yeah yeah... Jacko's a goner...

So it seems that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, affectionately a.k.a. “Wacko Jacko,” after a million nose jobs and bleaches, is dead.

Won’t drag this on too long since the entire web is overflowing with MJ stuff…

Only thing I feel like saying is that with his death, Jacko has effectively pushed away the tabloids for the last time, puts the entire circus known as the last ten years of his life behind him, and his musical legacy will be left to speak on his behalf.

"...in his dying, Michael Jackson may have just unwittingly written the biggest comeback he can ever stage..."

Did he still have music in him? I’d guess no less than a resounding “yes.” But the magnitude of his history bears its weight upon anything he does or tries to accomplish. And coupled with the unrelenting ghost of his own vanity, then it’s safe to say that anything Jacko does is condemned to be a disappointment from the start.

At this point, however, people will finally stop trying to anticipate the next way he will fail. They will instead gather up his body of work, take it for the musical greatest that is bears, and put Jacko in the pantheon of singular cultural icons and great musicians whose music will continue to sell for probably the next half-century at the very least.

Call it poetic justice, but in his dying, Michael Jackson may have just unwittingly (or knowingly?) written the biggest comeback he can ever stage. That supposed 50-date concert tour is nothing compared to what will begin to happen in the next few weeks.

'catch you later...

Happy Father's Day!

So it’s Father’s Day… ho hummm…

Whatever.

I must admit though, receiving Father’s Day greetings on my phone sort of makes me feel like someone who’s finally been let in in some kind of exclusive men’s club…

I’m waiting for the day Marge will greet me herself without my wife miming the greeting behind her in her best impression of a chipmunk. Heh heh…

Happy Father’s Day to all the fellow dads out there!

'catch you later...

Thanks to fellow sxc.hu contributor Vivek Chugh for the image.

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/992546

Stuff from Today...

Today...

- Dealing with a bunch of resignations. Nothing particularly extraordinary, but still has pinches of melancholy… particularly for one of them… but she’ll be back sooner or later… one way or another… took her 7 seven years, but she came back anyway… Hope the kid really gets better in a “mom-dammit-you-gotta-buy-me-my-optimus-prime” kind of way…

- Took me a couple of hours to do an ad lay-out I used to take half an hour to do way back when. Getting rusty… lots of typos on the ad… will fix it tomorrow...

- Almost shed a tear in today’s episode of “A Liter of Tears.” Did research/googling and got even more depressed about the story… Nice show...

- Taking me forever to finish a communication plan for a high-end brand that’s been with me for a decade… still not finished as of this writing…

- Still wondering whether or not Maja will approve my friend request on Facebook.

- Thinking it won’t happen. Still waiting for pigs to fly.

- Brought my friend/business partner back home to have dinner with the wifey. She made my favorite: Tinolang Manok… had two-day old cake from Bizu courtesy of a big wedding last Sunday… dammit… make that THREE-day old cake…

- Had fun with Marge. Walked her back and forth in the bedroom. I got tired… Really getting old…

- Made milkshake using leftover avocado ice cream… stomach grumbling….

- Still awake and writing this piece of crap…

- Thinking of writing a review of “Galaxy Express 999: Signature Edition”…

- Have other things to write about… but not tonight…

- Will try and fit a pig with wings and a jet pack, while refreshing my facebook homepage waiting for a friend approval...

’catch you later…

Whattawebsite...

Anyone who knows me well enough knows i'm a nostalgia freak.

And while surfing one of my favorite [unmentionable] sites, (which are unmentionable due to the fact I have a few wholesome readers here), I was pointed towards this nostalgia goldmine:

http://video48.blogspot.com/

Won't talk much about it, but if like me, you guys grew up in a simpler time in the Philippines when Metro Manila was considered one of the cosmopolitan cities in the continent... the Malacañang's San Miguel district was the Forbes Park of the day... SM was just a regular department store in Quiapo... Queen's was the largest supermarket chain... Alemar's was a major bookstore almost comparable to National... and Luneta was a world-class park where rich, poor and everyone in between hung out on any given day, and no one was afraid of getting mugged...

I do encourage you all to just click on the link above and enjoy.

'catch you later...

Movie Review: Night at the Museum 2 (Graveyard Shift)

Imagine a memory of a fantastic dish. It was light fare, not totally filling, but fulfilling. It was absolutely tasty, and all the ingredients were just right.

That’s how I felt about Ben Stiller’s first outing as the hapless night guard in “Night at the Museum.” And $574,480,000 in box office receipts indicated that I was not alone.

So naturally, I was totally stoked about the inevitable sequel.

