All I want for Christmas...

Okay I'm a retard for wanting these things but I want them anyway.

Tin Windup Robots
They're crude and ugly and pack a lot of history. I suspect the reason why the Japanese produced so much of these right after World War II was because these robots were the Japanese's vision of future technology post-Hiroshima.

Nunzilla
Say your prayers! No one is safe from the wrath of Nunzilla®! This fire-breathing wind-up sister trudges straight out of a Catholic-school student's nightmare like a determined disciplinary force, with green eyes blazing and sparks flying from her mouth. Wearing the traditional black and white habit and carrying a Bible in one hand and a ruler in the other, this holy terror will have you owning up to transgressions from as far back as birth.

And who can resist fighting nuns?

Horrified B-Movie Victims & Angry Mob playset
Between an angry mob and B-movie victims, how can you be bored? EVER!

Mr. Bacon vs. Monsieur Tofu
My money's on Mr. Bacon. Monsieur Tofu's a wuss.

More bacon goodies...
Obviously, I cant get enough of this beautiful meat product.

Crazy Cat Lady action figure
Self-explanatory.

And why not?

Dee-bee-dee dee-bee-dee be damned

On my way to work I finally paid enough attention to a Ford billboard to read that the Ford Everest can now be had by one and all for a low low price of 99,000 all in including a DVD system. I counted three tiny video screens.

What does it say about how we relate to people that we actually need video to help us get through to point B. It’s our fault, we Gen-Xers. Even as we fantasize about mass-murdering these bratty millenials, we are actually raising our kids to be monster brats with the attention span of a flea. What, we can’t stand our own children that we have to keep them occupied with Barney and Disney just to get them to shut up and behave and not bother mommy and daddy?

When I was a kid I enjoyed riding cars. I liked that I can just stare out the window and think a million random thoughts about the people and scenes that went by. I could sing Kenny Rogers and Glen Campbell songs today because I spent a lot of weekends listening to them on our way to wherever. My sisters and I learned to behave and entertain ourselves in the backseat. And I suppose my mom and my stepdad had their share of suffering through backseat tantrums and sibling fights. The point is we learned to just be together. We talked to each other when we wanted to. We sang along to the radio if we felt like it and all throughout we sat side by side trying as best as we can not to annoy each other.

But with DVD hounding our children until the last bastion of cramped familial space what will happen to tolerance, togetherness, elective idle thought and country music? Are we raising a generation who measure road trips not by the memories they made throughout but by the movies they watched?

When my goddaughter was a toddler we (my goddaughter, her mother and me) used to sing along to nursery rhymes every morning on our way to work, and she to her lola’s house. But it wasn’t like we were Brady Bunch derivatives or anything. Rush hour traffic and looped nursery rhymes coupled with my goddaughter’s precocious chatter occasionally took its toll on our nerves. But I get all warm and fuzzy thinking about it now. I only hope that she remembers that period and has good memories about it the way that those long car rides left me with good thoughts about my family. And I hope the LTO starts banning DVD systems from cars. I say, take it away, Kenny.

Porn!

I’ve just embarked on my pestilential soup diet. Those who know me know that me dieting is a rare occurrence, like the passing of Halley’s Comet or a major plague. But I’ve been extremely indulgent this past week, feeding almost exclusively on the baddest 9th floor cholestidbits, the meat madam’s bacon and porkloin and then spending an unforgettable night with Talyer’s liempo and chicharon bulaklak, finally capping it off by drinking like a fish over the weekend.

I’m on my second day which, from experience, is the worst day in this seven-day ordeal. I am having visions of steaming hot rice and piniritong baboy marinated in toyo and calamansi like my lola used to make. I can’t concentrate on work. It’s worse than feeling horny in church.

So to ease my misery I surfed for some pornographic pictures. Here are some of the really nice ones I found.

