Rainbow

I told a friend about my blog and he read it. He said that I tend to bitch a lot.

Well, here's more.

The song that I currently hate with a passion right now is Rainbow by Southborder.

I hate it for the obvious reasons:

1) The vocal stylings are a rip-off. Now you’ve got two of the members channeling Brian McKnight instead of one. You can’t tell if it’s the keyboard player singing or the supposed lead singer – for one thing, they sound the same and, second, they’re both butt ugly.

2) The rather complicated message of the song which is: There is a rainbow after the rain. How about writing a song on other natural phenomena and use these as metaphor - volcanic eruption as penile ejaculation or fissures on the ocean floor as the exposed ass crack of a plumber?

3) It's from Southborder which makes me prejudge this song as a piece of shit.

and the not so obvious reasons:

1) The video of the song has the band scrappily playing in, apparently, Anchorage, Alaska. The members are all frocked up in layers and layers of sweaters, jackets, and scarves. Faux snow is falling in the background. You can tell that they’re sweating it out in a soundstage though because you can’t see the cold breath coming out of their mouths. What’s the matter guys? You didn’t have the budget to digitalize the effect?

2) The first time I heard about the song, Chynna Ortaleza said in an interview that she wanted her ex-boyfriend to listen to it because the song contained some sort of positive message to help the poor sap go on with his life after the big break-up. That message is: I broke up with you because you’re gay. Listen to this song to help you get out of the closet. It’s about rainbows for chrissakes.

3) They have one guy playing flute in the song. That’s right, a fucking flute! What is this? Jethro Tull's Aqua Lung? Or maybe John Kaizan Neptune’s Soft Melody?

At this point, I have to say one positive thing about the song, right? Afterall, I understand it's quite popular among listeners of FM radio because it's always included in the top three songs in surveys.

O-kay, I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Bonehead

As sure as Stone Phillips is actually a cyborg sent from the future and is just biding his time hosting Dateline before leading the great revolt of machines against humans, I’ll do something so incredibly stupid when I get the feeling that I’m soooo perfect and beyond committing boneheaded gaffes that beauty pageant contestants are wont to do.

Take what happened this morning. I was faxing a document to an office which is located next to our building. As a result of this proximity, the fax no. I was sending the document to and my office phone no. are prefixed by the same three digits.

So there I was, hard at work dialing the office’s no. I was sending my fax to. I get a busy signal and then my goddamn phone starts ringing. I was expecting my nitwit officemates to pick-up my line but no one did. My phone stops ringing as soon as I started redialing the fax no.

It was busy again. At the same time, my phone starts ringing too. Un-fucking-believable, I thought. Since the fax no. was busy, I decided to answer my phone. However, it stops ringing as soon as I start to do so.

So I try faxing the document a third time. My phone rings. Again. The fax no. I’m trying to connect to is busy. Again.

I was about to scream out to my officemates - Can someone please pick up my goddamn phone? Can’t you see I’m busy at the fax machine? But something stops me and I check the fax no. I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to dial into for three times now.

Hmmm, it looks quite familiar. And then it finally hits me. It's my phone no.! I indicated it on the document as part of my contact details. I’ve been dialing my own phone no. and that’s why I couldn’t get through. And that’s why my phone rang and then just stopped.

Un-fucking-believable.

LVM

I’ve got a guy who works under me at the office. He sent me a text message this morning saying that he’ll be on sick leave today because he has “LVM.” This is must be about the fourth time in all the years I’ve known him that he’s been stricken with this apparently debilitating condition that causes him to miss one day of work. Each time he referred to “LVM” as what’s ailing him.

This guy is almost thirty now. He graduated from UP and he is in fact in the middle of getting his masters degree for some bullshit course I’ve never heard of before in DLSU. Both his parents are academicians with Phd degrees. All of these things going for him and yet he doesn’t have the wherewithal to use the correct consonant.

It’s ironic come to think of it. If he has Loose Vowel Movement (which I think he thinks he’s afflicted with), he'd theoretically be a consonant expert – his vowels are loose for chrissakes – and would have, therefore, complete mastery over each and every consonant in the English alphabet. The definition of loose – something wobbly, free, slack, unfettered – used within the context of his so-called condition would cause him to have diminished or even lose control of his vowels but not his fucking consonants!

