December 2002 Archives

It's been a day since I found out and I still can't get over GMA's decision not to run for re-election. Apparently, neither can anyone else:

Philippine Daily Inquirer: "Macapagal: I will not run in 2004", "Surprise, disbelief, hope greet Macapagal declaration", "Macapagal mum on successor, says 'it's too early'", "Macapagal action not enough to save economy: ECOP" (Well, duh; she's just the president, not a fucking omnipotent miracle-working god. Idiots.), "Militants doubt President's move to junk 2004 elections".

Philippine Star: "The good president" (editorial), "And now comes the hard part" (Max Soliven, op-ed), "In the service of the nation" (Domini Torevillas, op-ed), "No whimpers for this president" (Felipe Miranda, op-ed), Decision hailed, others dismayed", "Tears of relief from First Family".

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's announced she won't be running for re-election in 2004: Inq7.net, CNN, BBC News, Associated Press.

I can't imagine there's anyone even remotely interested in Philippine politics whose jaw didn't just drop straight to the floor when they heard about this. Completely unprecedented and totally unexpected. I stared at the screen and read the Inquirer article five times before I could be sure it actually said what I thought it said.

Now who the hell am I supposed to vote for in 2004? I'm not exactly GMA's biggest fan but when you compare her to the people who've been putting themselves forward as future presidential candidates lately, like Angara, Lacson, Roco and FPJ...

Wow. Someone blew up the giant head in Benguet.

Imelda , widow of the late President, said in a statement that she was "very sad" to hear of the incident. She said the bust was a "loving offering" of local residents to her husband.

An Ibaloi farmer, however, told the Inquirer in a 2001 interview that the bust represented everything the Ibalois hated about the 20-year regime. "He stole our land, and he wanted us to be reminded about the theft," the farmer said.

I think I'd be pretty ticked off if my ancestral land had been seized so a) the government could build a golf course on top of it and b) name it to flatter the (then) current president, no matter who it was. What amazes me more than anything about this event is that it's taken so long for someone (probably a bounty hunter searching for Yamashita's Gold—yes, the fortune Neal Stephenson wrote about in Cryptonomicon) to finally blow the thing apart.

Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal, Communist Party of the Philippines spokesperson, described the bombing as "pure nonsense and waste of time and effort."

"What could we possibly benefit from the blast? That's only a concrete monument. The NPA has better things to do than bomb that monument," he told the Inquirer in a cellular phone interview.

But he quickly added: "I don't have any report yet from the NPA command in the area about the blasting of the bust. This is only my personal opinion."

Human rights lawyer Pablito Sanidad, who defended many human rights victims of , said the blast was uncalled for.

"This is very unfortunate. (The bust) served a valuable purpose. It was a reminder of our folly as a people and that we should never allow dictators to rule our land," he said.

I agree with Sanidad on that, although I think the problem isn't so much that we ever forget about the sins our politicians commit, because the Philippines has got to be the only country where no one thinks anything wrong about bringing up politics over the dinner table, but that we love to forgive them and then vote for them again in the next fucking elections! This turn the other cheek shit has really got to stop.

Nice before and after photos courtesy of the BBC; even better ones here from My Way (thanks Anil!)

Why I can't bring myself to watch Sex In the City, except in small doses (and when Carrie isn't on screen for very long):

By the fourth season, with the exception of Charlotte, who has been divorced, the four women were in their late thirties and still unmarried, and you began to realize that the show's premise of its protagonists searching in the city for love and happiness was meant from the beginning to culminate in disappointment--but disappointment funnily, sexily, even glamorously portrayed, until disappointment itself started to look like love and happiness, and the object of the search, someone to share your life with, acquired the aspect of a dystopian and dysfunctional fantasy. The men whom the four women meet are selfish, unfaithful, uncouth, hyper-neurotic shits, which seems about right; yet the show brings no decent guys their way except for the handful of men whom the women themselves immediately or eventually alienate--like the virile, kind, cultivated, gorgeous police detective whose near perfection makes a nervous Miranda drink herself into a stupor on their first date, prompting him to flee her apartment after leaving behind the address of her local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter (a very funny episode); or Aidan, the virile, kind, and gorgeous furniture-maker whom Carrie first sexually betrays and then, when a year later he forgives her and comes back, refuses to commit to, thus driving him away for good. Indeed, kindness in men arouses anxiety and suspicion in the women: Carrie sabotages a relationship with a smart, gentle magazine editor when he catches her rifling through his apartment, looking for the incriminating evidence that she is sure will prove that he's too good to be true. (She doesn't find it.)

Nice how the username/password combination of mefi/mefi works for so many sites that require registration. Hint, hint.

[ via A Bright Cold Day in April ]

"A visiting Polish priest told police the sex he had last week with a teenage rape victim in her family's apartment was a form of "counseling," intended to show the high school that sex with men doesn't have to be bad."

