Archive for October, 2010

The Willie Revillame Show

The Willie Revillame Show

Where there is a stink of shit
There is a smell of being.

- Antonin Artaud, The Pursuit of Fecality (1947)

It was essentially the same kitsch and kaboodle of dancing girls and free money, the game show antithetical to the whole idea of the game.  The Willie Revillame Show is back on air, as with the poor old people given P500 bills and the down-on-their-luck placing all their hopes and dreams on live televised parlor games.

Somehow, The Willie Revillame Show has perfected the science of spectacle.  Theater is a recreation of life, but as Artaud posits it, it’s a recreation of that center that fragile center that forms cannot reach.  Therefore, everything is exaggerated, idealized, and even distorted; in a word, spectacular.  Theater and spectacle is not confined to the stage, but it extends to the viewers as well.

That’s where The Willie Revillame show succeeded in, and perhaps where it is most powerful and even at its most dangerous: that the stage is not that glimmering plexiglass floor, but society itself.

October 30, 2010 16 comments Read More
The Dog Ate It

The Dog Ate It

You have to give it to Associate Justice Mariano C. Del Castillo and his colleagues at the Supreme Court; apparently, his fellow Justices accepted the excuse that his computer did not have a tool or utility that warned him he was plagiarizing, and that his legal researcher inadvertently dropped a couple of citations in the footnotes.

What makes plagiarism a serious accusation is that it runs counter to scholarship; to miss a footnote or to copy extensively from a source that’s not being cited properly is simply an act of stealing.  To live a just life in society means giving one what is due to him or her; the intention may not be malicious and the act accidental, but denying a person’s due comes across as malicious, unjust, and more importantly, unfair.

October 23, 2010 0 comments Read More
My WordCamp 2010 Breakaway

My WordCamp 2010 Breakaway

WordCamp Philippines 2010 was nothing short of awesome.  And yes, this is a very belated entry.

This year’s WordCamp Philippines found me babbling about WordPress statistics at the Advanced Track for the breakaway sessions – talking more about bananas and the tumbok shape of normal distributions more than anything else relevant – but I’m writing this post for the benefit of those who:

  • Were not able to attend my WordCamp breakaway;
  • Agreed with Bariles’ opinion of me being a rockstar at night (although the rockstar should still be Matt Mullenweg), or;
  • Attended my WordCamp breakaway but just weirded out by my incoherent mumbling, and making suggestive gestures with a bottle of drinking water.

Here goes.

October 17, 2010 3 comments Read More
The Bottle in the Balance

The Bottle in the Balance

The world has changed dramatically since the first human beings took water from clean streams and brooks.  Today, the water industry is expanding to include different varieties of water not only for human necessity, but for the varying tastes, wants, and needs of people.  With increasing wealth comes increasing kinds of water, at increasing costs: sparkling water, alkaline water, flavored water, sports drinks, and perhaps the most ubiquitous of them all, bottled water.

Every year, 200 billion bottles of water are consumed globally.  These bottles find their way into the waste-stream: while some make it to recycling plants, some also make it to the ever-increasing interest of solid waste we saddle the planet with.

October 16, 2010 2 comments Read More
Dispatches from the Buffet Table

Dispatches from the Buffet Table

It’s like the medieval Great Hall, Filipino Style: with all the sweetness and the sourness of the Filipino attitude, and those hotdogs decorated with marshmallows, skewered on halved cabbage heads.

The Filipino buffet, to me, has almost always taken a rather familiar route.  I’m not talking about hotel buffets or all-you-can-eat specials at restaurants, but the typical Pinoy one: the common putahe served to celebrate everything from a wedding to a funeral.  It almost always includes rice, some form of pancit, some form of lumpia, and a whole array of foods that can be made from pork or chicken in various states of food warmer-aided coagulation; seasoned and enhanced with various degrees of MSG, save for macaroni salad and buko pandan somewhere in the end of the line.

October 16, 2010 0 comments Read More
The Revolutionaries Will Not Be Tweeting

The Revolutionaries Will Not Be Tweeting

Nowadays, anyone who writes an entry critical – or skeptical – of social media would be looked down upon with such contempt, especially if it is done within the context of social media.  Well, here goes.

In his latest commentary for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell takes a critical view of social media:

In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Can the revolution be tweeted?  Of course it can; participants of the revolution can tag each other in Twitter conversations, check in to the revolution venue in Foursquare, or have a pulse of the public through Facebook fan pages about the revolution.  Surely the status quo can fall under the mighty brunt of blogger power.  Yes, it will be tweeted, but will the revolutionaries be tweeting?

October 1, 2010 5 comments Read More