November 2003 Archives

The best thing I've read so far about this whole FPJ candidacy thing is this prayer for wisdom, which was probably meant to be a throwaway comment to this LiveJournal post:

please god

iodized salt

gumana ka

patalinuhin mo ang bayan

iodized salt

ikaw ang pag-asa

If you're one of those believer types, print it out so you can post it on your wall, carry around in your wallet or give to friends. Or not.

Also someone please send it in to whomever's editing this year's Likhaan Anthology? It's certainly not any worse than many of things that've found their way into past ones.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer's Lifestyle section has a Top 10 reasons FPJ
is running for President list. Sloppy writing (was it done by the 2BU crew? "Eeew!") but I enjoyed the top five:

5. If he wins, everyone will migrate and the population crisis will be solved.

4. Globe, Smart and Sun are ready to bankroll him because they'll rake it in with the endless text jokes. . . or "kita tayo sa Edsa" (see you on Edsa) text messages.

3. So he can stop making movies where he stars opposite ever younger girls. Imagine this: Starring FPJ and Frankie Pangilinan. Or Juliana Gomez. Scary!

2. Edgardo Angara wants to be President. Eeew!

1. Tito Sotto wants to be President. Double eeew!

What's really frightening to me is that numbers 1 and 2 are true, and 5 is halfway there. My poor country.

Ever thought about the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and wondered, gee, what would Joan Jett do?

Well, now we know—she'll be voting for Dean!

I've been taking a drawing class with Billy Sullivan^* these past few months and yesterday afternoon he took us on a field trip of sorts, visiting various galleries around Chelsea. Here are my shitty photos from the afternoon:

^*If you saw As Good As It Gets, then you've seen some of Billy's work already—he created the paintings that were Greg Kinnear's character's just for the movie.

My blood pressure's shot up again and this is why: "[Fernando] Poe says he will run for president in 2004"

Senator Edgardo Angara as quoted in last week's Newsbreak:

What about concerns regarding Poe’s lack of experience in governance? These, Angara says, can be addressed by appointing well-educated and competent Cabinet members.

'Cause, you know, doing that worked so fucking well the last time we elected an inexperienced actor to the presidency. Um.

If you were having triple bypass surgery, surely you'd prefer the surgeon with years of experience to do all the serious slicing over a med student, even if the med student had the best support team in the world? The Sick Man of Asia needs to see a specialist.

"I am dedicated and I love my country," said Poe as he thanked his supporters who collected millions of signatures from across the country in support of his presidential bid.

I hate to break it you, FPJ, but you don't love your country. If you really truly loved your country, you wouldn't let the gigantic ego massage you've been getting from the people around you let you think running for office is the best idea ever, because it's not. You don't understand how governments are run, how economies work, how the legal system functions, and the opposition loves you for it because they hope you'll be their chump if you win. And you will be, if you do, because you won't even know where to begin to see if the advice you're being given is shit.

(As I said over than a year ago: If only FPJ cared about the country as much as Dolphy, whom I respect because although he's been asked to run for office many times, he's always declined, saying "Mananalo nga ako, e pagkatapos anong gagawin ko?" (I'll win of course, but then what?).)

Still massaging the templates and most of the old content isn't up yet, but hey, psychicpants.net is finally back!

Last year some guy started emailing one of his posts around without attribution, which was annoying until we both received it multiple times as forwards from other people, and then it just really pissed the hell out of me. Hey, if you can copy and paste an essay, surely it's not too much to ask for you to include the url you took it from, no?

If you saw it when it was first posted and would like to see it again, or you were one of the thousands of Filipinos who received it in your email unattributed, you can read it straight from the man himself: Being the True, the Good, the Beautiful and Definitive Meaning of Jologs (or When is the Squattah Not the Othah).

(Or you can wait a bit longer and read it when you buy his first book, which'll be out sometime soon. More about it in a few.)

I did my groceries last night in a rush and so I only discovered this afternoon that the Bounty I purchased was the special Spongebob Squarepants edition. Okay, someone please explain this to me: why are there such things as special edition paper towels? WHY?

"Special edition" makes me think "collectibles" and I'm not sure I want to live in a world where someone might conceivably be hoarding paper towels with a mind to sell them on eBay one day.