Nice.

[ via sassafrass ]

Today's PDI editorial is especially interesting, questioning what the Philippines's national hero Jose Rizal would make of how we throw the word "terrorism" around today:

Terrorism is not merely a matter of explosives. A bomb thrown against a military target is a horrible thing, and may result in tragedy, but it is not by itself an act of terrorism. Neither is terrorism simply a matter of ideology. The ramming of a police station by a truck loaded with C4 does not become an act of terrorism simply because the explosive was packed by a fanatic's hands, or the vehicle was driven by a true believer. Again the act is unconscionable, and again the consequences may be dire, but it is not necessarily the work of a terrorist.

It is time to remind ourselves: what defines terrorism is the use of violence against the innocent, to achieve political or ideological or religious ends. The conversion of a commercial airplane into a weapon, the destruction of a crowded office tower, the parking of a car bomb outside a heavily trafficked restaurant: these are doubtless acts of terrorism. But so is the shelling of entire residential areas, whose only sin is to host one house harboring suspected enemies of the state.

It is, it can only be, a complicated issue. If Rizal were alive today, how would he make sense of this new Age of Terror?

I always get Karen Allen and Margot Kidder mixed up, or at least I did up until Kidder's unfortunate mental breakdown in 1996, at which point it became very clear to me that Allen is the one with good teeth.

If you know who Allen is, it's probably because she was the love interest in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark—I say "probably" because although she's been working steadily since the late 70s, she hasn't had a role as big since. I bring all of this up because a) I try to see the Indiana Jones trilogy at least once every year and b) I saw Allen when I brought my mom and Auntie D to brunch at Sarabeth's West the other day. Karen Allen looks about the same now as she did on screen in the early 80s, except she's much taller than I expected and her smile is blinding.

P.S. Belated many happy returns of the day to my favorite kikay , PePs! May you be fashon forever.

Anyone have wireless cable/DSL router recommendations? So far it's between this Linksys and this Netgear, and I'm currently leaning towards the Netgear, but I'd love to find out about other routers or your experiences with any or both of the two I've mentioned.

My first and most important requirement is that it works well with OS X, and then I care about reliability, affordability, ease of installation and range, in that order.

Like most bookworms, I can't stand to watch movies based on books without having read the books first so when my curiosity got the better of me (and my hatred for Nicholas Cage¹) and I decided I had to see Adaptation, I went out and got Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief². This was one of my favorite passages:

If I had ever doubted whether the orchid world was really as much a world, a culutre, a family as I imagined it was, this antagonism was perfect proof. The orchid world had the intimacy of a family and the fights of a family. Like a family, it provided a way to fit into the world, to place yourself inside a small and sometimes crowded and sometimes bickering circle, and then an even bigger circle, and then finally by the whole wide world; it was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being a part of something bigger than yourself, even though each side of the equation put the other in jeopardy. This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual—how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your seperateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something—your town or your profession or your hobby—then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind.

¹He always looks so, well, dirty—whenever I see him I want to pluck my eyeballs out and wash them. Ugh.
²Yes, I know the movie isn't really based on the book. Whatever, I still had to read it.

I took my mom out to dinner at Haru last night. I'm an atheist, she's (mostly) Buddhist, and really, nothing says "holiday" to the both of us like chatting over a tray of tasty raw fish.

This morning I went to the airport to pick my Auntie D up, and this is what the tracks looked like at Rockaway Boulevard after all of yesterday's snow:

Cheap, quick, good laugh: The Nought of the Wings.

Happy Holidays from Lia and Jarvis the Wet-Nosed Reindeer!

I popped Jarvis into his bag this afternoon and we took an hour-long ride on the A train, all the way down to JFK to pick my mom up.

Later on in the day while I was showing her around my apartment, I asked, "So, it's messier than you thought it would be, right?"

And she said, "No, this is just about what I expected."

*sigh*

Bet you didn't know Adam LeFevre, the actor who plays the dad in Sony's Lewis Family commercials, is a poet—his poems appeared in Ploughshares once and in the über prestigious Paris Review five times (twice in consecutive issues), and his collection Everything All at Once was published by Wesleyan in 1978. LeFevre also has a few plays to his name.

UPenn's library has two undated photos of him that I'm guessing (from the hair and clothes) were taken in the late 70s or early 80s, in case you want to see what he looked like before he began to appear in movies. Not that many people know what character actors look like, except maybe Steve Buscemi or William H. Macy, but whatever.

