Alyas Robin Hood and why it's not good and Julio Valiente makisig na lalake

This meme has made the rounds on Facebook and the picture says it all. This "new" TV series is a genuine rip-off of DC's "Arrow". 

I have always complained--its obvious by the way--that our local superheroes are direct copies of American superheroes. There's Darna=Wonderwoman. Gagamboy=Spiderman, Captain Barbell=Shazam, etc. 

Now, here comes Alyas Robin Hood, which from the title alone proudly flaunted it's lack of originality. 

Okay, what's my problem here?

The hero looks like Oliver Quinn and not Robin Hood. Hood is an English folk hero. His story is well known. 

Judging from the title alone, I guess the story would be, hmmm, like that of Robin Hood. Steal from rich, give to the poor, and a few garnish and spices here and there, and what you have is Robin Hood. 

Now, how do you re-tell a new-old story that would interest the viewers without the viewers realizing that what they are watching is an old-new story? Maybe give Robin Hood a few tweaks like he could be a lesbian, or a helpless and demure lady during the day and a tough WWE thief-archer at night, or he could be a tough-thief-archer at night and a gay masseur during the day. 

Instead...

Why not create a TV series about a purely Filipino fictional hero. Instead of re-inventing and re-hashing and re-heating foreign heroes, why not go local! Carlo J, Caparas' "Julio Valiente" is a good example of a local fictional hero. Of course, the secret identity thing is copied from most American and foreign fictional heroes, but at least Caparas tried to infuse Filipino in Valiente. 

The guy wears a salakot and uses a cloth-guided-heat-seeking dual bolo, which judging from the movie, is capable tracking and taking down villains at an effective range of ten meters.

Valiente's blades are made from an adamantine (wolverines claw is made from adamantine) like metal capable of splitting bullets.

I have to admit, Valiente's story line is unmistakably inspired by Zorro, but at least there's an attempt to Filipinize him.

Of all the weapons , they have opted for  the English long bow. But Filipinos do not have long bows. It is not our main weapon. In fact, historically speaking, bows were not even mentioned as weapons used by our patriots against the Spaniards and the Americans, considering that they offer more range than the itaks and the bolos which was the main weapon of the indios.

I have nothing against the English long bow and we do have our own bows but at the very least, the network or whoever is in charge of GMA's TV entertainment section should have thought of a native Filipino weapon like the bolo or arnis. 

Why not arm the hero with our own bolo, which the American soldiers found very effective in close combat. The bolo proved its worth during the Second World war when used as a close combat weapon. In fact, the Germans had the surprise of their lives when their bayonets were met by a meter long cleaver like blade. During WWII an American Negro soldier named  Henry Johnson was able to fend off and kill bayonet wielding German raiders using a Filipino bolo knife. So, if the foreigners admires our local weapons, why not use this as the weapon of choice? Like Valiente. 

Or arnis.

Anyway, TV could be used as powerful tool to promote our culture but instead of doing that, they do this.

The Legal Wife: Soap Opera or Sardine Opera...

Thank heavens for sardines.

I was not rally paying any attention when I heard a TV station doing a promotional ad on its top rating show "The Legal Wife."  

Upon third or fourth hearing, I turned around from the computer and paid attention to the TV and there it was again: Join the promo and win a daily supply of sardines.

Three things violently entered my mind there and then:

1. Is this for real?

2. Is this sane?

3. Isn't this insulting?

Obviously, this is for real.

This promo is different from the others not because of its mechanics, I mean, I have seen them all, but what made this promo different is because of its prize: the lucky winner will get a daily supply of two pieces of canned sardines. The promo did not mention if the supply is for eternity, for a lifetime,  or for as long as the show is being shown on TV. There is no mention of the duration of the supply. 

Soap operas are sponsored by soap brands.

This is product placing. The soap opera has some of its protagonists working in a canned sardine manufacturer. I don't know if the management thought of this to attract sardine manufacturers to sponsor the program or if there was a prior product placing agreement, but it easy enough to think who the sponsors would be. "Soap operas" are called soap operas because their main sponsors are soap manufacturers, so its only logical--and ground breaking at that--to call the Legal Wife a "Sardine Opera". 

Is this sane?

Anyway...

Canned sardine together with rice are the backbone of
relief goods.

