BEEN JADED AND ALL BUT I'M HEDGING MY OBAMA MOMENT ON NOYNOY. (and still, hello, hacienda luisita.)

By perfect, I mean resistance to violence, war, famine, pestilence, nuclear detonation. (God, no sensible post yet in my busy, busy life.)

And yes, in my busy, busy life (w/c is short of a nuclear detonation area, sortof, right now), I am a recidivist when it comes to misplacing thumb drives. At times, I commit them to accidental total destruction.

Ah what fun! It is not fun.

So the point is, I'm looking for that shock-proof, water-proof drive. Here are the 5 short-listed ones:

1. Super Talent 's pico drives:

Verdict: Pico-sized, duh. Can insert them in tight spots like your wallet. But will easily get lost in many places - not excluding bodily orifices (sometimes a flash drive is just a flash drive, damnit). :D

2. Lacie's iamaKey, itsaKey, and PassKey:

Verdict: Key-sized, duh. Woot.

3. Pretec's i-Disk:

Verdict: Bullet-proof. For the James Bond types.

4. The IronKey:

Verdict: Military-grade hardware encryption. Will self-destruct a la Mission Impossible. Nah, I won't have it self-destruct for just some stolen private videos. :-)

5. And last but not the least, the IronDrive:

Verdict: Get ready for this --> resistant to nuclear explosion. Kaboom. But with that size, I won't schlepp it around. Plus, it's least likely that I will have Dear Leader Kim Jong Il for an enemy.

Hey, WAIT FOR MY OVERALL VERDICT: Got the Lacie iamaKey, man! It has theAdvantage ofBeing locallyAvailable. Ayos!

Gosh as for you, babe, I love the way your hair blazes in the sun fiber by fiber.

I'll be back.

A bit of personal memorial to the King of Pop.

In the 8o's, it was de riguer to ape Michael Jackson. I did. (Betcha you didn't know he also had the so called earthwalk, w/c is the forward moonwalk. )

Zoom to the present and Michael is still Michael despite the inevitable false tabloid Wacko Jacko image. Maybe a lot of these so-called millennials (that I think is how the youngish generation is called today, as opposed to Gen X or Gen Y) have that false sense.

Then baam, Michael died, and the uninitiated millenials and those living under a rock and the rest of the world are becoming fans by the femtosecond squared.

Here are the four easy steps to be a fan: First, watch clip # 1. Second, watch clip # 2. Third, watch clip #3. Lastly, watch clip # 4. :D The clips are below:

GATEWAY ---- Aw, what timing!!!!! It's raining cats and dogs outside -- so that after watching Transformers the movie, I'd say, it's raining Transformers outside – or rather, there's an ongoing massive WWF-style smackdowns outside.


Yawards! Metaphor watching is a rare diversion I do nowadays. I'm tired of being the failed future mock boards topnotcher has-been at the Gateway Food Court Review Center. Do you follow me? LOL.


Just a wannabe critique: Transformers the movie was OK. As a 1980s child, I'm familiar with the Transformers saga -- for example, they transform. Hehehe. This cartoon series is lucky in that today, CGI is so high-tech it can render unrealistic robots real. This movie barraged me with smooth berserker CGI sprinkled with the usual humor brought about by Shea whowasit and that Turtorro guy, who, as the sector 7 agent, was so funny in his well, funny underwear.


But this '80s child also grew up. I expected more. I was hoping this movie would be directed by the Wachowski brothers of the Matrix and V for Vendetta fame. Compared with all-actions Michael Bay, the Wachowskis have this rare gift of combining good story, deep mythos, and breakthrough action.


So my beef with Mr. Bay is that his movie lacked some serious destruction, insurrection, and resurrection. Plus some serious emotional wretching (the humor can be dealt with). His movie is doomed to be compared with benchmark scifi movies like the Matrix. Or not.


