Phooeey-try

I hate poetry. There's only one thing I hate more than poetry and that's finding a bloody Band-Aid in my clam chowder. Oh sure, I've read Shakespeare and am very impressed with the technical structure of his plays and sonnets. However as a child reared by and still sucking at the teat of Hollywood cinema, I tend to appreciate more a good plot line or unexpected twist to enhance storytelling and not just the clever use of iambic pentameter, as was Shakespeare’s genius. (Pentameter is a line of verse consisting of five "feet" {ten syllables total}. Lines of iambic pentameter are the most common of all lines of verse in English and, certainly, the most common verse form in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry. A line of iambic pentameter consists of five iambs and, traditionally, would be described as sounding something like this: da DUM/ da DUM/ da DUM/ da DUM/ da DUM {"from FAIR/-est CREAT/-ures WE/ de-SIRE/ in-CREASE"} – Shakespeare.com. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a website eventhough he’s, you know, dead ).

Having said that and being a big fucking hypocrite, I’ve dabbled in poetry in what felt like a previous lifetime. I wrote the following poem for a girl years ago but she’s never read it. Things were going so bad for both of us at that time that I felt a stupid poem couldn’t make things better – even just a tiny bit . It’s kinda like going on to eat your clam chowder after you’ve found a bloody Band-Aid in it.

So read on and see that poems are made by fools like me*:

Now that you’re not speaking to me anymore and now that you don’t want to have absolutely anything to do with me, I’ve compiled a list of the all the things I hate about you. It’s some sort of coping mechanism I guess--that old trick of focusing on the negative so the positive doesn’t seem all that good and in some roundabout fashion, I won’t feel so miserable. But it doesn’t seem to be working though. For what it's worth, here it goes:

I hate the way you’re always right.
I hate the way you wore hair in a ponytail--primped and shellacked.
I hate the very steep driveway to the parking area of your condo.
I hate it that you have to pronounce everything you say perfectly.
I hate that I can’t bear to watch Samurai X anymore.
I hate that I was looking up at the Boracay night sky with all the stars out last Sunday and wanted to tell you about how beautiful it all was but couldn’t because you didn’t answer my call.
I hate the fact that it’s been a month since I’ve seen you.
I hate it that you must have a reason for not wanting me to be your friend--and even more that you’re not telling me what that reason is.
I hate it that you don’t text anymore.
I hate missing your stories about crazy uncles with bad body odor.
I hate it that I was so happy when we were friends and now I’m just heartbroken that we’re not.
But mostly I hate the way that I don’t hate you
Not even close, not even a little bit. Not any at all.

*I also fucking hate “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. By the way, the name of my blog, as you doubtless know, is from the eponymous Jim Carrey movie. It actually comes from a line of the, um, poem "Eloisa to Abelard" by Alexander Pope.

License to Kill

On my morning drive to work today, a taxi tried to cut right in front of me. I barely avoided crashing into his ass because the fucker managed to break hard. My whole morning ruined because the Land Transportation Office issued a professional driver’s license to an idiot who lacks the common sense to look at his side-mirror before making a turn. You know, just to check if a 2,000 pound automobile is careening down the lane you plan to take.

This got me thinking on how unbelievably easy it is to get a driver’s license in this country. Sure, there’s a whole system of tests and requirements in place meant to weed out those that must (note the imperative) not be issued a license to drive. But as we all know, the system stinks – just like Eddie Gil’s toupee after a full day of campaigning in Payatas. Anyone can get a license. The club’s as exclusive as Christina Aguilera’s vagina – everyone’s welcome.

Allow me to ruminate a bit more. A brain surgeon studies , say, 10 years more post-undergraduate before he achieves resident status in a hospital. Even after he graduates from med school, he has to spend another two years reviewing for a board exam which he must pass in order to practice medicine. Clearly, it takes years and years of study and training and a considerable fortune before the brain surgeon gets his license to operate on your noggin.

During an operation, how many lives is the surgeon responsible for? Just one – the patient being operated on.

Now, compare this to a bus driver. How many souls does he have control over at any given time in the performance of his duty? At the minimum, around 10 people – the fucking bus owners don’t pay these guys a regular salary and instead the variable amount is set on the number of passengers that ride the bus driver’s trips. How many years of study and training go into a bus driving career? I’m guessing but it must be considerable less than the years that the brain surgeon has put in. How hard is it to get a professional driver’s license? I’m guessing again that the qualifications and requirements are less stringent than the brain surgeon had to meet.