I’m not going to correct the guy. For one thing, he never listens to me (although I’m his direct supervisor) because he thinks he’s better than me, and another, I don’t really give a rat’s ass about him. It’s a lesson which he’s going have to figure out for himself and the ease of teaching him the right consonant to use would be downright insulting to both of us. I’d like to think that twenty years from now and by some big, cruel cosmic joke, I’ll get a text message from him saying that he can’t come to work because he has “LBM.” That means he’s finally figured it all out and I’ll also realize that slight tingle I’ll feel won’t be my bowels loosening but maybe, just maybe, respect.

Have you moved?

I read this joke in FHM and I just thought that it was balls-out hilarious:

A guy goes to a doctor because he's been constipated for three days.

The doctor gives him a laxative and said he'll be able to take a dump the next day.

The following day, the doctor calls the guy on his cellphone and asks, "Have you moved?"

"Nope. That laxative you told me to take didn't work."

"Okay," said the doctor. "Try finishing a whole bottle and I'll call you tomorrow."

The doctor calls the guy the next day and asks, "Have you moved?"

"Nope. I finished the whole bottle and still I can't take a crap."

"Okay," said the doctor. "I want you to finish two bottles this time. I'll check up on you again two days from now."

Two days later, doctor calls and asks, "Have you moved?"

"Yup. I had to. My apartment's full of shit."

Black Box

My boss thought that her computer monitor was too low for her line of vision when sitting down at her desk. She took two phonebooks and boxed everything in using black cardboard and clear plastic tape. So she has now, literally, a black box under her monitor which effectively raised this to a more comfortable four and a half inches. Yup, I took a measure of it.

I was sitting down infront of her one day talking shop.

I just said apropos of nothing, "I finally figured out why you have that black box under your monitor."

Of course she explained again the obvious.

"No, there's another reason," I said.

"You have it there so when your computer crashes, everything's recorded in the black box."

My boss just stares at me then goes, "No. I really need it to raise the computer monitor because it's too low."

Right.

La Bolsa de Vómito

I watched Once Upon A Time in Mexico over the weekend. This movie completes the El Mariachi trilogy of director Robert Rodriguez and the title is his tribute of sorts to Once Upon A Time in the West - the classic spaghetti western of Italian director Sergio Leone.

Don’t let Once Upon A Time in Mexico’s tenuous connection to the 1968 masterpiece starring Henry Fonda deceive you. It stinks. In fact, it stinks so much that I wanted to do justice in saying how revolting it is. So what I did was meditate for an hour to search my memory bank on what the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had the chance to experience in my lifetime and compare this to Once Upon A Time in Mexico.

Here it is.

This happened way back in college when I was living in a dorm. It was my first time to be away from home for an extended period of time and this relative freedom afforded me the opportunity to indulge in all manner of nefarious activities.

One of these was drinking. I’ve never drunk as much alcohol since my first year in college. And it was during this time that one of my roommates brought with him after a recent visit to his home province of Quezon a big jug of lambanog.

Lambanog, for the uninitiated , is distilled coconut wine. Nope, change the last word to moonshine. Nope, even better, change it to rocket fuel. It’s not a cliché to say that you’ll sprout chest hairs after drinking lambanog because…it’s fucking true!

So there we were, all fifteen of my dorm mates in a circle drinking the lambanog “tagay” style – that is, all of us used just one glass to drink as judiciously poured out and fairly meted by the designated lambanogtender who was himself partaking of the alcohol. The natural consequence of this was the lambanogtender would sometimes be more judicious and fairer to you and you’d get more of the pisswater than the rest of the losers in the circle.

When we had almost finished the big jug of the firewater, I excused myself to go back to our room which I shared with two other assholes because I told my mates I was gonna get something. I was never as drunk in my young life as that moment and the sensation of having the whole room literally spinning around me wasn’t as enjoyable as I supposed it would be. In truth, I wanted to go to the common bathroom because I was about to puke my guts out. However, I didn’t want my dorm mates to think that I was a pussy and that I couldn’t hold my liquor, eventhough the alcohol we were drinking came from, well, the distilleries of the Seventh Co-Centric Circle of Hell itself.

Staggering to our room, I desperately looked for a plastic bag. When I finally found one, in what seemed like an eternity, I puked like there was no tomorrow into the bag. I made pretty sure that I didn’t make any of the gagging and throaty noises that comes with vomiting away my small intestine as the fuckers might find out and I just wouldn’t hear the end of it –my unforgivable transgression of puking and further compounding this by doing the foul deed in subterfuge.

When I was done vomiting, I tied the plastic bag half-filled with puke in a neat bow and chucked it inside my locker for disposal as soon as the coast was clear. I certainly felt so much better and gravity was again my friend because I could feel the floor underneath my feet.

