A Counter-Offer to CJ Renato Corona's Proposal

Last Tuesday, Chief Justice Corona has finally appeared in the senate to testify, if testify meant deliverying an opening statement which is almost as long, predictable, and butt-cringingly artificial as that godawful movie Eat Pray Love, and then walking away before the actual testifying part. That'd be like Lady Gaga having a concert, make a speech about how she's all for gay things, and then leave the stage after three hours, completely forgetting that she's famous not for being the rallying point of the fabulously liberal, but for singing songs.

Three hours of Julia Robert doing nothing important and wasting your time

Before the end of his speech however, Renato Corona said he will sign waivers to open his hidden magical stash if 189 other people would sign it. Imagine if this sort of bullshit applied to a rape case, in which case the accused rapist will only provide a semen sample on the condition that he will do it in public, in front of the judge, and if everybody inside the courtroom will join him in jacking off. And we're going to let the Chief Justice get away with this?

That's just wrong. Like, courthouse-full-of-ejaculation wrong.

I have a counter proposal. Let's propose that we'll end the impeachment trial. CJ Corona will get to retain his position as Chief Justice for until he can retain the position. That's what he wants afterall right? In exchange, we'll just ask him to waive his basic right to defend and avenge his nuts from being punched by any taxpayer that comes across him anywhere.

Bust a nut with this deal. Literally.

It's a pretty fair deal. That way, he can go screw this country as much as he wants, but he won't be screwing pretty much anything else lest his manpiece falls off during intercourse.

Imagine if that agreement would take place. Corona can, for example, rule that expresident Arroyo can travel abroad, say the seventh circle of hell to consult with Satan, even though she's not supposed to since she's on trial. We can, in return, go visit the supreme court and give his family jewels a good fistbump or two. The next time Corona does that, he will start reconsidering how important Arroyo is compared to being able to walk without holding his nutsacks in a  styrofoam cup filled with ice.

And I assume that will also kill the protests. How exactly can you remain angry a man who just got punched in the nuts 637,244 times in a single morning? You just don't. Any guy who sees another guy get punched in the nuts will definitely laugh the first few hundred times, but after a thousand? You'll just start feeling for the guy. No more prostests. Prostate, maybe. But no more protests.

At least until he starts doing stupid shit again.

Then the nut punching cycle begins again.

Will it be worth it? Totally.

China Vs. Corona

Last Sunday we were treated to a celebrity showdown that's normally reserved for what-if debates that occur six-bottles deep into a Friday-night drinking session. I imagine the starting question would be like: If Raymart Santiago fought Mon Tulfo, how long would it take before Gloria Diaz walks in on the set and becomes bedridden so they'd be forced to make up and become friends again in the name of Filipino movie values to the tune of a knocked-off dramatic Hollywood soundtrack? 

pictured: (left) Raymart,about to haul ass. 

(right) Ass in question to be hauled

Well apparently there's Red Horse where Fate hangs out because that's just what Fate made happen at NAIA 3, minus the Gloria Diaz part (well it hasn't happened so far, but it still could so I am not completely wrong - yet)

A few hundred miles away, another showdown was happening, with our brave fishermen and coastguard playing patigasan ng itlog with our counterparts along the Scarborough Shoal. Admittedly, it's like we're the Mon Tulfo of this showdown, with our boats outnumbered fifteen to one. And I assume, on one of their boats, there's also a class-A pirated version of the pink dude that smacked Tulfo like a red-headed stepchild in his now immortalized NAIA scandal video. Bottomline? We just can't win that one with our current resources.

NAIA scandal: better than the Mahal/Mura Shower Scanadal,
infinitely worse than Hayden Kho's Absolute Mineral Water scandal.  

But then again, on a completely different field, we have another battle yet going on, which is indirectly between Chief Justice Renato Corona who could probably sink the entire Chinese fleet by the sheer weight of his dollar accounts, and President Aquino, who has enough clearing space on his forehead to have it converted into a makeshift runway for our antiquated airforce jets. There's no clear winner just yet, as Corona's proving to be the dodgiest sunnovabitch we've seen being impeached. So much so that everybody looks at the previously for-impeachment exPresident Estrada and says "We're sorry. You're not the biggest asshole around anymore. As an apology, we will let you run against Mayor Lim for Manila. If you can beat jailtime then sure as hell you can beat a walking corpse."

