Weapons of Mass Amplification

This is almost every typical mid-income house living room in the province that I've seen: a sala table, a sofa, possibly a small TV, pictures of family members on the wall and AN EXTREMELY LARGE COMPONENT RADIO occupying half the room that looks like it'd go transformers the moment you hit play.

Filipinos love music, I understand this. But what I don't get is why it seems like in every barrio, there's this arms race of speakers and shit. You'd go into a house and the largest thing you'll find is the component radio. These same people are the people who have barely anything to eat, yet have radios that eat up more electricity than Robocop having orgasm.

I remember one house we stayed in before, the radio was so large, whenever it was turned on it'd make a low humming sound and it'll dim every single lightbulb in the fucking village. 50 gazillion watts of speaker power baby!

5.1 digital speakers? Fuck that. These things can cause richter 5.1 earthquakes. I tried listening to "macarena" (they like to play these kinds of music) to such a stereo once, the song permanently burned itself on my ears. I was rocked so hard my body kept on involuntarily vibrating for about a month or so. And if ever I have children, I bet they'd come out of my wife doing the macarena because my sperm was exposed to such loud music.

God forbid you're in town when two households are component-dueling. That's when two neighbors startup their stereos and crank up the volume to try and outdo each other. This happened to me, and I actually thought I was in the scene of a disaster film. Roofs were blown away and many many children were lost (probably ran away because of the bad taste of the adults)

I really think there should be a regulating body regarding the size of these things. I'm sure at the trend we have right now, it wont be long before somebody comes up with Stereos large enough to blow people to bits- and give them bad hearing for life.

I don't think I can put up with bad tasting "Itaktak mo" spinoffs blaring in my ear at 180 decibels. And while there's no real study conducted yet, I bet hearing mic feedback from something that large as that would sterilize men faster than nude pictures of Vina Morales.

Think of the horror.