Make mine melamine

I should be outraged. Worried at least. But the fact that I’ve been drinking Meng Niu Pure Milk for the last two years doesn’t disturb me at all. Maybe a little, but I’m more curious than worried.

I should have known there was something suspicious about Meng Niu. It tasted too good. But I did my homework. First time I bought it I immediately went online to look for the Meng Niu website. Apart from the atrocious grammar and the fact that its plant was located somewhere in Inner Mongolia there was really nothing suspicious about Meng Niu. How could there be when they had pictures of a successful Chinese yuppy family (mommy and daddy in a suit looking at a laptop with baby) and cows grazing in a field of buttercups. Except I came away from the website convinced that what I was drinking was in fact, yak’s milk, which really made no difference to me. It could come from Tibetan virgins for all I cared. It was that good.

I revisited the website because I was curious about what they had to say for themselves and I found this story that was part press release, part Chinese melodrama. Now I know my kidneys are doomed. But at least the story's kinda funny. I would like to meet this Aunt Zhang.

"We Believe What We See”——500 Beijing Citizens Witnessed the Whole Process of Safe Production at Mengniu Group

“We could not believe until we saw it by our own eyes. Seeing such strict inspection and modernized plant, we could keep complete peace of mind and feel at ease to drink milk. I Hope that Mengniu and other brands could maintain such state so as to regain the trust from national people,” Said excitedly by Aunt Zhang from Chaoyang District. On September 26, Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce and Beijing Consumers' Association organized the visit to the workshop of Mengniu. It is estimated that on September 26 and 27, about 500 consumers from various districts and counties of Beijing will visit Mengniu's Beijing based plant.

Safe Source Milk Guarantees Dairy Market of Capital City

Early in the autumn morning, it was a little cold. When visitors walked into Mengniu's plant located at Tongzhou Distict, some people exclaimed that there was such a modernized workshop like this in the suburb of Beijing. Each truck full of raw milk lining up at milk collection square was waiting to be inspected. We saw work staffs with uniforms there and got known that they were all from Beijing Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision for melamine examination. “Trust us! All raw milk collected have to be examined and only that without melamine and meet the standard can be used for production. Meanwhile we will also examine all finished products to ensure that every batch of products is qualified. Now all products are safe, and please feel at ease to drink”.

Aunt Zhang pushed forward to the front to inquire the staff responsible for source milk management, and Zhang Zhiming, the manager of source milk management department, introduced patiently to Aunt Zhang, “At present, there are 42 milk collection stations in Beijing. In order to guarantee the quality of source milk management, Source Milk Division has sent out over 150 people to supervise at milk stations where we have adopted the system of man-to-man supervision on milk collection truck, milk collection depots and milk collection tanks since September 19. Till now, we haven't found any tainted dairy products in Beijing market. What's more, we took back the right of management of all nationwide milk collection stations that are proved and tested qualified. We also sent several thousand of staffs stationed at the milk collection stations together with work staffs dispatched there by authorities. According to the principle that every batch of products has to be examined and each of which has to be qualified, we strengthened the control of product quality and food safety. We will never allow any unqualified raw milk to make access to the workshop and we are adopting 24-hour strict supervision on each section of raw milk collection to prevent the problem from the very beginning.

Read more

Daddy and mommy launching baby to heaven because they made him drink Meng Niu Milk. Fly baby fly.

Back in the saddle

“It’s like riding a bike really,” I thought as I gingerly eased my bottom onto the stool, feet balanced precariously on the footrest, elbows planted squarely on the edge of the bar for support. It’s been years since I sat at a bar's bar, my prodigal return caused by my home boy’s confused and confusing visa-renewal-turned-emigration to New York, the land of brotherly shove. I’d forgotten how pleasant it is to sit facing nothing but a near-empty wall, a refrigerator full of beer, and the bartender, or in this case, our friend and bar owner, G. It’s the sitting side by side, I think, that does the trick. It frees you from the burden of making conversation but stops short of cutting you off from your seatmates’ banter.