Race To Deliver benefits God's Love We Deliver which provides meals free of charge to people with AIDS, cancer and other serious illnesses in and around New York City. They serve over a thousand people every day, half of whom are women and children.

Meg Hourihan will be running Race to Deliver in Central Park tomorrow morning so if you've got a few bucks to spare, please consider sponsoring her run! Most of you reading this are in good health and can afford to miss a meal or two but the people God's Love We Deliver helps aren't as lucky. Meg's running and I'm skipping a few McGriddles for charity, how about you?

I was poking around the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department website after reading their Michael Jackson-related press releases when I discovered the guy with possibly the best criminal name ever: Jesse James Hollywood.

Hollywood's FBI's Most Wanted page says he's known to use the alias "Sean Michaels", so first I thought, he named himself after a wrestler? How lame! And then I realized the wrestler actually spells his name Shawn—the Sean Michaels who isn't Jesse James Hollywood is "the most successful black man in porno history". Nice, only "Jesse James Hollywood" would've made a far better porn name than "Sean Michaels". How many people can say that about their aliases?

lia: michael jackson's mugshot is soooooo bad
matt: like a surprised housewife
matt: "you rang?"
lia: i want a large file so i can make a t-shirt
matt: I love the eyebrows in their perma-surprise position
lia: scary
lia: also the cheekbones that slide straight into the jaw, wtf
lia: who has bones like that?
matt: yeah. did he get his eyes enlarged?
lia: yah
lia: dude, there's nothing left of his old face!
lia: it's all been done over and over and over again

(Question now is what's been done more often, Michael Jackson's face or Paris Hilton?)

See also: Separated At Middle Age, Michael at the doomed Gest-Minelli nuptuals with the newlyweds and Liz Taylor.

At about ten to six this evening the fire alarm went off in 721 Broadway, the home of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, which is where I go to grad school. The entire building was evacuated because of a fire on the ninth floor.

update: Washington Square News (NYU's student newspaper) reported that the fire was in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study next door, but all the emails I received from school administrators say 9th floor 721 Broadway, which is our building. A guy I know who took his time evacuating said he definitely smelled something in the Tisch stairwell, and a fireman he asked on his way out said 9th floor of our building—what's up with that, WSN?

We were in the dog run tonight and a guy and his wire fox terrier named Winston, neither of whom I'd ever seen before, come in. Winston runs straight from the gate two thirds across the run and jumps on Jarvis, growling and snarling and refusing to let go. The guy finally gets there and pulls his dog off, he says sorry, I'm so sorry, we'll be leaving soon, this while we're both carrying our dogs. Eventually he puts Winston down and he runs to me, standing up with his front paws on my legs trying to get to Jarvis. I notice a woman come in with a cup of coffee, she walks in our general direction.

So usually I'd scream at this guy and make him get out, which is what people with dogs that start fights are supposed to do without being asked anyway as part of the run rules, but I'm too freaked out by what just happened so I pick Jarvis up and we go sit on a bench, so I can check him out. He's freaked out too, if he wasn't such a fuzzy dog Winston might've broken skin on his neck or his ears. We sit on the bench for a while so I can calm the both of us down. Meanwhile the guy, his chick and his dog don't leave like he said they would, they walk to the far end of the dog run and they both sit down on a bench while Winston runs around playing with some other dogs. He plays with a female Jack Russell, her walker is cautious and doesn't take her eye off them because of what just happened and they do get rough, but he doesn't attack her.

After five minutes or so I put Jarvis down, we walk around a bit in the middle of the dog run. Maybe three minutes or so pass, he finally gets around to doing his business. I'm getting a plastic bag open, getting ready to pick it up, when Winston suddenly runs in our direction. I try to head him off, but eventually he gets past me and jumps on Jarvis again, snarling and growling again. This time I bat him off twice, but he keeps trying to bite Jarvis and eventually he gets enough of a hold on him so that even when I pick Winston up by his hind legs he doesn't let go, and when his owner finally arrives and snatches him up Jarvis gets carried up too. Winston only lets go when Jarvis is about a foot or so in the air, he drops and stands still trying to get his bearings. I pick him up.

The guy says again, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, we're leaving soon. Still too angry to talk, I look at him long and hard and walk to another area so I can check Jarvis in the light, make sure his skin isn't broken and that he's okay. The guy walks back to the other side of the dog run with Winston and he sits on the bench again.