Pic not related: Erap's FuckyouArroyoMobile. It runs on Jueteng Money.

Going back to our Chief Justice, I say let's use his powers. We'll have Andrew Tan of Megaworld sell the entire fucking Scarborough Shoal to him at a discount like his Penthouse, for like maybe 500 bucks because of "storm damage". If he doesn't agree at once, we'll embroil him first in a scandal and then bribe him with it, because he'll only accept it if it's dirty. By next year, it'll be in his SALN, and the prosecution will report it 10x via Inquirer.net.


I don't expect China to take this sitting down of course. Realizing they have been beaten to the race for squandering by an even more nefarious squanderer, they'll take it to court, wherein Serafin Cuevas will gladly declare that the islands aren't actually Corona's but in fact it's his daughters, who happens to be a physical therapist in the US who bought the islands and apparently half of China,and paid for it with her money. And for some reason everybody will lap it up like it's true, because hey, testimony.

Caption: Cross me and I will expand your asshole to this size
so I can insult you from inside your rectum.
And the rest will be history, like literally, the proceedings will be embroiled in so much bullshit and nonsensical rantings of International Judge Miriam Santiago that it will take ten years just to get past initial pleading. A hundred years later, archeologists will dig through the fossilized bullshit and see the case never finished, the islands never turned over to China, and Judge-Senator Enrile preserved, looking not a single day older. By then China would've given up and start claiming some other island nation instead, like the Bahamas. We. Can. Win. This. 

 Tonight's closing statement: 

The fate of the world is now a race between who gets to claim ownership on everything first: China or Corona's daughter.

Single Price Stores

One of the growing trends nowadays in malls are the opening of those so called dollar stores where every thing has the same cheap price, regardless of what it is, sometimes including whatever the cashier brought to work for lunch. I am assuming that this concept was invented by the laziest accountant in the world.

The goddless communist-styled pricing scheme is supposed to make you feel everything is cheaper, because normally expensive goods are given the same price as items that consumers would term as "pieces of shit". And it actually works. The only problem is that it works both directions, as you tend to forget that some items are worth much less than the fixed price and you buy them anyway. I assume that that's the whole point of it all, a dark, nefarious scheme to cheat me into buying an expensive 85 peso plastic cup while walking away thinking I just bought myself the holy grail for less than 100 pesos.

Last weekend I was able to drop by Saizen by Daiso, a fixed price shop that sold mostly bits imported from Japan. How can that idea fail? Imported goods for the price of a blowjob in Pasay?  Now I'd like to say that one unique thing about fixed price shops is that the only common theme they have is the price of the items. So what happens is that in their bid of gathering as much of similar priced items as possible, they end up with an array of goods that are not in anyway related to each other. For example, here's what you'd find in one aisle:

- Stereo headphones
- Hand sanitizer
- Umbrella
- Foldable plastic cup
- Inflatable breasts*

The whole point is, because there's no real rhyme or reason to what you're going to see inside. It's not like the grocery where you walk in knowing at least some of the items that you need and you know they're going to be there. You don't know what's inside so, for budget shops, the main idea when you walk in is "maybe I'll find something interesting for 85 bucks".

Because of that, you end up considering buying shit that you normally don't contemplate on buying, just because it looks cheap, and because you're already there. If ever there's a shop that successfuly mimics the feeding behaviour of a carnivorous Pitcher Plant, Saizen has got to be it. By the end of my visit, I bought the following items:

- Hydrometer
- Hanayama Devil Metal Puzzle
- Hand sanitizer
- Candy

I had no idea I'd be buying these items, and outside a budget store, I'd probably have not bought any of those things. But I did anyway. The whole concept of single pricing the whole store somehow drives even normally logical shoppers insane. Or maybe they have strong psychoactive substances venting out of the air conditioning.