Sitting at the bar is cool. It’s all those iconic moments and characters in film. You end up role-playing in spite of yourself. For a while I tried to pretend I was the laconic hero in a cowboy film, quietly brooding over my beer, occasionally throwing pithy lines at the bartender or squinting at some no-good punk while an Ennio Morricone theme plays softly in the background.

Ah but there was only G and the boys. And the only no-good punk in the bar was the guy who stupidly parked his car too close to mine.

I ended up closing the bar with J, barfly of the South. And phony cowboy that I was, I drunk-drove, not into a fiery sunset, but to a dark sky slowly turning ashen with the dawn. Oh well, it still feels good to be back in the saddle again. Hi-ho Silver!

Hair piece

I knew it was going to be a shitty ride the moment she sunk her body into the seat in front of me. Hate ran hot when she deftly slid her fingers up her nape and in one swift motion, spread her hair all over the back of the seat—inches away from my face.

Now hair, women with long hair to be exact, tap a hidden rage in me. It’s the years of sitting behind them in jeepneys and having their disgusting alien tendrils fly into my mouth and whip me on the face that makes me a little homicidal when I see hair so wantonly spread before me. I think I did temporarily go mad because I spent the next thirty minutes willing myself not to do the following to her hair:

Set it on fire…
Chew gum and festoon it round her head…
Trap strands in my bag’s zipper and then yank it close…
Braid pens, keys, flash disk, wet tissue, Difflam, the springs of my notebook and whatever else I can find in my bag into the ends…
Sneeze and pray that my virus and green snot gets in there good…
Flick boogers into it…
Engage hair owner in good old-fashioned sabunutan…

Maybe next time.

Hammer time!

Years ago our mother brought my sisters and I to a Unilever family thing during which I was inveigled to ride something called “The Hammer”. It’s essentially a curved cage that first swings back and forth, gaining momentum until it finally loops in a 360.

I hated it.

The contrived thrill of park rides never appealed to me. I don’t like to be shaken and stirred. I get queasy and irritable.

And now I find myself in a real-life Hammer. People around me are moving out and on. It’s disconcerting. I’m queasy and irritable. And terribly sad.

I hate it.

In praise of 23 (sort of)

There’s an object lesson in twenty-three year olds that I’m not getting. What is it about that age that I’m unconsciously and inexplicably drawn to? Should I look back at my twenty-three year old self to find it? And what do I expect to find beyond unbridled sex, profligate drinking and generally irresponsible behavior? Some forgotten hurt or a life-altering experience perhaps?

T.H. White wrote that a woman’s interesting period happens in her 20s when she is just getting a sense of her self. A woman-child untouched by life’s realities with a hopeful heart that’s yet to be broken by cruel men, even crueler women, facial lines and time.

Twenty-three year olds always seem poised to go somewhere gay and exciting and terribly exclusive. And it’s true too. They are, after all, on the cusp of life itself and all the joyful, grievous, dreadful things it brings.

So here’s to all you pretty young things. May you stay 23 forever.

I done a very bad thing…

So there I was staring morosely out the window, vaguely hearing my boss as she explained how an incensed client from New York called our Asia-Pacific CEO to complain about the “incident” in the Philippines.

I wondered if my body mass could actually break the plate glass window and propel me outward and on to eternity in one go.

“So that’s how bad it is, Joyce.…”

For two weeks I’ve been thinking of a worse adjective for “mistake” other than “egregious”.

It’s sheer bullheadedness paired with a bad temper—a winning combination that my mother is certain would get my face blown off in a motoring altercation. It very nearly happened by the way. Twice. Both times with a .45.

But I’m tired of staring down at proverbial .45s whether they’re Smith & Wesson or a burly American shrew.

And I truly am sorry for letting my anger get the best of me that Saturday.

So tonight I’m going to write that letter of apology and plot how I can make amends.

And then I’m going to drink myself to smithereens.