I have nothing against canned sardines. It is food and I'm not even going to demean or degrade the food as cheap or whatever. Keep in mind that canned sardines saved a lot of lives and is still saving lives in times of disasters and other emergencies.

But there's something about it, there's a psychological stigma attached to canned sardines.

The Philippines is one of the most typhoon hit countries in the world and from the recent super typhoons and abnormal monsoon rains that have created large scale floods, water and wind surges that caused huge losses in lives and properties in the country, canned sardines have become the staple of relief food operations along with instant noodles and other "instant" products. Add to natural disasters are the insurgency problem in the south that have displaced a lot of communities.

How may ways to cook canned sardines?
From the TV specals i have seen on TV,
I believe it is safe to assume the the Filipinos
are the only people in the world who have
created hundreds of ways to prepare and
cook food with canned sardines as the main
ingredient.

After typhoon Yolanda wrecked havoc in the Visayas, canned sardines become the primary ingredients of everything the typhoon victims cook. 

The Filipinos creativity was tested to its limit when faced with the situaton of eating the same food over and over again. They have invented many ways of cooking and preparing food to beat the monotony and at the same time aiming at getting the balanced daily nutrition they need. 

But still,  I could only imagine the pervading fishy and metallic aroma of the canned sardines that permeated the air almost everywhere and for weeks in the affected areas especially evacuation sites that volunteers, journalists and even the victims themselves said it's already sickening.  

Whether we like it or don't, through experience and media exposure our minds are conditioned into connecting canned sardines with disasters and relief operations.

Consciously or unconsciously we don't like to be reminded of our helplessness of being victims. 

Isn't this insulting?

I don't know what's in the mind of the people who thought of this gimmick but giving away sardines as a prize?

I have only two hypothesis:

1. Somebody up there an employee, an executive, someone connected to the station is writing a masteral thesis or a doctoral dissertation on "the application of simian intelligence in advertising" from some veterinary college.

2. Somebody up there must have an abnormal predilection for eating sardines.

 Anyway...gonna have my lunch..."tortang sardinas na maanghang". See, I love the stuff but I don't like it being given to me as a prize...a motorcycle or an internet TV is more like it.

Sunday TV: Ating Alamin, I miss Kuya Germs!

Surfing free TV channels, that is after church, I am…what do you call this? I have this feeling of familiarity and friendship when I see that Gerry Geronimo is still active doing Ating Alamin, his Agriculture-Entrepreneurship show on PTV 4.

 I got to give it to this guy because for four decades he has been sharing knowledge, skills, and technology on almost every aspect of agriculture and entrepreneurship. And what’s comforting is that the format of his show has not changed: he speaks in Tagalog, he dresses like his audience, he spurts no technical jargon and he still uses the stick mic that has become his trademark. (Seeing him poking the stick mic on his guest’s face is a little hilarious, but he does that all the time.)

Nice to see that after all the technological advances and boybands, there's this little TV show that has been on air for as long as I can remember.

When my father was still the pastor of our church, I went home after Sunday school to watch TV. My favorite program then was the Movie Sneak Preview shown on channel 9 from 11-12. I sit there mesmerized by previews of Starwars and other movies of the early 80’s. After the previews ended, I always end up watching Ating Alamin. I have always had this fascination with plants and animals, anyway…

__________________________________

Look at them.look at them, they are just having fun! Why can't
they do it like this, again.

I miss Kuya Germs! I miss Kuya Germs and his Sunday noon time TV show aptly titled “GMA Supershow.”

I miss the spectacular stage props, the Bellestar Dancers numbers complete with the feathers, boas and the imperial headdresses and the choreographies, and the legs. I miss Kuya Germs’ and his cohorts of emcees that talks incessantly trying to squeeze each other out, in a nice way of course.

I always had this suspicion that the owner of the Bellestar,
a lady by the name of Belle, made sense since she owned the
company, was an immortal, a vampire.

Look at the noon time shows today, with the exception of Eat Bulaga, all of them have adapted the Panel-Critic style popularized by Simon Fuller and his Idol franchise.