Maybe the whole merchandise industry should follow that concept. You'd enter a restaurant without having to decide if you already want something because, fuck it, they're all priced the same, "maybe I'll find something interesting for 85 bucks". We'd be governed my a steady state of randomness. It'll be awesome.

I'm just not sure if hand sanitizer will make an awesome ulam.


*I shit you not

Sidecar Logic

I was driving today when I nearly got into an accident due to a large and generally unaddressed problem in our roads today. Sharon Cuneta. No! I meant sidecars! My mistake! Lately they've exploded in number, as though the sidecars reproduce on their own, fueled by street-level pollution. There's one part in Taft Avenue where three lanes have already been occupied by sidecars hawking for a ride while one lane is delegated for everything else, including even more sidecars. Most of these sidecars wait for potential passengers coming from the nearby LRT station, and with ever increasing competition, pedicab drivers have gone so far into the station to call for passengers that they will sometimes start calling for passengers even before the LRT as come to a full stop, one station away.

The problem is that because these vehicles are supposedly not fuelled by artificial fuels (although some drivers are running mostly on cheap 120-proof alcohol) , they are not governed by any transportation agency. And because they don't have license to work with, pedicabs take it as a sign that they also don't have to follow road rules. It's just about as absurd as feeding lions raw meat with your bare hands in the wild because you aren't in a zoo that has rules prohibiting just that. The result is just complete anarchy.

So anyway, I was moving along the road at a moderately fast speed when a sidecar decides to have a nice chitchat with Death by emerging out of a pedestrian crossing section at full speed and then going towards the direction of my car, counter to the flow of traffic, as though it was challenging me to a game of chicken in the same way a fly challenges a swatter.

It happened in a few seconds, and thankfully I didn't go angry birds on the sidecar and was able to hit the breaks and bust my horn just in time for the sidecar to not join other sidecars in the great big illegal sidecar waiting area in the sky. The sidecar driver, after being stunned for a few seconds, finally popped out of his alcohol-driven haze without so much as showing any sign of regret, remorse, or sanity and finally went to a safer lane on the other side.

Oh did I just say that?

Ha ha. No. He didn't. He moved to another lane to counterflow and kept going. I gave him the staredown of a lifetime, along with a few words of advice that would probably be bleeped out should it have been aired on any medium governed by MTRCB.

Inside the cab were four girls, most of them college students, who looked like they just have been delivered a healthy dose of fear of the Lord by what had happened. These kids looked like they're from a family where the biggest threat to their life so far has been getting grounded and having their allowances cut off.

See that's my problem. Why would anybody in their right, functioning, non-insane mind decide that it is perfectly okay to ride what is essentially a cage made  of welded rusting spars and canvas attached to a bicycle being ridden by what could possibly by an insane person who has no qualms of meeting God before the day ends? What makes them think that riding such an infernal mode of transport along one of the busiest, most dangerous roads in the city is justifiable so long as you don't have to walk five minutes to get to where you're going?

A few years back (by few I mean less than a decade ago), when I was still in college, the only reason anybody would use a sidecar on a main thoroughfare is if the road is deep enough in water for humpback whales to swim alongside buses in Taft Avenue, quite possibly to  pickup passengers. And even then, we'd only do so if the sidecar looked sturdy enough to not decompose into a pile of rust before we got to our destination. It made sense. We rode those things so we didn't die (of infections and falling into a manhole or both) and not so we could feel what it's like living on the edge (of safe part of the road)

People are just getting lazier and lazier nowadays.  

Pickup Line Na Pickup Line

Para kang pickup line. Pinagpapasapasahan ng iba't ibang lalaki.

Parakang pickup line. Okay sa inuman pero walang silbi sa totoong buhay.

Para kang pickup line. Ginagamit ka lang ng mga lalaking desperado.

Para kang pickup line. Napagiisipan lang pag wala nang ibang matinong magawa.

Para kang pickup line. Ang sarap barahin.

Para kang pickup line. Corny na.

