Dumbest slaves in Egypt take a break

Most tragic love story (on film): Brokeback Mountain [During the cowboys’ last “fishing trip,” Ang Lee inserts a flashback of their first summer in Brokeback Mountain, wherein Jack watches Ennis ride off to tend to the sheep. THAT is THE look of love.]

Most tragic love story (on page): The End of the Affair and The Remains of the Day [It has to be a toss-up, it just hurts to pick. One goes down the ugly, angry rabbit hole of passionate love while the other hesitates on the edge of what could be a true meeting of the minds and hearts. Both are equally lonely stories.]

Best fairytale: The Princess Bride

Best “real” love story: When Harry Met Sally [But Harry, I insist: it is possible for men and women to be simply friends.]

Best mindf*ck (on film): The Usual Suspects [This, M. Night Shyamalan, is how you deliver a twist.]

Best advice columnist: Cary Tennis [Bar none.]

Hottest “masked” vigilante: Dexter Morgan [Sorry, BatBale. Dexter’s long-sleeved cotton shirt and cargo pants trump your spandex suit – with the fake abs – any day.]

Hottest drug addict: Tony Leung as Yan in Infernal Affairs. [For the life of me, I do not understand why I find him SO HAWT in the scene where he’s snorting coke. It is a mystery to me.]

Hottest as*hole: John Malkovich’s Viscount de Valmont in Dangerous Liaison

Best telenovela: Bleak House [Oh the saga of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce!]

Best alcoholic drink: Vodka Mudshake coffee flavor [I know, I'm a wuss.]

Best personal essay: Body of Work by Gerald Hannon [He argues that prostitution is akin to sainthood. Chew on that.]

Best author writing in opposite gender’s voice [I know, clunky, but he’s really quite brilliant at it]: Wally Lamb for She’s Come Undone

Best movie critique: Charles Taylor [Where are you, Charles?! Stephanie is overthinking everything!]

Hottest world leader: Barack Obama [Just had to get that in there]

Hottest Discovery Channel host: Mike Rowe [I didn’t like it when he gave the zombie special effects people ‘tude, but I’m giving him a pass on that since he was sick. Same episode has him stripping for a doctor. Yeehaw!]

Prettiest CNN anchor [because we do notice the girls too]: Anjeli Rao [I lurve her big, toothy smile.]

Best horror film: The Exorcist [Never again]

Best horror novel: The Eye of the Dragon by Stephen King

Best poem: The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [Ulysses is not of this world, so I’m not even going there.]

Most challenging poet whom I can still understand: John Ciardi

Best non-physical fight scene: Clive Owen verbally assaulting Julia Roberts in Closer [You know what they say, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words...]

Best TV show (comedy): The Office [I’d add “the original,” but since I do not even recognize the existence of the US rip-off, this will suffice. "Arrested Development" is a verrrry close second. ]

Best book: The Catcher in the Rye

Best chocolate dessert: Cyma's freshly baked Skolatina [God invented this dessert so that those people who are surely going to hell can at least have a taste of heaven.]

Hottest country: Italy [And no, I am not talking about the climate.]

Best con artist: The team in “The Heist” [Mickey Bricks!]

Best Mr. Darcy: Colin Firth [So stop making film versions of the book and casting other would-be Darcys because you will never top Colin, whoever you are.]

Best mother-and-child movie: Dumbo [Goddammit, just thinking about it makes me tear up!]

Guiltiest pleasure: Watching Daniel Craig get tortured - nekkid - in Casino Royale [Torture is BAD, children! And it never gets you the information you really need!]


What are some of your superlatives? Share, so I can read/watch/taste/drink them and maybe add them to my superlatives as well.

I took a halfday leave today and went on over to my City Hall with my brother so we could register as voters; 2010 can not come soon enough. We were buoyed by my mom's encouragement that our City Hall is very citizen-friendly and that all we needed to register was one valid ID.

On our way, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the rest of this city (ok, I know, I'm extremely Alabang-centric) is very clean and well-maintained. There were traffic cops at every major intersection and people actually sought out pedestrian lanes when crossing the street. I was a proud, happy camper.

So it was doubly disappointing to be told at the City Hall that we can not, in fact, register there because registration happens somewhere else -- at Baywalk something-or-other. And that we need a goddamn police clearance before we can register. As my dad would say: sanamagan.

But you know what? This is not the end for this voter. Because I will vote, by the hammer of Thor. I'll find a time to go on leave again and find this Baywalk something-or-other and figure out what exactly I need to bring with me in order to get my name on that list of people who get to have a say on who runs this country. We fight! We fight!fight!fight!

I hope you're already registered. We need your good sense holding a ballot come 2010 because these are dark, dark times.