Now, almost all TV noontime shows here in my beloved country the Republic of the Philippines have followed the same format. Even on Sundays, even on Sundays, it’s irritating to watch actors in a team trying to outdo each other with numbers that are supposedly conceptualized and choreographed by themselves (do you think they have the time for this?). To squeeze drama out of the unbelievably unbelievable reality styled creative process, they show the practice sessions where the frustrations and the conflicts among the members are highlighted, throw in some shoutings and walk-outs --which we all know are staged-- in the end cooperation and understanding and world peace prevails. Then there's the criticism and judging...are they even contestants?

Now, what’s wrong with this? Everything!

Where's Willie Revillame? Ooo I forgot, he pissed off a lot of poweful people. I don't like him too and his power tripping on TV is ...insanely crazy.Maybe his ego has landed. Of course, the Germs is still alive and his early, early, early morning show is still on. But its not the same...God I feel old!

Mermaid overload

Have you seen what’s on primetime free TV lately?  I‘m talking to someone like me who have no cable subscription and is thus condemned to watch crappy programs aired by crappy stations.

Mermaids, mermaids (sirena in Tagalog), I have had enough of mermaids. How many mermaids have been shown and re-booted and re-shown again and again on free TV?

Many claim that Dyesebel is the original Filipino mermaid as drawn and conceptualized by Mars Ravelo. Maybe in comics but not in literature. Dyesebel is just a re-creation of Ariel,  the little mermaid. I have nothing against Mars Ravelo but there was once an initiative to have him named as national artists for his comic characters and for his contributions to visual arts. But personally, I think he does not deserve the honor because he did not create anything original and most of his works are just copied and recycled DC or Marvel superheroes.Imagine his name being put aside names like Amorsolo, Botong, etc.

I do not know if there’s a local equivalent of the mythical mermaid since we have no Tagalog word for it (yes, if you have no name for it that means it does not exist, at least in the head) and sirena sounds Hispanic so I suppose mermaids are brought here by the ocean crossing Spanish colonizers.

What is bothering is how free TV has two mermaids TV soap opera being aired at the same time slot by two competing channels. I know what a network war is, but this is insane!  

How many theme can there be with mermaids except that of a mermaid falling in love with a terran. 

Even if you add more antagonists, protagonists, elements stolen from varied 

classic literature (have you eve wondered where Iago got his name?), the story is the same. How many endings can there be?  

Two: 

Tragic: where the mermaid got unrequieted love and she died an old mermaid and her ghost ended up singing a lot atop an atoll or a rock island or something luring sailors to their doom.

Classic: where they lived happily ever after. The mermaid loses her fishtail for normal legs, or the man becomes a merman and loses his nromal face for a fish face. 

I suggest they follow the new trend, mash up. Instead of retelling crappy love stories, i suggest they become creative and do something interesting about mermaids.

Here are my suggestions:

Dyesebel fighting white collar crime like the PDAFScam. It would be interesting to see a mermaid wearing power dress in the courtroom lashing out legal jargons with a terran lawyer. What will make this more interesting is the setting, the court will be held in swimming pools!

Dyesebel and a ZUMA love story. This will be a good mash up. Here we have two iconic Filipino comic characters, one a badass immortal snake god and the other a hmmmm...mermaid.  The plot is very simple: Dyesebel is sunning on the shore and then she saw ZUMA shediing his reptilian skin and hanging his sheddings on mangrove branches. They had eye contact and rght there and then they fell in love.
 

There'll be a lot of twists and antagonists, but in the end they overcome, got married, had children and lived happily ever after. They became very succesful circus operators.

Why not try an evil mermaid?

Dyesebel as a minion of Janet Napoles and the three Notorious Senators. The story can begin like this: Janet Napoles invested a portion of his PDAF kickback in Dyesebel's underwater realm...and the rest is easy enough.

I'm hungry...

Be careful with my heart blah, blah, blah...

Absent from work for four days, still reeling from bronchial asthma (or asthmatic bronchitis, whatever the difference maybe, it's beyond me) that gave me chills for many nights, I am not quite that excited about going back to work. Well, I guess nobody would be what with the lesson plans and lessons to catch up with, the deadline for the submission of test papers, the charts, the quizzes...whew really glad that I have no advisory class.

Anyway...the good thing about the absence is that I was able to follow the new ABS-CBN series "Be careful with my heart" starring Jodi Sta. Maria and Papa Chen. I have been seeing the series on-off because I go home for lunch and am able to see portions, but it was only last week that I was able to see several full episodes. 