Heaven forbid the woman he's with have to finish her coffee while standing up or walking out of the dog run, cause it would be such an inconvenience, you know?

Meanwhile Jarvis, who loves to spend hours going all over the dog run by himself without checking to see where I am more than once an hour if at all, was so shaken up he wouldn't walk more than five feet before he would stop and wait for me to catch up with him. I usually have to put his leash on and walk him to the gate so we can leave, but tonight after I made us stay an extra twenty minutes after everyone else had left because I wanted him to get comfortable in the dog run again, he walked straight to the gate himself, and just to make it very clear that he wanted out he started pawing it.

If I ever see Winston's motherfucking piece of shit owner again I am going to rip him a gigantic new asshole.

Those of you who checked out Ween's aborted Pizza Hut commercial tracks "Where'd The Cheese Go?" when BoingBoing linked to it a few months ago will probably be happy to see this Lego music video created by Oblong Pictures. His other movies are all quite good, but my favorite is Chicken Dance, although now that I've watched it a few times I've got the damn song stuck in my head so beware. You can see Ween's official videos as well as two more fan-created stop motion animated ones on Ween.net's video page.

Oh, and I'd like to point out that Ween's official site happily links to their fan sites, includings ones that trade live and rare mp3s. The boys get major extra points in my book for being musicians who get the potential of the web and making friends with their fan base. And now I think I'm going to go out and buy their latest album Quebec, just cause.

"I've been wanting to come [to Divisoria] since high school," said the 21-year-old [Audrey] Tan, a college senior at the Ateneo.

I've been known to crack a joke or two (or ten) on how horribly sheltered Ateneans are, but come oooonnn. Divisoria's only an hour's drive from Makati, it's not like you're travelling to Sagada.

My perlas na bilog (borrowed from Manang Bola) just gave me a preview of next week's Lifestyle section feature piece: Manila's Five Loveliest make an anthropological expedition to the Greenhills tiangge accompanied by the Inquirer's own Sea Princess, Tessa Valdez-Prieto. A promdi tindera giggles nervously when one junior socialite says to her, "Miss, Miss, how cute naman this blouse! How much will you make tawad for me?" while her coworker secretly seethes at the girl wearing a thousand dollar watch who thinks haggling over fifteen cents with a minimum-wage earner is fun.

From dong resin's interview with the Patriot Act, on the occasion of its second birthday:

DR: (...) You're saying your name is a willful nod to how imperialist your underpinnings are? That's a bit shocking, P. Kind of frank for the Beltway crowd, yeah?

PA: See, it's kind of a textured joke that you can take as you like. Am I being ironic calling myself PATRIOT? Or frighteningly jingoistic? Bit of a Rorschach test, see.

DR: Right, yeah. Now, I thought your name was an attempt to sell you as, you know, "good for American citizens", yet another big pander from the current administration, as in"no child left behind." Not the case?

PA: Yeah, a lot of people have taken it that way, but really, if you think about it for even half a second... exactly who needed to be sold? Where was the big scary resistance that I had to push through? Face it, I could have been named "The Let's Knife-Rape Dakota Fanning For Satan Act", and no one would have twitched. I passed though congress like greased shit through a goose with nary a peep. Nobody really had the stones to open their cry-holes after 9/11, did they.

I like how Wal-Mart won't sell certain cds and magazines because they're sexually explicit or whatever but has no problems hawking a mail-order bride costume for Halloween. My favorite quote from the article:

Wal-Mart did not return KING 5’s calls for comment, but a Wal-Mart representative did leave a voice mail at the office of State Representative Sharon Santos saying the store did not intend to do any harm and the company did not have "that many" of the costumes for sale anyway.

'Cause, you know, the chicks on the cover of Cosmopolitan are so obviously dangerous to the public that they must be masked with plastic shields, but the international trafficking of women is just hilarious.

Well, haha. Fuck you, Wal-Mart.

For your reading pleasure, I'm delighted to link to three new stories published in three different places in the span of a few days by your good friend and mine, Mr Kevin Fanning:

1) The Time Between Ordering and Eating" (monkeybicycle.net)
2) "When Your Mother Was A Spy" (Surgery of Modern Warfare)
3) "True Things About Trish" (Eyeshot)

Clearly our dear Kevin is at this very moment the total and utter shiznit of the online literary movement. One day, when his fame has spread throughout the land, we'll be able to tell people we knew him way back when.