Red Book: Back To The Philippines

We arrived in the Philippines shortly after the first quarter of the school year. We were only in Saudi for two years, but bear in mind that at the time I was only six. Given that most of my memories started at age three, that already accounts for more than half of my memory. Philippines became just as strange as Saudi Arabia.
The first priority when we got back was to reintegrate back our educations. My sister was enrolled back to her school before she left, and I was enrolled to a school right across hers. I had no problem passing the entrance exams. I already read, wrote, and did simple arithmetic at the time. Unforutunately, because I was advanced a year during preschool, I was a year short of the minimum age requirement of entering first grade at that time. It was then that I learned a lesson through my mom that I'd use a lot later on in my life: There are few problems that you cannot solve with a white lie (my age) and bags full of swiss chocolate (Toblerone).

Thankfully, there was this one kid, Francis I think, who had to leave for Australia or something. He left behind his books and a slot at the top section of first grade. The only thing I ever knew about him was that he sure loved to draw penises on pictures in his textbooks. I didn't quite get what was so awesome about helping out making the illustrations more anatomically correct - at least until I tried it. Anyway, even up until now I wonder if I did deserve to be in the top class, or if it's just because Francis left an opening that I got in. But at that time, I didn't really care. For the first time, I was in a real school that wasn't converted out of a small-scale office so it was an upgrade.

I was introduced to the class and most kids, some of them didn't really admit it until we were already in highschool, found me weird. And understandably. I had red hair back then. Read: RED. HAIR. I don't know if it's the water in Saudi, or the heat, or eating all those shawarmas, but my hair was troublemaker red. Thank goodness the polluted air of Manila happily worked on making it black in just a few months. I spoke English, hoping they'd understand me better, and it was the first time I realized that no, not all kids spoke and understood English. Specially not in the Philippines.

Speaking of firsts, that year was a great big bag of firsts for me. On the first day, my classmates were nice enough to teach me how to say "Putangina", but not what it meant, which I happily asked my mother after I got back from school. It was probably the shock of a lifetime, but looking back it was just a sign of bigger things to come.

After the first month, my parents were already called up by the teach for the first time. It most certaintly didn't become the last. I cut classes to play videogames during lunchtime. Age six. Yeah, you just know I'd grow up to be the rebel. It was crazy. I didn't even know what I was doing was illegal when I did it but I quickly learned that the easiest way to determine which is legal from not is that the illegal things get you beat up by your parents. Cutting classes? Illegal. Big time.

On an interesting note, our teacher Mrs. Miranda is still teaching to this day, 22 years later. How somebody does something over and over again every year and not get tired of it is a miracle of discipline becuase honestly, if I spent a day working on the learning of my younger self, I'd probably be in prison for homicide already. It's a good arrangement. I stay away from teaching and my ass, in turn, stays away from prison rape.

That same year my grandmother died. She was the only grandparent I can say I really knew. My two grandfathers passed away before I was even born, and, well I didn't really know much about my other grandmother.  It was the first time for me to experience death within the family. All I remember was that she went missing, and the last time anybody saw her was having her hair and nails done in a parlor - something she never really did before. My mom sometimes says it's because grandma had a feeling her time was up. I suppose it kind of makes sense. You're born naked and sticky and crying on your way into this world, the least you can do is make yourself presentable on the way out.

I took a few days off of school and we went to Quezon for a supposed birthday party. It was not until we arrived and I saw the casket that I learned that lola had died. My sister and cousins were crying. I couldn't find it in me to do so. Perhaps I was too young to cry. I sometimes think I should've. No that it'd change anything, but I feel that it would've been more proper.

The same way I shouldn't have skipped out on classes earlier that year.

But I guess that was what being six was like for me.

Not really knowing anything about the world, until you see the consequences later on.

The Avengers Spoiler-Free Movie Review

I remember that at some point while watching the movie Thor I had to remind myself the only reason I should endure the shoddy, slow, and understandably bland film is so that I could at least somehow get the full background on the upcoming Avengers movie. It felt like having to go through looking for that final Transformer toy that I didn't really want save for the fact that it's necessary to build a bigger better toy.