I think the thing which most disturbed Orwell was the perversion of language and truth. We're already well on our way to something like Newspeak. The word "war" for example no longer means what it used to mean. With the original meaning, you can't have a *war* on drugs. It's nonsensical. Nor a war on terrorism. And what the hell does the phrase "humanitarian bombing" mean? And the word "democracy" is code for "capitalism". The US very often undermines democracy to support capitalism. But if democracy means capitalism because the meaning of the words has changed, then we *do* support democracy! I think you can see what I'm getting at. Newspeak is already here. Our ministry of truth is the corporate media. I'm not so concerned that they don't get the facts right... it's more a question of what's "newsworthy" and who is considered a "reliable source". If you define those two things right, you don't even need to lie to subvert reality. I think in some sense, America has gone beyond Orwell already.

This MeFi post by muppetboy makes me wish he had a blog, but alas, his user profile doesn't even have an email address I can send kudos to.

Two treats via What Do I Know:

1) "The Cutie Bunch Friendly Pal Pack" is a story written and illustrated by Angus Oblong, which I guarantee those of you who grew up reading Roald Dahl will like. (If you don't know what to get me for Christmas and are boycotting Amazon for some strange reason, any of Oblong's books will do in a pinch!)

2) Chrimbobat 2002 is a free holiday font, every dingbat created by one of a great list of designers, including the super awesome Amy Francheschini of Future Farmers. It'll only be available till the first of January, so get it while you can!

I went to the New York memorial for Santi Bose this afternoon and took lots of photos, some of which will probably get uploaded somewhere once I get Luis Francia to identify the faces in them and after Lille sees them.

Oh, and look, could this be a tribute to Bose by Krip Yuson that isn't a complete pain to read? I wasn't sure he was still capable of it, but there you go.

The Guardian has an article on how all the noise that finally led to Trent Lott's resignation yesterday got started: "Bloggers catch what Washington Post missed".

Missed? What?

It's not like big media in the United States doesn't have the manpower to cover every single story of national interest. Do we not remember how every single last tedious, unimportant detail of Monica Lewinsky's pre-internship life was reported ad nauseum for months and months and months only a few years ago? How Chelsea Clinton's choices of schools, hairstyles and dates are still considered newsworthy even though she's never courted the media or gotten in trouble and her parents are out of the White House? How every last skanky outfit Jennifer , Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears wears when they go out in public gets onto the nightly news or into the newspaper?

Missed, my ass. Try "wilfully ignored."

And then you have all the wonderful pieces written about how Lott's been going around apologizing for hurting people's feelings and explaining how his comments have been misunderstood, most of which lovingly skirt around the fact that no thinking person could possibly have misunderstood the meaning of Lott's comments, except perhaps those well-schooled in the art of denial. Support for a segregationist and his agenda = racism; I'm sorry, but there are no two ways around that. Would the media have been this quiet if someone had said "if only the Ku Klux Klan had succeeded, we wouldn't be in this fix"?

How about "if only Hitler had succeeded, we wouldn't be in this fix"?

If you've been wondering what Dick Cheney's been up to lately...

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, last night blocked a global deal to provide cheap drugs to poor countries, following intense lobbying of the White House by America's pharmaceutical giants.

Faced with furious opposition from all the other 140 members of the World Trade Organisation, the US refused to relax global patent laws which keep the price of drugs beyond reach of most developing countries.

Talks at the WTO's Geneva headquarters collapsed last night after the White House ruled out a deal which would have permitted a full range of life-saving drugs to be imported into Africa, Asia and Latin America at cut-price costs.

What I want to know is, how come Compassionate Conservatism as practised by a wealthy white man who loves his good Christian morals and values is more compassionate to Corporate America than to his fellow man? Whatever happened to "love your neighbor as you love yourself"?

[ via the always superb infojunkies ]

Oh, and if you aren't quite disgusted enough yet, check out the long accompanying MetaFilter thread. Most of it made me want to vomit; if it wasn't for raaka, Pretty_Generic (1, 2), Corky, riviera (1, 2), JackFlash, quarsan, Wood, SweetJesus, muckster and a few others, I think this post would've been the one to finally make me give up on MetaFilter. As it is I only visit once a month now, if at all, and it's almost always painful.

Faulty icons at Universal Parks Florida. Brilliant.

artbomb.net has a comic by Andi Watson up, hurrah! Now go read Sunblock (at twelve pages it won't take you very long) and if you like it, as I suspect you probably will, give Andi Watson's books Dumped, Breakfast After Noon, and my favorite, Slow News Day. If I absolutely had to convince someone who thinks comic books are stupid and all about explosions and superheroes that they were wrong^*, Watson's work would be one of the examples I'd use—his books are delicately drawn and quiet in tone, and are always focused on the intricacies of human relationships. The Boy's a Watson fan as well.

^*Usually though I can't be bothered to waste my time on such small minds.