The series was about an aspiring flight stewardess, who, through circumstances, ended up becoming an airline executive's babysitter. She was attracted to the much older father of her ward, but he was too busy to even take notice of her and so on...of course the story is as predictable as a fart, but the development of the character is something that made this series quite likeable. Richard Yap, is good, whose bearing, by the way, reminded of the Capt. Von Trapp from the Sound of Music movie. 

Anyway, I am not a critic, just watch the series and be entertained by Jodie's and antiques and Papa Chen's  hmmm....minimalist acting because it gives the series a relaxed and relaxing ambiance, which is a sort of a relief compared from the tensions from the so-called-heavy-drama-actors whose facial expressions even when expressionless radiates pain, suffering and struggling  .

Lorenzo's piracy, Earthquake drill

I saw the teaser of channel 2's newest tv drama called Lorenzo's Time and again I was dumbfounded at the blatant intellectual piracy. I mean, the least ABS-CBN and its people should have done is to acknowledge that the show is an adaption, or loosely based, or inspired by the 1992Mel Gibson movie Forever Young.

Lorenzo's Time is a touching journey of a young boy named Lorenzo (Zaijan Jaranilla) who was diagnosed with progeria, an extremely rare genetic condition wherein symptoms resembling aspects of aging are manifested at an early age. In order to preserve his young body, he was subjected to cryonics until his parents find a cure for it. After 30 years, Enzo will wake up to face the world with missed precious moments of his life—including his family and the only girl he loves.

A 1939 test pilot asks his best friend to use him as a guinea pig for a cryogenics experiment. Daniel McCormick wants to be frozen for a year so that he doesn't have to watch his love lying in a coma. The next thing Daniel knows is that he's been awoken in 1992. 

I mean..the cryogenics, the waking up a la Rip Van Winkle  thing was there. The only original thing that, I think, could be added to the idea of the series as based on the Gibson movie is that the show  would have the usual recipe: terrible writing, very very predictable twists, mediocre acting and cliche dialog.

But anyway, it entertainment and maybe that's what's important in the end--to escape.

________________________

The school conducted the national earth quake drill. The drill was conducted at 9 in the morning with the police and the Taytay MDRRMC. The school was teeming with unformed people: the police, the orange rescue guys and the--I don't know why some wear black--and the para-police , para-rescue guys.

The pupils were pissed off. A grade four pupil even complained that this was recess time. Don't we adults understand this, recess time is inviolable even by earth quakes, fire and nuclear war! (Photo: Ms. Redgie)

Anyway, there were lectures and all that stuff that goes along with the drill.

NKOTBBSB: The problem with boy bands

I heard that two boy band, or to be more accurate, two old boy bands will be having a concert here in the Philippines: New Kids on the Block and the Backstreet Boys. They were being announced on TV as  the two of the world's famous best boy bands.

Now what is wrong with this?

NKOTB 2008

Hell, they are not boys anymore. They are old now and seeing them perform their hits on the TV teaser is kinda painful. They were famous during the 90's and this era is kind of memorable to me because this was the age of alternative rock. The 90's saw the birth of great Filipino seminal bands like Eraserheads, Yano, the Youth etc. also the divide or the rivalry between metal and hiphop was kinda strong. So, their music was treated with contempt for they were pop and commercial (as opposed to the alternative-grunge-indie  music of the era). Also, they took advantage of the young girls and gays hormonal imbalance.

These boy bands were considered corny and childish or girlish and no rocker was ever expected to  listen to them. Now they are coming here to...weird. Of course, the rivalry between the hiphop and the metals are gone and all the nonsense... guess we all grew old, matured,  and became men and women. Still they call themselves boys? 

Backstreetboys 2011

They should rename their band: Old Kids on the Block and Backstreetmen. Anyway, hope to see them in 2080.

Princess and I: Gretchen's face

My wife and daughter are avid fans of Princess and I. My daughter watch it because of Daniel Padilla and my wife watch it because she loves watching TV especially prime time telenovela. Me, I'm a passive watcher of the TV since I really don't like telenovelas for reasons too many to mention.

