Twenty Vegan (Not Vigan) Meals

And sixteen more

Um, McCain

Kaluskos Musmos

Yes! Maila Gumila is now my fezbukfren

Nice Sharpener

How to Buy Her a Beer

Swim

Before You Drink

and after

Mister Cupido

There are 20 more photos like these. OMG Some guys have all the luck talaga.

Who Do You Love?

Worldwide Ukay-Ukay

Philippines, particularly Baguio, is the center of the ukay-ukay or the secondhand clothes of Hongkong and sometimes Tokyo. I heard from my French anthropologist friend Pascal that some countries in Africa get the Parisian and Milanese goods (lucky them!). Now, it surprised me that Haiti gets the US clothes.
Here's part of the article:

In 2002 The New York Times reported that of the approximately 2.5 billion pounds of clothes donated to charity in America each year, as much as 80 percent is shipped globally. The Times article inspired filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi to research the history of recycled clothing. From 2003 to 2007 they visited rag yards in Miami, dug through archives in London and Washington, D.C., and traveled to Haiti to see the international secondhand markets for themselves. The result is the recent documentary Secondhand (Pepe), which explores the global trade in used clothing.

David Cook'd and David's a Maze in

From Vulture:

When was the earth created?
Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years, which was the last time David Cook's new single would've sounded original.

Meanwhile in Utah, David Archuleta was honored with a huge (12 acres) maze on a corn field with his likeness and the words "Archuleta 4 Prez" above it and "Utah's Idol" below.

Best Signal in the World

Holy Rainbow

Biblical scholars plotted the Bible's 1,189 chapters on the horizontal axis of the photo here. It resembles a graph because the length is determined by the number of verses per chapter. Then the arcs show the 63,779 cross-references between each chapter. Thus, the rainbow.

That's When I Realized This is Going to be a Loooong Night

Eleanor Coppola

I bought the commemorative copy of Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola's all story magazine. There is a translation of Mircea Eliade's Youth for No Youth. I think FFC is making this into a movie. Anyway, I also spotted in my excuse of a library (nagkapatongpatong na mga libro) "Notes" by his wife about the making of Apocalypse Now in Philippines. The movie almost ruined FFC's earnings from Godfather (mostly on account of the weather) but it slowly paid off. Here's her entry for September 29, 1976:

I am sitting on a rock on a set. It feels like a rock, it looks like a temple fragment, but I know it was made by the art department. The crew had been waiting since 8:00 A.M. to shoot. It is almost three in the afternoon now. Francis and Marlon have been down in his houseboat, workign out his death scene today, and most of yesterday. The assistant director is saying that if they don;t start shooting in the next thirty minutes, it will be too late to get a shot today: "Eighty thousand dollars down the drain."

Ichiro: Eternal Sunshine in the Spotty Ms

Yes, the only exciting thing in Seattle Mariners remains to be Ichiro. He tied Lou Gehrig's record of with his eighth season of at least 200 hits and 100 runs. Gehrig reached those benchmarks in 1927-28, 1930-32, 1934 and 1936-37. Ichiro did it in consecutive seasons. Wow! Anyway, a trivia to baseball fans. It wasn't Babe Ruth who was the first to hit the ball out of the new Rizal Coliseum in the 1930s. It was Lou Gehrig.

My Favorite CD Holder

Oregonian interviews Mr. Fight Club

Q. You had a background in actual physical labor before you became a writer. Did that give you an advantage somehow over someone who takes a purely academic path to writing?

A. In American culture, writers come from one of two schools: They either come from academia, where they have a fairly limited amount of personal experience and exceptional writing skills -- they can write beautiful prose about very little -- or they come from journalism, where they have an enormous wealth of experience and exposure to people and events, but their writing tends to be kind of pedestrian, very plain. So they tend to write very plain-language stories about very important events. So it's either fancy writing about nothing or it's plain writing about huge things.

Q. Your own writing style is very direct. I'd be curious to know what you make of some of the overwriting in literary fiction.

A. Some of it annoys the hell out of me. [laughs] More

Caught Cheating

A girl was caught cheating in class
Teacher: What's this?
Student: My prayer list.
Teacher: Then why are the answers to our exam written here?
Student: Oh! My prayers have been answered. Thank God!

Hosoe Kodama

This is Frank Vinluan's story:

Monday, October 16, 2000

Hosoe Kodama `doctor of flowers,' flourished to 106

Frank Vinluan, Seattle Times staff reporter

Madame Hosoe Kodama was a "doctor" of flowers. A practitioner of ikenobo, a Japanese art form of flower arrangement, Mrs. Kodama displayed her work at exhibitions and flower shows throughout the Northwest, and she earned "sokatoku," the field's highest scholarly degree. Later, Japanese officials expert in flower arrangement granted her the title "madame" in honor of her lifetime achievements.

But as accomplished as she was in her own right, Mrs. Kodama worked to teach others how they might do the same."She was the foremost teacher in the state of Washington," said her daughter Nobie Chan of Seattle. "Her arrangements were huge and absolutely astounding."

Mrs. Kodama, founder of the Washington State Ikenobo School of Japanese Flower Arrangement, died from a stroke Oct. 5 at Providence Seattle Medical Center. She was 106.