I just got this from Lille:

For friends of the late Santi Bose, we are holding an informal commemoration/celebration of his life and art on Sunday December 22, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. The gathering will be at Tamad, a new crafts and furniture store owned by Lilia Villanueva-Scharlin and Craig Scharlin, Berkeley friends of Santi. Performing Buddhist rites will be Thulani Davis, monk, writer, editor. She asks that people bring flowers. And of course anecdotes, jokes, stories about that irrepressible spirit whom we knew in his earthly form as Santi.

Address: 5 Harrison Street, in Tribeca, between Hudson and Greenwich Street.
Phone: 212-566-7030, 718-458-6507
Closest subway stops: 1 & 9 Franklin St; E, C, A at Canal.

I'm going, of course; anyone who'd like to come with, or to meet up for dinner afterwards, either leave a message in the comments or (better yet) send me an email.

Some of you will understand what I mean when I say I'm wearing a Jurilla shirt in this Mirror Project shot, except with the very unMay (and I guess very me) slight cleavage; those of you that don't should check it out anyway for a peek at my apartment, if not my boobs.

You can also see all my previous submissions, two of which have found their ways into the galleries.

What I find most disgusting about the Vatican finally approving a tougher sex abuse policy isn't that it took so long to approve it, but that it only applies in the US. If the church thinks that allowing child molesters to resume ministry is wrong, then why is this only official policy in the US? Why isn't the church leaping all over itself to protect all its children, no matter which country they happen to be in?

I knew at first read I'd like Gawker because... ?

a) it's a weblog about Manhattan
b) it's got a lovely bitchy tone to it
c) it's just launched and already there are two mentions of Liza & David on the front page, plus a suitably horrible photo of the Uber Judy Garland Memorabilia Collector himself.

"With a paper bag over my head, I am brave!"

It's 4.9mb and 5 minutes long, but if you have the bandwidth and the time to spare make sure to check out Daniel Hsia's short movie "How to Do the Asian Squat".

[ via chinese american princess ]

The Boy was kind enough to email me those photos—seeing the faces of almost all the awful, ugly DECL people I saw pretty much every day for seven straight years wiped away every last trace of homesickness I was experiencing from not being back home during the holidays.

Hurrah for college graduation and for moving far far away, if only for a few years. Distance isn't always a bad thing.

"How many people did Oscar Schindler save? A thousand. Irena Sendlerowa rescued two and a half thousand. Did you see a film about her?"

[ via plep, who recently concluded his trip to africa and its companion blog, afriplep ]

"Everyone is a new door opening into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. But, to find the right six people..."
- Ouisa Kittredge, Six Degrees of Separation

I keep on forgetting how many people there actually are in the Philippines—80 million at last count—because it always seems like everyone's three degrees at the most from everyone else. I've gotten used to stumbling onto the blog of someone in Manila and reading about another person I know in real life, but I was somehow surprised to see a photo of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Garlic, on Alia's blog.

Let's play a game! If you know Garlic Garcia (and you know There Can Be Only One), tell me how or where you know her from in the comments to this post. Use a pseudonym if you're shy, but a working email address is a must.

If you can find the time tomorrow night, make sure to drop by ITP's Winter Show 2002 to see the incredible projects of some of my fellow ITPeeps.

Which one am I most excited about? I'm sure they're all cool, but the one I can't wait to see is my classmate Daniel's 3D model of the last scene from one of Gabriel García Márquez's books, I forget which one it is but it's the one that ends as all the characters stand around in a circle around the Colonel while he lays dying. Daniel's model lets you move to any point in the tableau and receive information on the characters you're closest to—super fascinating to this lifelong bookworm, as you can probably imagine. I'm going to bug him to put it online so you all can see it.

First thing you do after your last class of the semester: go out for drinks and dinner right after with your classmates and teacher somewhere nice and trendy in the area, like Puck Fair.

Second thing you do: go for a long, long walk with your dog.

Third thing you do: make bacon Justin Hall-style. Mmmm. Make more.

One project and one class to go and then I'm done! I'm still not sure how I made it through the week, I've been so stressed out.

Meanwhile Jarvis, who is generally more laidback than a VW van of Grateful Dead fans put together, would like to say thank you very much to Ranjit for getting me to buy him Greenies. They're his second favorite new experience, just behind the lovely Theodore Roosevelt Park dog run.

Ruben Defeo: "Hail, Santo Santi! Philippine art has a new patron saint in heaven. Viva Bose!"

Trust Krip Yuson to fill the first third of a column meant to celebrate someone's life with possibly the most pa-cute paragraphs he's ever written. Santi Bose's cooler in the afterlife than you've ever been or can ever hope to be in your lifetime, give it up already.

Five days between posts—what was I thinking?

Ah, yes. Finals. Arrgh.

And then there was this:

New York is gorgeous completely blanketed in snow, until you have to cross the street and your feet sink into inches of dark gray slush.

Regular programming resumes as soon as all my projects have been handed in, my apartment is clean and my sinuses have cleared. I can't wait.

Rest in peace, Santi Bose.