side of the Pacific.

Proof of success: "I Love You Sabado" was even used as the movie title for a Janno Gibbs-Mikee Cojuangco vehicle. The film itself wasn't really special. If I remember correctly, Janno's character had some sort of musical ambition and he had a band, and it had Tony Mabesa playing Saint Peter. One reviewer even calls the movie as Janno Gibb's best performance ever. It also carries the dubious distinction of having Rufa Mae Quinto's early appearances in celluloid, pre-Booba.

Also, while trying to dig out information, I came across Mon's blog, which has some fascinating tidbits about Jollibee:

1. They churn out around 500,000 hamburgers a day.

2. They import all their beef from Australia and their warehouse people walk around in winter jackets and pants, they look like they're going skiing! The frozen blocks of beef pass through a metal detector before they're ground up. I asked why they did that, they said aside from the fact that it's BFAD policy, they sometimes find knives in the beef. Weird. They also check the finished frozen patties for metal... interesting... Or is it just me and my weird fascination with factories and assembly lines?

3. They bake their own bread at a rate of 24,000 buns an hour in this giant room with a cooling line conveyor belt that goes round and round. What I found amazing was the fact that they had very few workers, almost everything's automated.

4. Their spaghetti sauce line is amazing, they cook it in giant vats and transport it chilled in 2kilogram bags. For chilling and freezing (burger patties), they use a great big "spiral freezer" which can zap a pattie solid in a matter of minutes.

5. They develop at least 5 new menu items a year, their newest are the sotanghon soup, meat pies and the new fruit salad variant of their ice craze line.

Okay, that's enough about Jollibee for this weekend.

Hay Na Kuh!

Was reading last week's Sunday Inquirer and this article's definitely got the funniest description of the director Peque Gallaga hands down:

"Remember, this is the guy who had the audacity to explode Kuh Ledesma's head, years before anyone really wanted to."

Wahahahaha! Peace out to all you Kuh Ledesma fans out there.

How to Save the O.C.

I haven't seen The O.C. in a long, long time, but Merlin's list just killed me.
Here ya go:

How to Save the O.C.

1. have Ryan start punching preppies at parties again
2. more Julie Cooper in fuzzy track suits
3. new haircuts for everybody
4. bring back Jimmy Cooper
5. keep not having Oliver on I still think you can do an "unofficial Pinoy version" of the show (if it hasn't been made or been yanked off the air yet) and they should give the Ryan role to Sherwin Ordoñez.

Wannabe teachers who blog need not apply

I found this really curious case about an American faculty search committee who disdains on applicants who blog. Is this like the new career requirement now--"Bloggers need not apply?"

What troubles the Ole Vanguards is that blogging seems like airing your laundry for everyone to see. Here's an excerpt:

A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

So why indeed would a blogger blog? Lotsa answers, but what seems to disturb Ivan Tribble, a "humanities professor in a small, 'liberal' arts college in the Midwest" (and the Midwest is full of people spacey with estrogen, as one writer put it), the most is that most blogs tend to become electronic versions of laundry washing in public, global, international.

He also commits some really gross misconceptions, the foremost of which is equating blogging with serious academic publications. Thus, "it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation."

I love blogging, but I know most academics wouldn't blur the distinction with personal desktop online publishing and getting published in those "peer evaluated journals." For an academic who surely knows his logical arguments, his reasons are just out of this world.

Also disturbing is their fact verification process--they Google you, the applicant. They search for your blog, other people's blog who have referred to you once, twice, and you are judged according to your online presence.

Got quibbles with that too, but what interests me is whether the same principle would soon apply to employment searches in our part of the world. If memory serves me right, I think I even put my blog's URL in my resume (a silly thing, really), although I don't think the Ole Vanguards in our particular search committee found that useful. But I remember sort of blogging (in a vague way--no proper nouns) about my beauty pageant like experience that was the faculty search. If that panel imposed a restriction like that given in the article, I would have thought twice about teaching.

But here we are, trudging along.

Friday, I'm just manic

So many things have happened while I was down with the flu and couldn't read papers or watch a lot of tv.

Gloria Arroyo has a special message which basically says, "Weh, you can't make me."

Erap will take on the presidency if--I don't even want to think about this.

London's calling for an SOS, but our embassy says all Pinoys are safe there.

"Retro/old," according to my students, now takes the form of movies like She's All That. But whoa, that Rachel Leigh Cook was hottt pala.

But the first thing on my mind is:

May pasok ba?

My mother is saying government schools don't because of some rally about a wake hike. But I can't find any circulars on that and my classes start in about an hour and I'm still heady on meds and am wearing pajamas. I just want to go back to bed, and then wake me when it's over.

What to do, what to do.

The curious sex lives of penguins and crabs

Some time back, there was a huge ruckus when the officials of a German zoo realized that three of their six penguin pairs were actually homosexual. The guys were getting it on together, mating, building nests, even went to the extent of adopting stones as though they were eggs ready to hatch--but no babies. It was only upon close investigation that they realized the guys were ignoring the girl penguins.

Their solution? Import female Swedish penguins. You know, to introduce variety. The funny thing was, the guys ignored them girls. I felt bad for Charley, Left-Arrow, Diagonal Line and Six-Point. Rejection sucks. But it's not their fault anymore, it's the zoo officials' fault anymore.

