The Fat Man Today

Lao Tzu said that the journey of a thousand miles starts beneath your feet. And that’s a line that’s been resonating with me for the duration of this week, because basically what Lao Tzu is saying is that in order to get something done, you need to get off your butt thinking about it, and start working to get it done.

I detest Facebook. Detest it because it consists of nothing but the detritus of all human waste. Day in and day out, you see nothing but people posting about pedestrianism, the last meal they ate, something cool (!) on the Internet, or their latest kitty photo. I’m guilty of all that, except that I take photos of my food AFTER it’s been eaten, and my cat is a macho noisy lazy butt who can put all of your Caturday photos to shame. I copied my girlfriend in that we both decided to skip checking Facebook all the time, and just go back to it every so often—in my case, every weekend, unless work demands it, in which case I probably don’t check it properly at all.

I have a bunch of friends who play games exclusively on the PC. These are the same people who consider console gaming to be a poor experience when compared to the richness that a full computer, with a keyboard, a mouse, and a joystick (on occasion) can bring. To them I say: you can keep your computers. You know why? Because dude, old console games are legitimately hard to play . Who’d have thought that timing that jump would be so damn difficult? Taken from Tasvideos . The other day, I was doing a bit of reading on the history of the Game & Watch—did you know that it was inspired by a bored businessman playing with the buttons of an LED watch?—and one of the pages I was browsing through had a comprehensive list of the games that were available on the various iterations of the Game & Watch. One of these games was Ice Climber. Well, for a former gamer, I had terrible hand coordination skills, and I was always better at something like Ice Climber than, say, Super Mario o...

My family is a largely carnivorous group. And I wasn’t that different, for quite a long time. I grew up knowing the sweet crunch of pork, the neutral taste of chicken, and the strong, earthy taste of beef.

Okay, so last week was devoted to Typhoon Haiyan and its aftermath. I guess it’s time to go back to your regularly scheduled programming this week. But still try to help out. The first order of business though: POLITICS!

So. Anderson Cooper. Korina Sanchez. Mar Roxas. And Noynoy Aquino. These are the stars of the current drama unfolding in the continuing saga of the Typhoon Yolanda relief efforts. And it isn’t a pretty chapter.

Just a short post today. I nixed my earlier post due to the state of how things are in the Philippines currently.

So last week, Haiyan went through the country. It made a total of six landfalls, and we’re still coming to terms with the possible loss of life and property the storm has left behind. If you want to help out, GIYF, although this link is a good place to start. For the rest of us still struggling with the aftermath, there are some things I would like to touch on in today’s post. So read on.

Whew. What a week-ender it's been. For all of you currently under the throes of typhoon Yolanda, stay safe! For those of you who're still getting ready for the storm, here's a good list of things you may want to take note of .

One of the most frustrating things about working from the comfort of your home is that sometimes you’re just stuck on your chair for long hours every day. I’ve been there, and while I’m thankful for the opportunity to work somewhere I’m more or less comfortable, I understand just how important it is to heave my heavy butt out and about.

So I just heard that October 31 wasn't a national holiday. This, despite the growing popularity of the Halloween celebration in the country. I have nothing to say about this proclamation other than good.

There’s this joke that spread on Facebook prompting people to change their photos to a giraffe. Lord, very few things have made me blow my top more than this seriously stupid question posing as a clever riddle.

Recent events have been very disheartening for Blackberry. I don’t think I would ever want to be in a company that loses something as big as $10B in one go, for one thing. And to close your doors to public shareholders and to go back to being a private firm, after general success for so many years? Insufferable. If their CEO were Japanese, he’d fallen on a sword by now.

This is the third post in our Maynilad Water chronicles. This time, we will talk about just how inept their record keeping skills are in the face of a massive overhaul in a given area. This involves a technique used by Meralco in high-risk areas called clustering, and is efficient – if utilized correctly. Needless to say, Maynilad has yet to be able to do this.

This is the second post in our Maynilad Water chronicles. This time, we will talk about just how inept their record keeping skills are in the face of a massive overhaul in a given area. This involves a technique used by Meralco in high-risk areas called clustering, and is efficient – if utilized correctly. Needless to say, Maynilad has yet to be able to do this.

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered these past few weeks is the inexplicable inefficiency of Maynilad Water. I don’t even know where to begin; this is how impossible the situation is. So I’ll go and separate things into multiple stories. This is the first case in this series.

I was supposed to write on a daily basis, but that doesn't always happen - and for a myriad of reasons. Every writer gets to a point where they hit that wall, and find it hard to keep on going. Some folks call it the writer's block. I call it the dark little time where you curl up like a ball in your bed and cry yourself to sleep because you can't write something even remotely decent. Yeah,writer's block is probably a better word for it.

I love coffee. I love coffee so much that, short of owning my own espresso machine, I try to experiment with the kinds of coffee I can make. Now, obviously I’m no expert barista, so I don’t expect other people to like how I make my coffee. My girlfriend, for example, won’t drink anything I make without watering it down with a lot of milk. I may be guilty of making my coffee too strong. C’est la vie.