But four years before that, in 1996, another Filipino Frank wrote about Hosoe for the Seattle PI:

Chinese Milk vs Russian Milk

I drank Chinese milk from 7-11 a day ago but then I realized that it was soya milk. So no tainted milk. I also got a text message a while back about a health alert not to suckle breast of the Chinese. Hmmm. It's a good thing this is Russian.

In This Corner, Levy vs. Zizek!!!!

Yes, the greatest intellectual debate of the year.
The audio is available over at NYPL Live.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's "rock-star philosopher," and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovanian "Elvis of cultural theory," will scrutinize the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those of the future, as they argue for a new political and moral vision for our times and investigate the limits of tolerance.

Does the advent of capitalism cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the neighbor? asks Zizek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.

Are human rights Western or Universal? How is it that progressives themselves-those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism-have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes? asks Lévy in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against New Barbarism.

Father's Day Spot Remover.

The (once) young boy in the picture asked for help in the Internet about the white spots on his Dad's shirt. He wanted to fix the picture for Father's Day. Some people did help, but this is the Internets and you don't really get what you want especially if you are demanding and haughty like the boy. Look at the help he got.

View from the Lobby

In Vang Vieng, the prettiest GRO (they call them "service women") in a ramshackle karaoke for lao people only turned out to be a kathoey. But I didn't know that. She used the word, "ladyboy" which is the only English word she knew. Only the next day after asking a kathoey herself did I learn what it meant. Anyway, in that karaoke bar, the songs were all Thai and Lao songs. Two hours later, they were able to find a karaoke CD of English songs. Only it was the songs of MLTR. Michael Learns to Rock. Osiyett! And I'm the only one among the international people who knew the songs. Because I was expected to be the ambassador of my country, I dutifully sang 20 minutes too late and too soon.

Guess who Conquered Time This Time?

Jackson Browne: Time the Conqueror
full album stream

Star

This must be another boring party. How do you explain me concentrating on reading Philippine Star when there's beer galore. That is Toots S. behind me and Vic Alambra who would later join the Philippine Star. I think this was in Iggy's House during the launching of Atras Pinoy with Andy Zapata and the late Benjie Villa elected as co-presidents. Jawo may be laughing then but he is now the president.

Nostalgia: Washington DC

I think this was in Washington D.C. The Bulgarian guy on my right is now a journalism teacher in the Midwest while the Palestinian broadcast journalist on my left married a Muslim in Colorado. Look how ADHD I was then: coffee, bagels and newspapers galore in case I get bored.

Obama's Campaign Soundtrack

The Barack Obama campaign has announced a compilation album, Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement, with proceeds going toward the Democratic US presidential nominee's election coffers.

The tracklist:

1. Eternity - Lionel Richie
2. Signed Sealed Delivered - Stevie Wonder
3. Waiting On The World To Change - John Mayer
4. American Prayer - Dave Stewart
5. Battle Cry - Shontelle
6. Make It Better - Los Lonely Boys
7. Pride In The Name Of Love - John Legend
8. I Have A Dream - BeBe Winans
9. Am I All Alone - Suai
10. One Is The Magic # - Jill Scott
11. Love & Hope - Ozomatli
12. Looking East - Jackson Browne
13. Out of Our heads - Sheryl Crow
14. Promised Land - Malik Yusef with Kanye West and Adam Levine of Maroon 5
15. Hold On - Yolanda Adams
16. America The Beautiful - Keb' Mo'
17. America - Ken Stacey
18. Wide River - Buddy Miller

Nostalgia: College Classmates

This will hurt. I will not name them.

View From my Hotel in Vang Vieng

with Mel from Cambodia and Judy of USC

Nostalgia: Roland Tolentino in UCLA

Roland Tolentino in UCLA in 1994, posing beside his name. Hoy, Choy. Kahit paano may sikat na tayong tagadala ng beer natin

Nostalgia: Coverage

Here is Satur Ocampo, years before he became a congressman. Please observe that I was left of center. And the other is Kora Dandan-Albano, famous ilustrador ng kabataan. We, together with her husband Jimbo, planned the DC (Desaparacido Comics) series of my poems 12 years ago.

Nostalgia: Peanuts

One of my favorite Peanuts strip. Ever since the Martial Law, it had been my habit to cut out my favorite strips. I then cut out Sgt. Bailey, Edd Aragon, Snoopy etc from Bulletin Today. Later, I would include Garfield, Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and many others until I can afford to buy the books. Internet has made the cutting for me but old habits die hard

Nostalgia: Yosemite

With Evelyn Balancio, my eldest brother's classmate in UP Baguio, in Yosemite National Park

Nostalgia: San Francisco Bay

8:30 pm in San Francisco, moments before drinking my first real Irish Coffee at North Beach

Nostalgia: My First Poetry Paycheck

I found this among my "junk." The envelope of the UP Linggo ng Wika Contest. It was Butch Macansantos who presented me the envelope. There were five to six poems and I was able to save only two of them. I forgot how much they paid me. I should have framed it.

Nostalgia: Willi Pascual's Bangkok Postcard

Willi Pascual's first paycheck in Bangkok and he spent it on a postcard. It was dated March 30, 1994. And already, missing Nora Aunor. Ha ha ha.


Within the couple of days, I would be posting what I found in two folders while looking through my stuff inside an old suitcase