So Bay's Transformers suffers from not having any breakthrough except that it's just some Exhibit A for the capabilities of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. It is, in other words, shallow. Hanky-panky, in fact. Ngek.


Sayang na hinde na explore yung idea of a mythos based on NBEs (non-biological extraterrestrials), which could have been explored well by the Wachowskis (obvious ba?). Like you know, I really think that there's life out there and it doesn't have to be based on scaffolds of carbon molecules. Any right environment via natural or artificial selection will lead to ETs, NBE or no NBE. : )


On the other hand, while the Wachowskis aimed to overhaul cinema, Bay has some other mundane agenda probably tied to the Hasbro company, which owns the Transformer brand. And this can be deemed from the fact that there's no single cussword uttered in this movie, syet. Bay is just trying to reach out across audience lines to tiny babies (LOL) so that everyone will have a good time and he will more than recoup production cost in the process. This is aside from boosting sales of Transformer merchandise.

So what? Hey, Mr. Bay, you are insulting the power inner child in each and every '80s child out there. This one included.

Verdict: Lotsa formulaic Bay-style slambang and robots chewing the scenery. No innovative action pieces. Saved by comedic timing.

Butch Dalisay, a UP creative writing professor, once offered reasons in his column in the Philippine Star why Filipinos don't write that many novels. My conclusion is that it doesn't take a PhD (maybe an MD hehehe) to answer why.

Here's my take (I actually commented on his blog). The reason why the contemporary Filipino novel is either in constant turnaround or kindof lurks in the shadow of say, a Rizal novel, is that most Filipino novelists today fit only a narrow stereotype of someone who's part of the academe, someone writing for writing's sake.

Reading an F. Sionel Jose feels as if it's required reading in Lit 101. It's so Lit 101. There's always a sense of believing that the Filipino novel is always a literary novel comparable to those published by Penguin, a highbrowed concept.

It is worsened by the fact that a novel as a literary form is, by definition, long -- in fact, universally too long for everyone's attention span, not just the Pinoy's attention span. A novel can only be successful if it connects to a larger audience. And we are talking here about that small audience of English-reading Filipinos.

Then it gets worse: English novel readers are only a tiny subset of English-reading Pinoys, too small to support the concept of a Filipino novel. Then here's the worst: The average English novel reader who is Pinoy, like most English novel readers around the world, will only buy a novel that's cool, a novel with cool characters, a novel that's well researched. In that sense, writing a novel requires more than just laziness masquerading as what the UP professor called "a largeness of vison" -- more than just being holed up in a mountain resort. It's more about research, a clinical feel of what's going on, a conversation here and there, and an ear for the nuanced idioms of the internet-savvy novel reader. That is, if you agree with me that the novel is more than just a literary Penguin-type novel.

What fits the literate Pinoy's idea of a novel is the American Novel. It ranges from, more or less, a Tom Clancy, a Neil Gaiman, a Don deLillo, and the da Vinci Code to the Notebook and the chic lit types, among others. There is one pattern in the great American novel: It is well researched (keyword: well researched; say it again: well researched), and the process of writing it is essentially democraticized; meaning, it is not only written by academic types but by people who pursue other interests, those who really have stories to tell -- not contrived stories. When a scandalous White House intern will write a novel, that novel could be interesting.

So why read a Pinoy novel when you have something that's more interesting? I don't want an F. Sionel Jose that will most likely lie around the house and gather dust like A Brief History of Our Time.

But our CURSE is that, in the first place, we just happen to enjoy the English language. And then, it also happens that the American novel is well researched and is written in -- English.* It's a curse that our Pinoy novelists will have to contend with (it's maybe related to colonial mentality but that's another story; the Greeks and the Scandinavians suffer from the same malady -- they prefer to write in English). But more than anything else, we are stuck with the old, un-diversified idea of the novel: the literary novel written by academic types. Now, don't force me to read those Tagalog or Bisaya or Hiligaynon novels. Ang hirap talaga basahin except yung mga mala-Sweet-Valley-High na tagalog.