Now, even passive watching, I cannot help but notice Gretchen Barreto's face and her facial expressions or the lack of it. She looks like one of Mdm Tussaud's wax figures. I mean, it seems that it is only her eyeballs that are doing the acting because her face is too tight--too tight that it shines and literally glows with reflection from the lights. I wonder what cosmetic operations and maintenance she goes through everyday but,again, none of my business. 

She doesn't look old and she doesn't look young; she looks beautiful but...lifeless.  

Big fight at NAIA/Airframe

I couldn't help but give my ten centavos worth on what happened to NAIA, the Raymart-Claudine-Tulfo thing. What happened happened and there's nothing that could be done about it and all the charges and counter charges would not go anywhere.

Cebu Pacific was blamed.  NAIA was blamed.  Now the security guards and the airport police were also being blamed and their jobs were threatened. I just hope that these minimum wager earners would not lose their jobs because of this incident because faced with the situation of two famous personalities fighting, screaming, and rioting, these poor security personnel were overwhelmed and it was understandable how difficult it must be for them to decide who to hold, what to touch, what to say...I mean.


Secretary Roxas was correct in saying that the whole thing was an attitude problem and the reactions and the finger pointing was unwarranted.  After the emotions ebb and the issue grew old, everything would be forgotten and everything would be back to normal.

That's how it is, things move on. I just hope that after all is settled,  no job would be lost. 

Anyway, to serious matter: here are some lucky numbers for the Santiago-Tulfo brouhaha. 

  Swertres lotto 4-4-1, 0-4-8,0-1-4,7-0-9

 4 Digit lotto 6-7-1-5, 1-6-5-4,0-1-1-0,1-6-6-0 

 Based on Birthday Raymart Santiago - July 20, 1973 

Swertres- 5-5-5, 4-1-5 4 digit- 5-4-2-8, 9-3-4-3

 Claudine Barreto 

Swertres -8-6-0, 2-7-6 4 Digit -6-5-4-8, 9-1-9-7

No, I do not gamble...just having fun with the issue.

__________________________

I have finished reading an old Crichton novel that has been lying in the house for almost ten years. It was my brother's book. I have read thirteen novels by Crichton that I thought I had enough of his novels, but I was bored so I picked it up. I read, and I was not able to stop until I finished the book.

Of course this was a work of fiction (Crichton's novels are well researched) but the book did present some  issues about the deregulated airline industry specifically about the safety of the old planes being bought, reconditioned and flown by small starting (budget)  airline companies and also about the danger of bootleg (pirated) airplane parts.. 

Anyway...makes one wonder how safe these budget airlines are.

Terra Nova

Summer, hot, with nothing to do...instead of dreaming of sand, beach, water, rivers, ice creams and other anti-summer-heat stuffs that needs (a lot of) money to realize, I chose to do the next best thing: electric fan, reading, blogging, and DVD marathon.

There's a new sci-fi series that I saw on my sister's cable TV titled Terra Nova. Of course, I could not stay in Baguio to watch the whole series, so I did what I always do, hunt for the DVD from my favorite vendor. To tell the truth, I am amazed by the titles being sold by my favorite illegal DVD vendor. I was looking around when, as if he knew, maybe he sort of like studied my preferences like Google's algorithm or something,  he showed me this.

The story was set in 2149. The planet was on the verge of death because of environmental catastrophe and overpopulation and the people survives on filtered air and artificial food and population control.  The people of 2149 discovered a fracture in time going back to 85 million years that can be opened and passed  through. Scientists sent a probe to explore and they found out that the time stream was different from 2149  time stream so it is possible to migrate and inhabit the time and place without disrupting the 2149 flow of time--the butterfly effect. There was  a catch though: the fracture in time goes only one way, it is not possible to go back to 2149.

There was waves of migration to the new colony called Terra Nova. (terra=land, nova=new) or (terra=left over, nova=grain chips). I'm in episode four...anyway...Terra Nova was a growing community of pilgrims from the future that have established a growing colony in the past.

Faced with the dangers of large prehistoric animals like dinosaurs and other prehistoric carnivorous reptiles, insects, diseases, parasite and other unknown dangers of an unexplored land, they survived by   being resourceful and living a spartan life. 