So now there's this book that recently came out that tries to, uh, remedy the situation. Just so the penguins don't feel bad, you know. The children's book ">"Tango Makes Three" tells the kids that it's okay if your family's a bit different. Meanwhile, this particular story was inspired by the gay penguin pairs in Central Park. I don't know why, but it seems like there are a lot of gay male penguins in New York. Feh.

And oh yeah, while running some weeks back with Yummy, I told him about this weird bisexual crab the fishermen found in Cheasapeake Bay. To prove it's really bi--or "bilateral gynandromorph" if you want to be more specific--one claw is red and the other is blue. They named the crab after the talk show host Jerry Springer.

Yummy says that this is the sort of news I dig. Yey, weird animal porn!

Red lipstick is bad for you

Well, because Shiela Jeffreys says so. The Guardian's Julie Bindel talks to Jeffreys, the "Andrea Dworkin of the UK," on her new book Beauty and Misogyny which traces the history of the beauty industry and how it has perpetuated the oppression of women through the endless pursuit of beauty.

Jeffreys takes a look at how cosmetics have been used to alter appearance for thousands of years, sometimes exclusively by prostitutes and others deemed disreputable, other times as a political gesture. The suffragettes fought for the right to look and dress as they saw fit, some wearing red lipstick as a symbol of feminine defiance. After the second world war, a shortage of men meant that women tried hard to look as attractive as possible in the hope of getting a husband, and make-up became, Jeffreys argues, "a requirement that women could not escape, rather than a sign of liberation."

She even eschews how women now "do not want their behaviour 'policed by feminism', but wish to enjoy sex with men, wear make-up, and dress in short skirts and high heels without feeling they are betraying feminism." For her, the battle is not just political but also personal. She stopped dyeing her hair a certain shade, cut it, and then decided to become a lesbian as a political stance.

But Jeffreys has always been viewed as an extreme feminist, such that even pornographers have even named a sex toy after her: The Sheila: A Spinster's Best Friend.

Now that's really hardcore.

The absence of urban literature

Now if the Philippines has a surplus of buangst literature, the Chinese are suffering from the opposite: the lack of urban themes in their writing.

Chinese critics have noted that their literature is still majorly influenced by agrarian themes and their writers are more familiar with rural subjects, making them unable to portray the delicacies of urban living. The reason for all these, some say, is that Chinese cities had undergone major changes in the last two decades.

The Xinhua newspaper reported:

Critic Li Jingze asserted that both theorists and writers should rethink their limited literary thinking. Writers born after the late 1970s were grappling with complicated urban experiences, whereas critics had no idea what they were talking about or why, said Li.

[D]epictions of the lives of doctors or lawyers should be much more complex and insightful regarding contemporary life than continual depictions of farmers, and should also require more dedicated research. (Highlights mine) However, most mainstream Chinese writers and critics, coming from the countryside themselves, still focused themselves on rural subjects despite the fact that the urban experience had become a major element of China's contemporary culture.

If the Pinoy writers are fixated on buangst writing, then the Chinese seem to be overdosing on their rural lit, forever mining the glorious Mao era and forgetting that it's all about the shopping malls now. And given that their writers are just about my age but they're all writing about farmers, that's just like, whoa. (Excuse the airhead, I just woke up, no coffee yet.) What struck me most about that article is their dedication to research. I was reminded of this Time magazine article about how rural Chinese also see their cities as a place paved with gold. The Time writers followed this teenage girl, from pagluwas sa probinsya to life in the big city and back to the villages again. I swear, it's just like our own people.

So maybe we should do as the Chinese and let's take to writing rural fiction for a while, and let the Chinese do as we do. Maybe make all those who want to be writers enroll in a creative writing program. Hee.

Buangst

In fiction class, my professor lamented about the proliferation of "buangst" stories--a trend wherein the characters, most of them writers and/or creative writing majors, go crazy ("mabuang") after treating the readers to several pages of usually urban or quarter-life induced angst and usually ends with a death (their own, self-induced) or deaths (others, Columbine style).

After dismissing those as unsubstantial fare, the challenge now is to go back to (here we go now) "our roots." Which means reading up on local myths and legends, the neglected epics that nobody really reads unless forced by their CW/Lit teacher, preferably in a language other than Tagalog. This is where we can get our material, she says, so we will produce something that will up the ante of writing and improve our reading culture.

I appreciate the challenge and all, although I'm becoming more and more aware that I have been digging my own grave in this class. (This is what happens to students who write about Sharon and Gabby in a Ph.D. level course.) So I guess this means I'll have to forget writing about elephants appearing in the middle in Edsa (lookie here, a Murakami anti-thesis!), getting stabbed in a jeepney holdup (ooh, see blood spurting from jugular!), and gazing into Courtney Cox's asshole (wala lang).

It'll be back to local culture for me. If push comes to shove and I don't get to finish my research project and don't have enough material, I'll write me another artista story to complete my "Pinoy Loveteams from the '80s" series. Then my professor will be so disappointed and go completely buangst on me. Haha. Wala lang.