Is the comparison fair? Nope. It’s as fair as a situation where a guy pays two million pesos to his brain surgeon for a successful operation. A month later, the guy rides a bus (I don’t know. For some reason the guy likes riding buses. It’s a hypothetical damnit) pays the ten peso fare and takes the seat behind the driver. Bus proceeds to crash into a truck carrying gasoline and turns into a fiery heap. Everyone on board dies including the guy. Basically, he paid two million pesos to the doctor he entrusted with his life and ten pesos to the bus driver whom he expected to extend the same level of professionalism of, oh, not killing him.

So, what do I want to happen? Should the government make the requirements in securing a driver’s license as stringent as that of a medical license? Should they train bus drivers as hard as doctors because ultimately they’ll be responsible for more people in one year than a doctor in his professional lifetime?

No. I just want that fucking taxi driver who tried to cut into my lane to crash into a truck carrying gasoline.

The Last Samurai

I finally finished watching my brother's pirated DVD copy of "The Last Samurai" yesterday. Three weeks ago, I only got through about 45 minutes of it and had to stop because my nephew bugged me to let him play with the Play Station.

I only got to the point where Tom Cruise's character, Nathan Algren, and his poorly trained Meiji army got their asses kicked by Katsumoto's Samurai posse. Algren gets captured in the retreat and, incredibly, Katsumoto decides to spare his life. Why? It's either to deprive him from experiencing the warrior's ultimate wet dream of dying in the hands of the enemy or Katsumoto has apparently fallen for Algren-San's unwashed Civil War veteran cuteness.

That point is where is I picked-up the movie again. Fucking pirated DVD was for shit. It was actually taken from the moviehouse and, aside from the pale, dull and black and green image, it didn't have the English subtitles when the characters were speaking Japanese. The sound was okay - it even had two audio tracks: Dolby 5.1 and Dolby DTS - but for the most part, I had to listen close to understand the dialogue. As for the subtitles, some Chinese guy transcribed everything and so you couldn't rely on them at all. Tang ina, I was totally confused watching the scene when the Emperor Meiji talks to Katsumoto and then leads on to that scene when the Emperor Meiji snubs his offering of the sword. Man, that was heavy shit...too bad I couldn't understand what the hell was going on.

I wanted to like “The Last Samurai” a lot but I think it sucked donkeys. It wasn’t that I saw it in two parts with a three week gap, or that the pirated DVD copy looked and sounded bad, or even because I missed out on some of the big scenes because I don’t speak Japanese, I hated it because it was very manipulative. Ed Zwick, the director, made pretty damn sure that you knew how you felt during every scene. Just in case you were an emotional zombie and you weren’t sure if you had to go boo-hoo or ha-ha, Zwick led you by the hand into the toilet, took your head in his hands, and shoved it in the toilet bowl of emotion. I especially hated that last scene where the American diplomat was thanking the Emperor Meiji for agreeing to the treaty with the United States and Algren interrupts, yup, interrupts the whole ceremony because, oh, he just wanted to talk to the Emperor.

Why the Emperor Meiji agree to permit such arrogance to disturb his throne was beyond me. And why did he change his mind about the treaty? He reasoned that he decided to 86 the treaty because Japan was moving too fast into the future but at the same abandoning its traditions and old-time values that are the hallmark of the success of its civilization, as represented by the Samurai code. Wait, wasn’t Katsumoto killed because the Emperor sent his army to smoke his ass? Fucking hypocrite. The lapse is okay, from the point of view of the screenplay, so Tom Cruise could grovel dramatically.

Historically, the Meiji Restoration was single-handedly responsible for bringing Japan into the 19th century by uniting the whole country. Japan was ruled by warlords with asskicking Samurais as their personal armies. And so the difficulty lay in bringing down these warlords and their Samurais. That is the context of the movie as the title suggests.
So how are the good guys in the movie, the Samurais, any different from the bad guys, the Meiji government? Morally not much, each was just trying to survive by killing anything which opposed its existence. So what was the point of all the big battles fought in the movie for? Nothing, I suppose – it just made good cinema. Why would you root for the Samurais when they were as blood thirsty as the Meiji army? Because they were the underdogs? Please. Japan wouldn’t be a country if the Emperor Meiji hadn’t opened a can of whoop-ass.

There was only one scene which I liked and felt that made it worthwhile to see the movie. Too bad it lasted for about ten minutes only. It’s that love scene between Algren and Taka, played by the beautiful Koyuki. It was so subtle – just Taka dressing up Algren on the morning of the big battle – and then that nanosecond kiss. So subtle that I don’t think it could actually be called a love scene but, boy, did I feel tingly down there when I was watching it. Koyuki’s so beautiful that you’d forgive her for having, pretentiously, only one name. I was surprised to find out that she’s only 27 years old. I thought she’d be older, like Michelle Yeo-old.