(And, perhaps most importantly, we'll be able to sell all the lurid emails he's ever sent us about Kylie Minogue's bum to The National Inquirer.)

"The Golden Girls: LIVE!" recently received a cease and desist order and had to shut down. Lifetime TV (which runs seven episodes of GG every day) gave the stage show their blessing but apparently they only own broadcast and dvd/vhs rights—the stage rights still belong to the tv show's producers Witt/Thomas/Harris, and their people sent along the c&d.

One of the missions of "The Golden Girls: LIVE!" was to raise awareness and money for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy research, PSP being the disease that's afflicted original and beloved Golden Girl Estelle Getty. The cast of GG: LIVE! was recently made ambassadors of the PSP foundation and so would love at least be able to finish their cabaret run at Rose's Turn through the holidays, since this is the most charitable time of the year.

If you've enjoyed the show and would like to help, there's a rally tomorrow night at 7pm in front of Rose's Turn at 55 Grove Street, just steps from the Christopher Street 1/9 stop. Hope to see you there!

See Ev.
See Ev try to get food delivered to his apartment.
See Ev try to look up San Francisco restaurant information on the web and fail.
See Ev then blame the web for having a ways to go.

See Lia.
See Lia try to get food delivered to her apartment (at three in the morning).
See Lia pull up MenuPages while sitting in bed and check out delivery menus from restaurants in her Manhattan neighborhood by cuisine.
See Lia fill her belly with garlic soup and waffle fries from Big Nick's and then fall asleep happy.

A ways to go, my ass.

My favorites of the suggested Bush/Cheney '04 bumper stickers:

Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention.

[ via wood s lot ]

You guys've probably already seen Worst Album Covers Ever (my favorite, like most everyone else, is "Let Me Touch Him" by The Ministers Quartet), but did you notice how much Joyce looks like Tootsie?

Only not as cute.

Now also available for your viewing pleasure: Worster Album Covers Ever II. (But why throw in the II when you already have worster in there? You might as well call it Worst Album Covers Ever Strike Back.) And then of course there's always Nick DiFonzo's classic bizarrerecords.com, from whence most of the album covers probably came.

Many thanks to friend Steve for pointing out Winston Smith's super fun takedown of Kim duToit. Smart is sexy and so is a guy secure enough with his masculinity that he knows not to be afraid of women. May his tribe increase!

Pat Benatar has a promotional appearance in New York on November 20th and while David and Alaina are gung-ho to go, I'm somewhat conflicted about it.

I mean, at first I wanted to go dressed up as Pat from the "Love In A Battlefield" video's dancing hooker fight scene

but then I saw the outfit she wore to the 81 Grammy Awards and I was completely blown away. I mean, how could I not be? So, what's a girl to do, I ask you? What's a girl to do?

80's Lyrics Quiz: People are What?

I scored an 80, not too shabby considering I was more into television than radio back in the day (still am). How did you guys do?

In my defense: if this had been a Name That 80s Video Quiz, I would've ruled—once in college my friends Monica and Doanne spent the weekend and I frightened all three of us by being able to name most every single 80s video (it was MTV's Classic Weekend) within five seconds. Ahhh, the days of big shoulder pads and even bigger hair. It's a good thing I was too young in the 80s to have truly embarassing photos of myself.

[ via prolific.org ]

Page Six reports today that Jessica Simpson might just be taking over:

Brace for an overload of Jessica Simpson. Not only has the ditsy pop tart signed on for another MTV season of "Newlyweds" with her hubby, Nick Lachey, she is up for the lead role in the movie version of "I Dream of Jeannie." On top of that, she just signed a secret deal with ABC to star in her own sitcom.

"Jessica's show will be prime time - kind of like what Eve is doing, or what Jerry Seinfeld did," our spy said.

Mentioning Jessica Simpson and Jerry Seinfeld in the same paragraph—let alone the same sentence—is sacreligious, unless you're talking about how they have the same initials. Fie on you, Page Six's spy, fie!

She's also too obvious for "I Dream of Jeannie". I mean, if we're going to go the big-breasted blond bimbo route, let's please go for Pamela Anderson, whom I've been a fan of since the sleepless night I watched back to back episodes of "V.I.P." Even the average episodes were funnier than most stuff that's on the networks now, it's a shame most people couldn't get past her image to the fact that the entire show was built on taking the piss out of it.