Fast forward to the following day and my roommate asked me to go watch a movie after coming back from class. We got back pretty late and so the plastic bag remained in my locker.

The following days after that turned out to be quite busy for me and I couldn’t find the opportunity to throw away my bag of puke. The school week ended and I went home for the weekend and it remained where it was.

Monday came and went and it was still it was inside my fucking locker. I was beginning to get worried. I wasn’t a student of the Natural Sciences but I suspected that keeping a bag of puke in stasis for almost a week would make it turn bad. What would you get if you leave a delicious turkey sandwich inside a locker for a week? That’s right: something moldy, maggoty, rotten, and indescribably disgusting. Dude, what more if you started with a bag of vomit in the first place?

The day of destiny happened to be Tuesday – a full week since it happened. I remember it was dusk when I sneaked out of the dorm carrying the bag of puke and stiffly threw it away in a garbage heap nearby. I swear I could hear someone playing Taps throughout my goodbye. Au revoir, mon vieil ami. Vous voir dans l'enfer.

So would my point be that Once Upon A Time in Mexico stinks as much as my bag of puke? Absolutely. But let’s take it to the next level. Watching the movie would be like emptying that week-old bag of vomit into three frosty mugs and lapping everything up – that’s how fucking revolting it is.

My Ten Ruminations on Love and Life

Life is a big sandwich that you bite big chunks off and not to be eaten in teeny tiny morsels. Love teaches you that sometimes that sandwich is made of shit.

For at least once in your life, you should try to have either life or love kick your ass. What the hell, make that at least two occasions for each of these.

If it takes you more than five seconds to answer the question, “What do you do?” Then maybe you’re in the wrong business.

That person maybe the most gorgeous, effervescent, brilliant, bodacious, lust-inducing, and perfect being that you have ever laid eyes on, but someone out there on this green Earth is tired of taking his or her shit.

The movie “The Matrix Reloaded” had the most number of listings at its end-credits clocking in at 1,997. However, it was still a flaming piece of crap.

You may think you’re right…but so did Hitler.

To remove bloodstains from your favorite shirt: soak the stain in a 50/50 solution of hydrogen peroxide and water. Do not use regular household bleach. Rinse with a vinegar and water solution and again in cool water. Air dry. To remove the foul stench of decaying flesh from your closet: Take maggoty human head decapitated three days ago outside to your yard and bury it.

Love is a sexually transmitted disease.

If they ever make a TV series out of my life ala ”24,” try to miss episodes no. 15 and 18 in the second season because that’s when I got a really bad case of diarrhea.

You don’t look for love, it finds you. And when it does, it’s in a police car with a search warrant and a restraining order.

21 Grams

I watched the perfect movie for this holy week. Nope, it’s not “The Passion of the Christ.” Or “Stuck on You” by the Farelly brothers. It’s “21 Grams” with Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts, and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu. This is the first movie I’ve seen directed by him – I can’t find a pirated DVD of his “Amores Perros” – and, yes, believe all the indie hype – he’s that fucking good, even brilliant. Oh, what the hell, he’s a genius.

The storyline is quite simple. Cristina Peck’s (Watts) family is killed by Jack Jordan (del Toro) in an accident. As a consequence, Cristina’s husband’s heart is transplanted to Paul Rivers (yep, Penn). Paul seeks out Cristina after the operation to get to know the donor of his heart. At least that’s how I pieced together all the scenes into what is to me a coherent plotline. You see, Innaritu made the bold decision to have the movie edited out of sequence. Of course, there are directors who have employed the same technique – most notably Quentin Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” and, to a similar degree – as the movie was cut in reversed sequence, Christopher Nolan in “Memento.” However, Innaritu has made the biggest gambit yet because there is apparently no rhyme nor reasonable explanation for the way the scenes are interspersed. For example, the very first scene has Paul and Cristina post-coitus. No handy set-up to tell you who the hell these fuckers are and why they’re together. I made the mistake of reading up on what the movie was about – just enough to get the basic storyline above – and was surprised to see that the very first scene already showed the two of them already together. Ah, I thought, it’s gonna be a series of flashbacks as a way to introduce who they are. And then the second scene came up and I was completely at a loss. I thought that I accidentally started the movie at the middle and so I stopped and had the movie play at the beginning. Dude, I was at the beginning.