But what happens when a perfect recipe of visual gags, subtle jokes, and Ben Stiller get overdone with too much and the whole dish becomes little more than a giant heap of bits and pieces?

Welcome to “Night at the Museum 2.”

"...As expected, the whole Smithsonian becomes an animated, overloaded theme park of special effects..."

This sequel, like most other sequels, was obviously an afterthought with the probable directions to make it “bigger,” “better,” and yes, “bigger-er.” And was there a bigger and more colorful museum than the bloody Smithsonian? So they got all the old guys back, tossed in more of Ben Stiller’s friends, and created this lazy excuse for a movie.

Here, Stiller has become a big TV shopping mogul, and has not visited his erstwhile inanimate wards at the Museum of Natural History. When he does go see them, they are apparently being readied to be packed up and stored away “forever” in the Smithsonian. Of course, we are to assume that Ben Stiller is unable to find himself some real human friends, and that his social life is limited to a bunch of old, none-moving museum displays brought to life at night by an Egyptian artifact. Not every different from someone’s horny grandfather with a Viagra stash on a Saturday night.

"...Of course, we did not buy tickets to “Museum 2” looking for a fucking plot..."

Ben Stiller then proceeds to break into the Smithsonian for the sake of making a movie, while totally insulting the intelligence of the movie audience, who they think is obsessed at simply seeing the special effects used to make museum pieces come to life. So many of Stiller’s precious museum piece friends are being moved to the Smithsonian, including the Egyptian tablet thingie that makes everyone come to life at night. As expected, the whole Smithsonian becomes an animated, overloaded theme park of special effects.

And that’s where the problem lay. There was too much going on, and the filmmakers tried too hard to squeeze in as much as they could, but it was just nigh impossible in a hundred minutes. So all the gags ended up being half-baked. Of course, we did not buy tickets to “Museum 2” looking for a fucking plot. But man, at least we wanted to decently entertained, right?

The cast looked like they really tried, especially Hank Azaria, whose entrance was easily the highlight of the film. Amy Adams probably thought she was still in a Disney film, considering how she’s overacting. Ben Stiller and Robin Williams are always a joy to watch no matter how dreadful a movie.

But still-er (bad pun intended)… I wish we didn’t trade the “Terminator” tickets for this piece of overdone crap. I am doing my best to honor the first movie’s fresh, innovative entertainment by doing yoga while convincing myself this sequel never happened.

‘catch you later…

Baguio Bits: The 50-Year Old Hayden Fan...

50 year old lady caused a commotion at the store entrance three days ago before opening hours. In bits and pieces, she kept ranting about buying herself a brand new portable DVD player, “generously” volunteering her newly acquired copy of the “freshest” sex scandal around (the Hayden-Katrina-etc Video Scandal… ho-hummm…) to be used as the “test disc” for the aforementioned DVD player, then allowed our staff to duplicate the disc out of the supposed kindness of her horny old haggy heart.

"...I do not blame our store staff if they were trying to subvert her plans of multiplying..."

Then lo and behold… she apparently got home, excitedly popped the new disc into her equally new player, and… nothing. So it seems, that her sticky (*yuck*) plans for that evening were thwarted with the lack of her much-anticipated Hayden Kho-produced visual paraphernalia.

I am inclined to assume that the old hag did not get any that night.

And she is loudly accusing the establishment (through our “disrespectful” staff) of swapping her prized disc with a blank one. And she is unhappy. Very unhappy.

She also mentioned in passing that the player’s left speaker seemed to be defective. But she didn’t want to dwell on that, or the possibility that her new DVD player was still covered by a 24-hour quick-change warranty. She was pissed that she didn’t get some monkey time with her new lusty, blurry video, and (we all assume) her probably not-so-new, but probably no less blurry man.

She wanted to see the video.

I later found out that she announced earlier (to our whole appliance department in the Harrison branch, no less, when she still wasn’t a happily frustrated sexless old bag of crusty prunes and arthritis…) that she was sort of hoping against the hope that this video will do the trick and will help her and her blurry hubby finally reproduce.

Of course, having met her, I do not blame our store staff if they were trying to subvert her plans of multiplying and bringing more lunatics like her into the goddamn planet.

But I digress… we didn’t swap the discs. It is as yet unexplained. Nonetheless, being our chain’s self-proclaimed “customer service expert,” I volunteered to be party to her pornographic crime and offered her fresh copies of the concerned videos from my personal stash. She happily announced her pending return to our premises within an hour after opening time.

* * * * *

The hour was upon us, and the video has been entrusted to our appliance department’s “disrespectful” staff to be immediately handed to our 50-year old sex-starved customer so she may run on home and restart her fantasies of terrorizing mankind with her imaginary children.