Are you happy? Think this is the bestest time of the year? Come sit with me. I have homebaked cookies, a cold glass of milk, and a big, big smile, all of which I am eager to share with you. (I'll even let you have the last cookie.) Because I lurrrve you this time of year, my fellow human being.

It is a FABULOUS time to be alive, world! YES WE CAN and WE DID!

Very interesting article in Salon today about sanitation habits around the world. About damn time somebody went on record as to how disgusting this Western practice is of just wiping after number twoing. Yugh. I don't know how they can go about their business after simply wiping. I'd prolly start crying after two minutes.

Over here, readers weighed in on their own experiences with sanitation outside the US. rudd.peter talks about a contraption he found in middle class homes in India: a hose and spray valve attached to the wall near the toilet. Oh, child. I wonder if that was a EUREKA! moment for him.

I wonder why God didn't make this a more or less general practice with all humans. You know how incest is taboo in most cultures? Why couldn't we have been born thinking water+saop+a bit of isopropyl alcohol follows pooping? So we don't have to contend with a civilization that has sent man to the moon but can't be bothered to wash-as-you-go. Again, YUGH.

October is Indigenous People’s Month in the Catholic calendar (yes, somebody made it up at some point, I kid you not). So at Mass this morning, the priests were joined by three men wearing bahag and one woman wearing what looked like a malong. When the celebration was over, the commentator called two of them to the lectern to share a few words. The woman was very brunch-crowd friendly, saying she enjoyed celebrating Mass with the community and that she and her peeps are more than happy to share water and what-have-you from her ancestral lands with us Manila folk because her tribe loves us. Swell.

Then one of the men gets up to the mic. He has a sure, forceful voice and straight out he says that he fears for his tribe because there have been other religions coming in to “tame” their culture, so much so that it’s been a while since he has seen a traditional wedding happen in his tribe – that practice, or at least the way they used to practice it, was one of the first to die. I tried to pay attention to the rest of his brief speech, but the shame and discomfort of the whole situation just made me, and my ears, retreat into my imaginary black hole. This man, by the way, travelled to Manila with a Catholic bishop. The absurdity of the situation doesn’t end there, though. After he finishes speaking, as with the woman before him, the Mass crowd applauds enthusiastically. Enthusiastically. It was such a palm-meet-face moment, my forehead hurt.

This is the community I live in. You know that suburban drone that was home to Nancy Botwin and her fatherless boys? That’s my village.

The least we could’ve done for that man, who sat in a freezing church through an hour-long ceremony he didn’t believe in, was apologize for insisting that our goodwill translate to converting him to a religion he had no need nor desire for. But this is the unspoken tragedy of the less fortunate, isn’t it? It’s not that they are poor; it’s that the people who are helping them want to wipe their slate clean without even bothering to ask if that’s the charitable thing to do. This man did not need us telling him that worshipping trees is an idiotic thing to do. He just needed help getting clean, running water to his village. He should be able to pray to whatever goddamn plant he wants to.

This Picture of the Day is brought to you by TheIdiotSarah Palin and her li'l one, Piper, who has obviously learned a lot from her momma.

Is it me or did Joe Biden debate even better than Obama? Bar, c'mon, you gotta up your game here, man! Because watching Joe, I almost went, "Obama who?"

More proof that the McPalin ticket will be four more years of Bush: She pronounces "nuclear" as nook-yoo-ler. Need we say more?

I turned 31 a few weeks ago. Look at that. I think I feel it, too. 31. It's definitely not like transitioning from 25 to 26. This new age brought with it some tell-tale signs. I'm living with them, but I dare not enumerate them for fear of giving them validation. They're there, but I'm trying to keep my attitude on a "kiss my ass!" level.

One sign I have to acknowledge, though, is this hankering to do something meaningful with my life. (That's a good "you're DEFINITELY older" sign, right?) I want to help. Someone. Or other. I don't know how exactly I want to help, I don't know that I would be much help to anyone, but I want to do something that makes someone's life easier, if not better. I'm getting tired of my airconditioned cube and shiny marble floors. Buying shiny, new stuff for myself and family and friends, while still fun, is starting to have an increasingly shorter shelf life -- it perks me up for an hour or two and then, soon enough, turns stale and tired.

If anybody out there has any idea that could help me out here, I'd like to hear it. I'm not ready to start a family, so that's off the list. And besides, who would I be helping in that scenario? Certainly not the rest of mankind, as there are already too many of us to begin with. (If I could give birth to pandas, though, that would be a different matter altogether.)

I need to do something that makes someone else happy. What would make you happy?