But the real danger was from the sixers. Sixers are pilgrims that came with the sixth wave of immigrants who are working with the industrialist from 2149 bent on stripping and exploiting resources from the past to be used in 2149  thus repeating the error of the future, the rape and destruction of nature. To realize this, the sixers are   working on a way to make the time fracture to go both ways but the Tera Novans are bent on stopping this.

So, there's this conflict between the sixers and the terra novans.

Anyway, still watching...

Princess and I, Jessica

I saw the premiere telecast of the much hyped and promoted channel 2's new teledrama Princess and I. The plot was about err...if you read Snow White errr...I mean Cinderella... you got the plot. Anyway, the series was set in Bhutan and its understandable, for authenticity, that Filipino actors playing the Bhutanese characters to speak Bhutanese but  ...hmmm...it felt weird seeing Filipino actors speaking foreign tongue being subtitled in Filipino. Anyway, I hated Gretchen Barreto; she's evil, only meant she's a good actor because she was able to make me hate her character in the series.

My gut tells me that Jessica Sanchez, half Filipino half Mexican who tells the world that she is a Mexican and not a Filipino but the Filipinos, for the sake of being Filipino, claims that Jessica is a Filipino and not a Mexican...anyway, my prediction is that she will not make it. Ninety-nine percent of the people that vote for American Idol wannabes are teenage girls. Teenage girls vote cute guys. Of course, being a patriotic and nationalisitc Filipino, I am praying and hoping and wishing that this Mexican-American girl wins the crown.

DVD series

I have been watching sci-fi series on DVD as a sort of an escape. I mean, I don’t drink nor do I take drugs and watching sci-fi is the next best thing to flying out into the atmosphere for fun. Anyway, it seems that most of the theme of today’s sci-fi has to do with time travel, entanglement and alternate reality.

Last night, I watched the final episode of “Lost”; and to tell the truth, I really loved the show. The series was about the survivors of a plane crash that landed on a mysterious island. I bought the DVD without googling about the show so I had no idea what it was all about. But after watching the first few episodes, I got hooked and addicted to it. I thought it was a simple human drama about human drama, but then the episodes got crazier and crazier especially the season enders that got me hooked and drove me crazy looking for the DVD of the next season up to the point that I had to beg the bootleg DVD vendor to get me the complete collection of the series. Also the series was done using flash back and flash forward  which was kind of weird because I already knew what happened but still I had to find out how it happened. There was also an alternate reality part which was like watching a series within a series which was a little confusing but once I got the hang of it, quite enjoyable.

Anyway,   what I liked about the series was it’s mixture of drama, psychology, love story, mythology, physics etc. and I really had this connection with characters especially John Locke. I also noticed that a lot of the characters were named after philosophers and many of the themes tackled in the series were very much philosophical and theological.  

Flash Forward is also an interesting series that unfortunately lasted only one season because of low ratings. The premise of the series is that the world had a planet wide black out (or the planet had a world wide black out) for 2 minutes and 17   seconds which during the black out the whole world had a glimpse of six months into the future. Investigation were made and they found out that these glimpses were all interrelated and that each individual recollection of the glimpses during black out could be pieced together to construct the world six months from now to figure out how or what caused the black out and to prevent another similar future event from happening. So, the psychological effect of knowing that the future is already determined is one of the main theme of the series—sort of a determinism vs. freewill thing. 

I am now into the 4400. Four thousand four hundred people disappeared abducted by a beam of light from 1946 to the present. These were thought to be alien abductions. Then into the present, a comet appeared threatening the planet. The comet was intercepted but the missiles did not destroy it. It continued on its trajectory and deposited the 4400 returnees.  Well, anyway...still watching the series.

Bronchial Asthma, Lost etc.

February 13, 2011. It was raining. I didn’t mind the rain. I strapped on my helmet sans my raincoat which I did not bring, rode on my motorcycle and left the school. I enjoyed the cold rain drops beating down on my face. It was cold because it was still February and the weatherman from the hopeless PAG-ASA, the country's weather bureau, kept on telling us that the tail end of the cold front was still on us, whatever that meant.

Anyway, I was wet and cold but enjoying my ride home. When I arrived, my wife gave me dry clothes and hot coffee. I sat down and rested for a while, and then it began: I started coughing. It was a little cough which I did not mind at all; I cough a lot because I have allergies, all that mucus and other yucky stuff. Things started to get weird when I went to bed: I started coughing really hard because of abnormal mucus secretion; my throat was constricted; I was cold but sweating. I was not able to sleep the whole night. 

