Archive for January 26th, 2009

Showbiz Shootin’: The Woman Who Was Hugotized From My Tadyangizer

Showbiz Shootin’: The Woman Who Was Hugotized From My Tadyangizer

I’m posting Marian Rivera’s picture here because I feel like it.

Anyway, PEP.ph – my source for fair and balanced reporting in local showbiz – reports that on February 2, 2009, GMA-7 will launch its newest primetime soap offering: Ang Babaeng Hinugot sa Aking Tadyang. It’s an adaptation of a Carlo J. Caparas graphic novel, which was first made into a film in 1988 starring Vivian Velez…

Wait a second; let’s run by that again: Ang Babaeng Hinugot sa Aking Tadyang. That’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?  And in an online showbiz community that thrives on abbreviations (like, “MSKM” for Maging Sino Ka Man, “IPL” for Iisa Pa Lamang, among other things… sorry for using ABS-CBN examples), could the abbreviation “ABHSAT” work?

Before anything else, let me explain something about Pinoy television.  Here in the Philippines, there is no such thing as a soap opera – or a TV program, most especially a noontime game show – that fails.  There are only ratings that say one channel is better than the other.  Those ratings, in turn, are one of two things: unreliable, or rigged.  If you’re watching a locally-produced TV program that fails, that is not number one, or does not have high ratings, you’re not watching Filipino TV.  You’re probably getting aerial reception from our Taiwanese friends.

But yeah… ABHSAT?

January 26, 2009 0 comments Read More
Cargo Cult Blogging

Cargo Cult Blogging

But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science.  That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.  It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly.  It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards.

- Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”

There’s a certain group of people in Vanuatu who worship an avatar called “John Frum.”  When the Americans occupied the islands during World War II, they bought with them unexplainable amounts of material wealth never before seen in the islands.  Some of the people surmised that the wealth is supposed to be theirs, and the cargo could be theirs if they followed the way of the Americans.

After shedding their colonial pasts and embracing their roots and customs, the tribespeople then equated the massive amounts of cargo with airstrips, towers, and US Army uniforms.  So they cleared jungles to make airstrips, made towers out of trees, and even went so far as to wear “headsets” made from vine and branches.

“We wait for you, John Frum,” they pray.  ”We wait for you and the cargo you promised us!”

Yet no airplanes land on the “airstrips,” no responses are heard from the “headsets.”  There’s something wrong here: the cargo does not arrive.

I use this anthropological study – and Richard Feynman’s reading of it – to illustrate “what’s wrong” with the Filipino blogosphere today.  Borrowing from Feynman, let’s call it “cargo cult blogging.”

January 26, 2009 6 comments Read More