I was told she didn’t take the copies.

Odd. Curiouser and curiouser…

* * * * *
One day, while overseeing the orientation of a new batch of hirees, our resident appliance officer-in-charge tapped on the glass partition and informed me that dumb can indeed get dumber…

The old lady returned after over a week WITH A COP.

That’s right. She was back with a police officer, because she intended to “press charges.” She was still pissed about the supposedly swapped disc. At almost every turn, I saw the police officer sending his eyeballs to the back of his skull, while he smirked like someone who just had some the prior night. Again, we are guessing that the lady still had not gotten any at that point.

She also said she never asked us nor did she ever intend to claim the “new” copies of what is then the Pinoy’s favorite sex scandal, and potential box office blockbuster.

* * * * *
We’re still waiting for the cop to come back. Or the old lady.

* * * * *
And to top off this entry… please indulge me as I share a snippet of our perilously foggy journey down Marcos Highway… and show people how cold it is up there…

‘catch you later…

Fluke, Lucky & a bunch of really evil people...

While talking a casual walk to the corner with the wifey, we were sort of greeted by a kind, kempt Pomeranian who looked at us as though we the Anti-Christ with our grinning mugs. She proceeded to bark at us, then ran out to the other direction. Only to be promptly faced by a big street mutt who either wanted to pick on her or pick her into pieces.

Spunky Pomeranian stops dead on her tracks, then turns and runs back to us. Probably assuming we were the lesser evil.

That’s how we found and met Lucky.

As toy dogs go, Lucky’s arrival was relatively uneventful. She wasn’t much for grabbing attention with tricks and/or excessive noise. She was just cute and cuddly enough that people wanted to grab her. She was obviously well-maintained, clean, smelled great for a dog one finds lost in the streets, and she was disciplined enough that she didn’t sleep in the bed with us.

But she always barked and made a ruckus whenever we had a masseuse over. She ate like no tomorrow, and as of yesterday was joyfully overweight to the point of difficulty in walking.

* * * * * *

"...the undeniable in-your-face reminder that there are truly bad people who are running around out in this is sad, tired world..."

He was a gift to my then thinly disguised “friend,” who eventually became what was the sum and byproduct of Hitler, Idi Amin and the Ayatollah… a.k.a. my wife.

Fluke relished running, and had often led us to tiring chases up to eight blocks at a time. Playful and powerful, Fluke was a proud creature. A handsome son of the great champion Labrador Retriever known as “Cooper.” Of course, all that was sort of for naught since almost everyone proceeded to neuter every male dog. So from our perspective the supposed greatness was ending right there.

But it was a greatness that gave us 10 years of a great dog who was smart, funny, friendly, and died -defending our home.

* * * * * *

Yep, you read that right. Died. And yes, those things about Lucky are all also in the past tense.
Early morning today, June 6, 2009, at around 4 a.m., our home in Dominican Hills in Baguio City was broken into, where a band of reportedly nine would-be robbers threw poisoned food to cruelly quiet two of our four-legged children.

Of course, anyone who knows us knows that we've lost many dogs before. But none under these rather violent circumstances. None in such an evil and relentless way.

Truly a sad day. Another of those days when shit one sees on the evening news comes to life in full grainy detail. And it is you who cannot look into the imaginary cameras inadvertently held up by helpful family members, as you grieve not only for the loss of your four-legged wards, and feeling violated, but inwardly cry in frustration at your helplessness, and the undeniable in-your-face reminder that there are truly bad people who are running around out in this is sad, tired world.

The wifey and I are left sitting and staring out our window in QC, jumping between thoughts of how we’re fortunate that we weren’t there when it happened, and feeling guilty with the possibility that it wouldn’t have happened if we were there in the first place.

And for someone who has boasted, as well as lived, without showing what most people classify as fear, to have something like this happen in your own personal space that one shares with one’s wife and child (along with non-human children), makes one rethink what fear really is.

See, we do not fear the insanity of other people caused by desperation, we pity that. We do not fear something we can stare into with one’s eyes while they stare back. We do not fear physical pain.

We will fear losing the ones we care for. We fear what our lives will become should they no longer be in it. When we love what our lives have become, we fear any possibility that it will change for the worse, and that such an incidence will be beyond our control.

So I guess I have not truly been without fear for quite some time.
And days like this one rudely reawaken me to that reality.

* * * * * *

To Fluke and Lucky… wish we had one more walk together. Sorry we weren’t there. No more excuses.

‘Catch you guys (much) later.