For the case of The Avengers, I wasn't even sure the final combined product would be awesome. Still, it was worth a gamble. The Avengers has always been THE movie to watch out for. There are probably more people waiting for it than the second coming. Was it hyped? Hell yes. Did it live to the hype? Simple put, still a hell yes.

I'm not a big fanboy of Marvel characters. I never was. I played trading card games as a kid. I watch movies. I try to read comic books when I get my hands on them, but I don't go out of my way to read up on each and every character. I don't bitch when I see the movies deviate from the comic books. I'm one of those people who are just happy to see their characters come on screen in a level of quality that's better than the 70s era Captain America cartoons which might as well have been cut-outs from comic books.

The Avengers in its simplest sense is action porn made for people like me. There's the usual foreplay, the witty/campy one liners, and then there's the nonstop action that people never get tired of. The thing is, it actually works better that way. Remember the last time Ang Lee thought that maybe, just maybe, humanizing these childhood comic book superheroes would make for better movies? The result was The Incredible Hulk starring in his own soap opera set in the middle of the fucking desert where the worst damage he can do is punch a couple of sand dunes. Seriously man, fuck that movie.

But that was a long time ago.

The Avengers is a movie that pulls no stops in showing the craziest fight scenes any comic book writer could think of. At times, it felt like a high-definition version of somebody's fanfiction where instead of fictional characters from different storyworlds makeout homoerotically, they beat the living daylights out of each other. And to see that is actually one helluva treat. The characters and the plot areonly built up just enough so you know who the characters are and that there's some point to doing whatever they're doing and everything else is just carried on by a torrent of fast-paced one liner witticisms and well, as I haven't stressed enough, ass kicking.

I've heard of a lot of people complaining how some scenes just get ridiculous, like how the military or the conventional forces seemed so feeble and weak and even lacking in presence. That's just fine. Let's just not forget that these movies are coming out of COMIC BOOKS. We're not watching Saving Private Ryan. We're watching superheroes do their thing, and if it takes a ridiculously comical set of normal humans to make every scene with a superhero in it look great, so be it.

The balancing of aspects worked really well for The Avengers. I honestly think whoever wrote the story did exceptionally well in three main aspects.

1. The Avengers basically weaves the Ironman, Thor, Hulk, Captain America universes together. Not only do they have to mesh in a way that the movie doesn't  sound like an acid trip, it has to be entertaining. That's double digit crazy right there.

2. Let's face it. Hawkeye sucks. Nobody likes Hawkeye. But they have to somehow make him just as useful as say, the God of Goddamn Lightning, Thor. Powers and roles have to be balanced. And that's just what happened. By some miracle, Hawkeeye actually doesn't (completely) suck.

3. The Avengers is largely catering to the generations that grew up admiring these heroes. On the other hand, kids will be watching the movie as well. It's hard to figure out how you can make a movie with enough action to make the adults punchgasm while squirming in their seats and avoid wanton violence that would make the (non-fan)parents of children avoid the movie.

The true strength of The Avengers is that 5 or 6 movies later, Marvel already knows what people want and that's what they're packing this time around. It's a great balance of funny moments and action packed sequences that drive the adventure down your gut with the ferocity of Captain America's F'ck Yeah Punch. No more Ang Lee drama bullshit. Just action.

The bad part? It's that same strength. Deep down inside, when you think about it, The Avengers has a plot so straightforward, if you took it and replaced the characters that didn't have as much buildup as Marvel characters, everybody would probably dump it as a B-movie. But because there's just so much nostalgia, so much buy in, we're made to think that it's all good. Like if the Pope, Obama, and Lady Gaga went onstage at the same time, it wouldn't really matter why they are on the stage at the same time. It's that they're there, and you ARE going watch it even if they just stand there and wave at the audience for an hour.

But you know what? That's perfectly fine.

Avengers is like that great party at the end of a big race. The less you take it seriously the more awesome it gets.

And that's really the bottomline of comicbook storylines.