But back to Jessica Simpson, let's throw her a bone. I've seen Eve's show a few times and she was almost as wooden as Al Gore, so if Simpson does do a sitcom she couldn't possibly be worse. That said, I love "Newlyweds" so much I'll even drop what I'm doing to watch episodes I've seen twice or thrice before, but "Newlyweds" is more than enough Simpson exposure for me.

You may have seen this photo of an all-male (of course) group of politicians watching George W. Bush sign the (totally heinous and evil) Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act into law before, but did you know what the people in it were thinking while it was taken?

Hastert: . o O (zzzzzzz)
Hatch: . o O (I pray, Lord, that you will bless this vague and unconstitutional ban, and maketh ill any dirty liberal judge who is about to rule against it.)
Sensenbrenner: . o O (I think Dubya's getting a little thin up top. Heh.)
Santorum: . o O (I am happy to protect Americans from moral failures like choosing the least risky abortion procedures!)
Oberstar: . o O (Wait a second, these guys are all GOP... did I come in the wrong door?)
DeWine: . o O (Oooh, what pretty writing!)

Bush: . o O (G-E-O-R... uh oh... they're all staring! don'tpanicdon'tpanicdon'tpanic you can DO this! J? NO, G! G!

All credit to Dave Adams, if you liked this leave a comment—maybe he'll get encouraged and start posting snarky things to his own blog more often.

stereolabrat on Halloween:

Why is it that guys always come in better costumes than girls? Like there was a guy dressed up like a mushroom cloud and one who went as a glory hole and one who went as what might have been either the Staten Island Ferry or a car wreck. And most of the girls just came as sexy nurses or sexy angels or sexy fairies. Ok now you dykes are gonna get all women's studies on me, but shut the your clam up and listen to me: girls are dumb. They want to barf after they eat so they can be skinny and look good for a bunch of assholes who'd basically fuck them no matter what they looked like. Except if they are fat, cuz no one likes fat chicks. But that's not the point. Girls, all you have to do is show your tits and wash the cooch semi-regulary and you will get the deep dicking you crave. If you are also intelligent, hey that's cool, you merely get a wider selection from which to choose your sexmaking partner.

I hate the sexy nurses, sexy angels and sexy fairies, they're too easy and therefore so boring, but the absolute worst offenders are the girls who dress as prostitutes. They always wear really cutesy outfits and never dress like the hookers I'd like to see (i.e. the really broke ass ones addicted to crack, with missing teeth and bad skin—as seen on "COPS" and of course, "Reno 911") and anyway they invariably look like they probably dress slutty every other day of the year.

Outfits I hereby declare banned from the streets of New York forever more:
banned outright: vampires, witches, devils, doctors, fairies, witches, angels
banned except on very hairy men (the more grotesque the chest and leg hair—to say nothing of the back—the better): nurses, hookers

My old apartment was fully-furnished, the new one is completely bare. I've been so busy working on my midterms and arranging my move that I had absolutely no time to buy furniture and so last night I had to run out and buy an AeroBed from Zabar's.

Jarvis, to his horror, had to share a tiny twin mattress with me for the first time in his life. After an hour of me trying to sleep while he showed his displeasure by snorting, harrumphing and pacing back and forth along the edge, I ceded 60% of the space to him and he was on his back and snoring within five minutes. We both know who really runs our household and it's not me.

Here's an equation I've become familiar with lately:

midterms
+
planning a move
_____________________________________
total nuclear facility-level personal meltdown

Midterms are over and I'm in the middle of moving to my new apartment right now. I got a mover to bring most of my boxes and all my heavy things over to the new place early this morning, then I came back and crawled back into bed with Jarvis to get some much needed sleep (I slunk back in from the wonderful Uffish Halloween party at 4:30). I just woke up again ten minutes ago and I'd really like to have something to eat—only my microwave was one of the heavy things packed up this morning and now it's sitting in my new kitchen four blocks away while my empty belly is here and so is a freezer full of food I can't reheat.

FUCK.

No internet access at the new place till Wednesday (when Time Warner and RoadRunner come by to hook me up with some sweet, sweet cable loving) so I'll be checking my mail and blogging from the park, weather and free wifi availability permitting. Jarvis sends you all his love.