People are going to the million people march today in Ayala. And they should! The pork barrel brouhaha's become a beast of utter magnitude, and the government should know what the people have to say about it. Just, you know, don't expect anything to come out of it.

And I don’t feel quite fine. The US government just shut itself down, due to the bickering of children in monkey suits because they couldn’t agree to whether government subsidized healthcare was important or not. I don’t know all the economic ramifications of the shutdown, but what I do know has my blood boiling.

I was going to post an irritable story about this old man in a jeep, but perhaps that’s a tale for another time. Because tonight, I was saved by an amazing webcomic called Sinfest.

I love the movie 3000 Miles to Graceland , no matter how much critics panned it. The part of the movie where Kevin Costner tries to slip past a security check by cheering for the Wombats remains, to this day, the most vivid memory I have of the film. Probably because the line had something to do with greasy pork chops. Mmmm.

A couple of weeks ago, I stopped listening to the music I have in my computer, and switched to Internet radio. I don’t think there are that many radio stations in Manila worth listening to these days (unless you want to listen to stupid radio), so I initially started listening to Radyo 5 – an FM talk radio station with an AM programming format – but eventually moved to the Master’s Touch (DZFE), a decidedly Christian radio station that played classical music.

It’s halfway through September, and I’m quite pleased to note that I haven’t written anything even remotely full-on political on this blog. And no, that Celdran article was not even close to political.

You know what they say about how tough times brings out the truth in situations? Well, I don’t know about the truth, but it does bring out a bunch of realizations that makes things a bit clearer for you.

One of the more prominent illnesses I have been prone to this past year is an ear-induced cold, accompanied with terrible post-nasal drip, occasional fever, and the rare whooping cough. I don’t think you need me to tell you that having a cold’s a terrible thing. You feel like crap the entire time, and you have a hard time sleeping, and a hard time getting up in the morning. In other words, you just can’t win with the colds.

It’s the middle of September, and the UAAP season is in full swing. Now, I personally don’t care about the games (unlike some people I know), and whoever wins, wins. I never understood the allure of the spirit of this competition, much less the fervor fans have for their respective teams, that they bring themselves to the brink of very ungentlemanly behavior, as can be seen on the comments of this article .

So Burn Notice is ending today. That show has been part of life as I know it since late 2007, and was a welcome respite from the dearth of good TV shows during the American summer. For years, Michael Westen and his gang of cocky bitchy little girls would provide me with the same level of entertainment that I would imagine MacGyver provided people who were three to four decades older than me. And now, the time has come for us to say one last farewell to those bitchy little girls. What better way to show my appreciation than by listing down the five things I learned from Burn Notice, 8list style? So here goes.

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to watch a movie as bad as I have been itching to watch Star Cinema’s latest action outing On The Job . I have been wanting to see this movie ever since I saw the trailer a month ago, and now that it’s out in local theaters, I think I will take the time to watch the film sometimes next weekend.

In a previous post, I talked at length about the whole Damaso brouhaha of Carlos Celdran. You can view it here , if you want to know more about what I had to say about the topic, at the time. Recently, though, the issue resurfaced when Celdran was sentenced to two months’ worth of jail time. Well, two months and twenty-one days. Check out that Facebook post, and the comments that come after it. They’re worth noting. I have stopped writing about politics in this blog because, honestly, it gets tiring. But this isn’t just an issue of politics, in my opinion, so I have something to say publicly about it. So here goes.

I have a confession to make. I seldom reread books.

The other day, my cat went out of the house for his seasonal (?) romp around the town. This usually means deflowering virgin pussycats and increasing the amount of lookalikes he has on the streets of Pandacan. I tend to take these irregular periods of escape with a chip on each shoulder, since this usually means that my cat would come back home not only disheveled and hungry, but also needing a thorough check-up from the vet.

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook the other day. The post was a photo showing a black and white outline of a kid with a werewolf towering over him. The text accompanying the photo went something like this: “Some of us stopped believing in myths when we were children. Others still have religion.”

Truth be told, I was more affected by the news of David Tennant leaving the show than I was by the news of Matt Smith's exit. 10 will always be the Doctor that redefined Doctor Who for a whole new generation of viewers, after the reintroduction of the series by Chris Eccleston. So for all intents and purposes, 10 was a tough act to follow.

There is no doubt at all in my mind that Billy Joel's "For the Longest Time" is one of the best songs ever written. There is also no doubt in my mind that the aforementioned song is also one of the most difficult songs to pull off live.

Reading takes up too much time. This is the reason I don’t write; I read all the time. Which is a pretty big paradox in my opinion, since you need to be a good reader to become a great writer.

The other day, Carlos Celdran was put in jail for offending the Catholic Church. While it may come as a surprise that one single person can, indeed, offend an entity like the Church of the Philippines, please take into consideration that this is the Philippines we’re talking about, and in this country, Philippine rabbits turn turtles.