The most heartbreaking scenes for me to watch were those involving Jack Jordan and Cristina Peck. Jordan’s an ex-con who’s found Jesus and struggling to do good with his faith and family (in that order). The accident wrenches his faith from inside of him and is returned not in the same way – it is now shattered, out of place, completely misunderstood, and totally useless to help him deal with the consequences. Peck spirals downward into drug and alcohol abuse to numb the overreaching pain of her grief. She’s lost her husband and two young children to the accident and she just can’t find anything in her life that’s left to start all over again.

This made me think that sometimes guilt and grief causes mental anguish more unbearable than physical torture. At least when one is being subjected to a severe beating, he can retreat to a place far, far away in the mind and, somehow, the body becomes numb from the pain. Mental anguish offers you no solace in the physical realm – your mind is the torture chamber. If I were to be asked to subject myself to a crucifixion, I would of course say no. But if I were to be asked to be crucified as the singular way of not having my wife and children not to be taken away from me forever, then I’d say yes. Comparatively, a lifetime of grief from loss against a limited time of physical pain would tip the decision in that favor.

Nevertheless, the movie also demonstrates a note of optimism. There were at least three characters I counted who uttered the forgivable cliché “Life goes on.” The ending (or I think that was the ending) showed the three characters moving on with their lives after surviving another tragedy borne of the first one. You make your peace with your God and then you go on, carrying a bit of the guilt as baggage – just enough to teach you a lesson and not more than enough to paralyze you to indifference.

Zero

I met the husband of my friend Diana last night. We mostly talked about cellphones because he showed me his. It’s one of those small Samsungs which fold out. He showed me how the built-in camera gives really great pics – the best images I’ve seen taken by a cellphone camera so far. It also had crisp graphics and expandable memory. Well, it should have great features because the fucker cost him PHP25,000.

When I said I’d like to have the Nokia 6600, he said, “Oh, the six-six-zero-zero?”

“Yup," I said, “The Nokia SIXTY-SIX HUNDRED. It’s packed with all the features – Bluetooth, expandable memory, tri-band.”

“Personally, I prefer the Sony Ericsson P-nine-zero-zero.” He countered.

“The P-NINE HUNDRED? Ah yeah, but it’s very expensive.” I was starting to hate his guts. “It costs FIFTY THOUSAND BUCKS, right?”

Aha! I’ve set the trap. Let’s see how this shit-eating fly try to untangle his way out of my bitchin’ spider’s web. After all, he’s gotta say the damn thing costs five-zero-zero-zero-zero, RIGHT?

“I know. It’s really expensive but the prices will eventually go down. Look at what happened to the P-eight-zero-zero.”

Shit.

“How much does the P-EIGHT HUNDRED cost now?” I asked.

He replied, “Oh, about TWENTY EIGHT THOUSAND.”

There. He said it.

“Diana’s phone is a Nokia seven-two-five-zero. I don’t know how to use it and the pictures I get with the camera aren’t that good.”

Right.

“I gotta talk to Diana for a bit. It was nice meeting you.”

Yeah…the pleasure was all mine C-O-C-K-S-U-C-K-E-R.

John, Oh!

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported yesterday that a 24 year-old male sex worker, Diego Gomez , has filed a complaint with the Tagaytay municipal court against reelectionist Senator John Osmena for attempted rape. Apparently, Senator Osmena engaged the services of Gomez at a popular resort in Tagaytay City. His oral agreement with “Mike” (the alias supposedly used by Sen. Osmena) allegedly stipulated that they would use a condom and that no anal intercourse would transpire between them. However, the good senator allegedly violated the oral agreement between the two gentlemen when he forced his finger into the sex worker’s anus.

Gomez also alleges that Sen. Osmena handcuffed him to a bed post after he got dizzy from imbibing a shot of Scotch whiskey.

Sen. Osmena’s media staff denied the charges , dismissing them as “plain and simple harassment.”

In a spirited defense of his father, Cebu Vice Gov. John Gregory Osmena said, “My dad is 69 years old. Knowing my father all my life, he’s not violent by nature.”

Poking the Chocolate Starfish

Being the curious bastard that I am, I entered the words SENATOR JOHN OSMENA into the Internet Anagram Server of Wordsmith.Org. As you may know, an anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase. As an example, you rearrange the word “SHIT” and you get the anagram “THSI.” Or something like that. I’m not so good with anagraming.

So here are the four phrases I picked out at random and arranged in no particular order (so if the concerned party ever gets to read this, please don’t sue my ass off – in a manner of speaking – because I’m just the messenger):

JOHN SENSE A MANROOT

SEN JOHN EATS A MORON

JOHN SEEN TORO A MAN

JOHN TORE AN ASS ON ME