The day after, I went to see the doctor. The diagnosis: bronchial asthma. I was given asthma medicines and anti-biotic, but the best of them all--not that I like being sick--I was given a three day rest which counting the weekend, meant I had five days of rest. I spent Valentine's day sick.

But things didn’t go that well. I didn’t know if there’s some connection or something because when I woke up yesterday, my ankle was hurting and when I looked at it, my ankle bone was missing--my rheumatism or gout or whatever this inflammation of the ankle joint Is called was acting up again. Heaven’s when it rains it pours! Asthma and rheumatism they do come hand in hand. (I really don't know if I had rheumatism, or arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis, or arthritic rheumatism or arthritic-rheumatoid-rheumatism-arthritism...) I don't know if its psychosomatic or some sort of..anyway..I do need to take care of my diet now.

Age is what it is…I used to hate the smell of Efficascent Oil, or Omega Pain Killer Extra Strength, but now that I frequently used them, and  I have become used to their smell, now, I mean...in the bedroom, sort of a love scent or something...aromatic-aphrodisiac...hmm sort of.

Anyway, what did I do with my five days rest?

I read book, played guitar and watched DVDs.  

Here’s the strange thing: every time or most of the time when I am reading a book and I am interrupted to go to the comfort room, when I come out of the comfort room I forget where I put my book or sometimes I forget that I am even reading a book. So, I end up looking for the book which usually I just slam on whatever surface page-open-faced-down. When this happens, I end up picking up my guitar and playing some pieces that I knew, but I can’t concentrate because I am still thinking where I put the book that I am reading.  

When not looking for the book, I find them in the strangest places like upstairs on the bed, or on the aparador with the cracked mirror, or under the plastic sofa hidden by the throw pillows that looked like rugs now, on the motorcycle seat and sometimes even on top of the dog’s cage.. Hmm…weird, I sometimes think there are naughty gnomes living in the house.

Still learning Bach's Gavotte en Rondeau on the guitar for almost a year now. A happy guitar piece--I like Bach's music because they are happy. Gavotte is a French Folk dance which explains why its a happy, lilting, jumping music and rondeau means round: ABACA form. Anyway, just learning it because it's beautiful music..

My wife complains that she is better off when I am at work because then she does not have to deal with the clatter (bootleg DVD jackets, books, guitar scores, banana peels, cotton swabs…) I leave wherever I sit.

Anyway, I am now in season five of Lost! Great, great series to watch. Just one complain though, I hate the 360 degrees camera sweep. I mean the camera starts from the face, then to the ear then to the nape, then the other ear, then back to the face again, cliche.

Amaya

 Amaya is a popular epic-historical TV series shown on GMA Channel 7. 

To show that GMA is serious about the cultural and hsitorical aspect of the series,  a documentary special was shown to show to the viewing public the effort the network had gone through to make sure of the historicity of the series.

Historians were consulted to make sure that the character had some historical parallel.  Anthropologist, archaeologists and other experts were interviewed to add authority to the claim of historical accuracy to the settings and the implements etc.. Ancient Filipino languages experts also contributed their knowledge of ancient Filipino language so that the dialog would be appropriate for the time setting. Hence, the dialogs are anachronistic.

DepEd and National Historical Institute even promoted the program for its historical and cultural value. Blah,blah,blah...But they missed one important and obvious detail.

For heaven's sake, she is a meztiza. I have nothing against Marian, but she looks like a Spanish seniora, an alien (not that alien).

The fictional epic (as in epically inspired by Korean epic historical TV series featuring epic historical women) was supposed to be set in the Visayas before the coming of the Spaniards. Hence, common sense, or logic, or my brain, tells me that  pre-Spanish Filipinas should look like pre-Spanish Filipinas. 

This is how I imagine a pre- Spanish, pre-Vicky Bello, pre-Glutathione Filipina should look like. 

What I mean is that I believe, even historians, anthropologists, archaelogists, biologists and lobotomists would agree with me that meztizas were not supposed to exist before the Spanish era.

 Of course, they have artistic and creative freedom...I am just asking!