Occasionally, there will be a development at work that, although is technically meant to be understood only by the practice staff, gets passed on to our tiny group as well because it might affect the way we market the firm. One such development involves an update in the Code of Ethics that was laid down by the International Federation of Accountants. The IFAC.

Now, I don't know about you, but I would've gone with i-ef-ey-see in pronouncing that acronym. It doesn't take much effort and it's not like I'm in a hurry to get the whole acronym out the door. But yesterday, I had the mild discomfort of sitting through a meeting with a Partner who, without malice or giggle, kept saying I-FAK.

You see how this is not merely a case of po-tay-to/po-tah-to.

Date:	2008-07-17 22:12
Subject:	YEY!!! And HELLO Angelito!
Security:	Public
Mood:	ecstatic
Music:	drizzle

My World Vision kid wrote to me! My World Vision kid wrote to me! YEY!!!! =D

Snail-mail letter. One more thing that's better than sliced bread!

...but I'm afraid we must take issue with some of your parting words:

“I do feel that when you’re born into the world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show, and when you’re born in the United States, you’re given a front-row seat.”

“…at some point, I drifted away from feeling any allegiance…I don’t identify with city, state, government, religion, association, country, organization or species, even.”


Oh but George, you are so painfully American still.

It was a nice try, bub, and certainly you have good cause to want to disengage from this cruel, crumbling world (“Human beings were given a lot of great gifts…but we squandered it on goods and superstition. We gave ourselves over to the high priests and traders, and they are the ones we allow to control us.”). But you gotta know from a third-world native: You were born a white boy from the US of A and you died a white boy from the US of A. It never fails to amaze me, this American conceit.

Maybe you can finally isolate yourself, wherever you are. Maybe you’re not so white over there anymore.

My friend got married today. (Pictures later. Our dresses were perfect.) Here’s the thing: I can commit to a wedding. I can. More often than not, I lurve weddings: the sentimentality, the aesthetics, the effort, the quietly crying parents, what the whole ceremony stands for. And I have a very partial idea of what mine would be like. (There will be a lot of Indigo Girls and Van Halen playing in the background, for one.) But I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my brain around marriage. I don’t understand how people can do marriage. Makes me think of this psycho I read about in crimelibrary.com who kidnapped a hitchhiker once and kept her in a box that was so small, the only thing she could do was lie down. Even smaller than a coffin, I tell ‘ya. That’s what marriage looks like to me – this tiny box. That you have to share with someone.

I’m hopeless, aren’t I?

More learnings from this highly caustic life:

When someone tells you he is in pain, that someone isn't always looking for counsel. Or a pep talk. There are instances when all that someone needs you to do is to agree with him about how horrible, tragic, or utterly lonely that thing that just happened to him is. Humans need other humans to validate their pain. Not so the pain becomes twice as real, but so that their humanity becomes more pronounced, more palpable. In that moment, the person in pain isn't looking for comfort (yet) so much as for someone who will sit with him as he studies his pain and masters its contours and colors and flavors.

It's not an easy thing to do, sit quietly beside someone who is hurting. But at this point, all that is being asked of you is to be patient. Eventually, your wounded pal will have had enough of his pain, whose entirety he has stared at and pondered for a considerable time. Eventually, he will remember chocolate, or sex, or a warm bath and fresh towels after a long day, and realize that the pain he has been focusing all his energy on is really quite a drag. When he does, he's going to need someone to hold hands and skip down the road with while whistling a happy tune. That's your reward for sitting quietly and not marking time. You get to share in that feeling of renewal.

Date:	2008-01-08 13:24
Subject:	audacity of hope indeed
Security:	Public
Mood:	hopeful
Music:	Richard Darbyshire - Love will provide

"In "Areopagitica," John Milton wrote, 'Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.' In Iowa, we witnessed the shaking of those locks. Like one of those miraculous reversals in one of Shakespeare's late plays, when a statue suddenly comes to life after standing motionless for years, Obama's victory seemed almost otherworldly -- as if the laws of space and time had been suspended, and a quality as evanescent and fragile as hope had suddenly become real. I am not a religious person, but it was hard not to feel that his triumph vindicated the essence of what I think of as the secular essence of religion, something even nonbelievers can believe in: the possibility of inner transformation. A transformation at once personal, and national."

- Gary Kamiya, Obama's double magic

I can't vote for him and whatever shiny new health plan he has won't affect me one bit, but I am very much excited to see what this man will do if he is elected into office. The idealist in me is rallying for him. It's like believing in Santa all over again.

Dear God,

I'm still waiting for the work pace to slow down and the work load to lighten up. And you know I'm not the most patient kid in the block. Let's just keep the prayers moving up there, OK?

Sincerely yours,
rossetti