Overall, I say pass on this movie. Sure it’s nice to look at with the amazing visuals of the New Zealand location but the hands of Ed Zwick forcing your head into that toilet bowl seems too steep a price to pay.

Crazy Old Coot

I work with a 44 year old guy that I go out drinking with once or twice a week in this shithole dive. The only reason we go there is because it has the cheapest beer we've found so far. Besides, the waitresses treat us a little better because not a week passes by that we're not there.

I went out with old coot last night and we both had six beers each. I got into my car first and when he opened the passenger-side door he said that someone got in my car and messed around with his shirt which he left on his seat. He said that his shirt was moved in a rightward direction closer to the handbreak when he swears that he left it at the leftside nearer his door.

I said that it was impossible because the alarm would have sounded if the car was broken into. Besides, I said, if someone did go inside the car wouldn't he leave the things in the car the same way he found them? That is, to avoid any suspicion that something foul was afoot.

Would it make any sense at all that someone would break into my car and move his shirt and leave everything else untouched? Like my CD player or badminton racket?

Old coot wasn't buying any of my explanations and said that I was the one who moved his shirt. The fucker wanted me to admit that I was the responsible party to this heinous act.

I denied that I moved the shirt because I DID NOT MOVE HIS GODDAMN, MOTHERFUCKING, WILLIAM HUNG UGLY, COCKSUCKING SHIRT!

Then, old coot offered his own logical explanation for the mysterious affair of the teleporting shirt. He said, and I'm quoting the exact word he used, that the reason was "supernatural." I'm not shitting you when I say that he believes in his heart of hearts that a hereto unknown supernatural force broke into my car (well, this thing's ephemeral I suppose so it didn't technically "break into" my car but passed right through the physical structure which is the passenger-side door of my 1997 Honda Civic VTI)
and MOVE HIS SHIRT!

I looked at him and saw his beady eyes looking back at me asking for validation. I heard my brain say, "Tang ina, deck this asshole," but my heart went, "Fuck it. Just go home."

So I went home.

TANG NA!

Driving along one day, I saw a billboard hawking Tang. It was just a woman, supposedly a mommy, holding a pitcher of orange juice. Below the image of the mommy was a really lame tag line, so lame that I've completely forgotten what it was.

This got me thinking that a really great and memorable tag line for that billboard would have been a straightforward invite in big bold letters:

TANG NA!

Or prefix it with the subject in the second person plural:

TANG NA KAYO!

Or again qualify to include everyone:

TANG NA KAYO LAHAT!

You could make the tag line the center of a promotional jaggernaut. Imagine promo girls going around the city giving out free samples and calling out to everyone:

"TANG NA KAYO! TANG NA KAYO LAHAT!"

Even more appealing to the family, you can emphasize how Tang has been with us through the years - even your own mother was drinking it when she was also a child:

"TANG NG INA MO..."

Man, I'm in the wrong business. With my marketing whiz and savvy, I should have taken up either of the two callings I would be perfect for: advertising or prostitution.

That Fathead Arnold Clavio

I saw that coffee ad again on TV - the one with Arnold Clavio in it.

It starts with tight close-ups of three guys who smell something good and are just orgasmic about it. Then, the smell disappears and they look bewildered.

You know what's causing this olfactory torture? That fucking creep Arnold Clavio. He lets out the aroma of his mug of coffee and then quickly cups it so the smell of instant coffee doesn't go wafting into the air. All the time he's as giddy as Rip Taylor.

What the hell is up with this commercial? Why is Arnold Clavio living in the same house with three other guys? And why is he the one making coffee for the fuckers? The guy's a network TV anchor and yet he prefers to squeeze in some moments of his hectic schedule to play barista to his loser housemates? How much do they pay for rent anyway? I mean it has to be a lot since they've got a millionaire to do their shit for him.

What about that puppet named Arn-Arn that appears with him in his morning show? Get this, Arn-Arn is supposed to be the exact likeness of Arnold Clavio, right? (Which isn't hard to do, apparently, as there other textile-based life-forms who look uncannily like Arnold Clavio - Exhibit A: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew from The Muppet Show) The bitch is the lazy bastards who stitched together Arn-Arn didn't bother to get a guy to voice him that sounds like Arnold Clavio. Instead, Arn-Arn's ventriloquist's a guy who's either lost his testicles or is about to hit puberty - that is, he sounds like a five-year old girl. Would it have been too much to ask these lame asses (I'm assuming there's more than one person involved in the creation of this masterpiece because the name "Arn-Arn" sounds like it was thought up by a whole Creative Writing class) to hold auditions to find a guy who can do a decent Arnold Clavio? Hell, there are 3 million people out of work in the country and don't tell me that in this hapless bunch there isn't one unemployed AIM graduate who can't try to sound like that fathead.