*Thus, Pinoy writers are relegated to write short fiction and non-fiction. Ganun din ata ang nangyayari sa movie industry natin. Instead of competing head-on with Hollywood, they opted to find niches in soap operas, sitcoms, game shows, noon variety shows, etc. Latin America does the same with its soaps.

Who would not be interested in anti-oxidants? Not that I'm popping pills in the kitchen. I'm just being inundated by questions about the efficacy of glutathione– in two fronts: its vaunted antioxidant properties and its whitening effect. But if you really want to know about it, umm go Google it.

Now there's something about it that's difficult to Google:

1.My first encounter with Glutathione was possibly ten years back. I came across an article about the potential of glutathione as tops among these so-called antioxidants and there was never mention of the whitening effect. And lo and behold, I'm surprised glutathione today has become a skin-bleacher industry in itself.

2.The good thing about this hoopla about antioxidants is that they're actually ok. I mean, it's always nice to heed the cliché: An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. In other words, the health-conscious, wary of diseases, take every measure to prevent diseases from happening in them. And although prevention is much more multi-dimensional ranging from behavior modification to making environmental laws, antioxidants as food supplements take the emotional centerstage in disease prevention as proven by the fact that they have grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry (don't bet your phone on my math).

3. Here lies the contradiction. They may not be good at all. While these supplements are touted as panacea by anecdotal evidence, their labels would say otherwise: No proven therapeutic claims. Kinagwang. (And worse, they're expensive! Whatever happened to the notion that prevention is cheaper than cure?)

4.(In that case, supplements can actually rival another set of unsure entities: subatomic particles. Hehe. According to quantum mechanics, we can never be sure where exactly they are --- or probably they are not particles at all but waves of energy. Same with supplements. Hehe!)

5. It's true that some food supplements actually have therapeutic effects as proven by some of them eventually graduating to drug status (by way of scientists isolating from them the active ingredients and testing these in rigorous clinical trials).(Now I really don't know what happened to Lorenzo's oil; whether it became a drug or not, I don't know – or Google it.)

6. The truth is that there is more to the “No proven therapeutic claim” label. Companies have to use it so as not to earn the ire of BFAD, FDA and their conspirator Big Parma or to avoid litigation arising from false claims in the advertisements, for example. Technically, only drugs have therapeutic effects.

7. “No therapeutic claim” actually means “no scientific proof,” "no clinical trials to back it up, which is altogether different from anecdotal evidence.

8. Now, the question is: As food supplements, are they effective? Sorry to burst your bubble but recent researches are equivocal, providing answers bordering on “probably they're not; probably they are.”

9. I could surmise why so. Again, prevention is multi-faceted. Taking tons of supplements but failing horribly in other areas of prevention will surely go for naught. You know, you continue to smoke and drink; you live in a polluted area or in the dirtiest part of the Third World or in Iraq; you are suicidal; your diet is unhealthy; you are always stressed out; your job is being ... the Crocodile Hunter; etc. (But it doesn't hurt to try as long as you don't hurt other people, hehehe!)

10. And... THE BEST PREDICTOR OF LONGEVITY is genetics, of course. If you fail horribly in this area (e.g., relatives die young from the likes of breast cancer, colon cancer, etc), sorry. For starters, go ask around how long your ancestors had lived. As for me, I usually prescribe good genes to my patients for good health. Hehehe. Ha, if only you can choose your biological parents. Don't laugh now. Prescribing good genes to patients may sound funny but technology is catching up (e.g., gene therapy).

11. As for glutathione, I think its whitening effect is not just a side effect. I haven't verified this in literature: Melanin, the skin's brown pigment, is actually a free radical! But it's not your typical free radical because it's more stable -- its unstable part is stereo-hidden in a pocket (don't mind the jargon) – it can actually persist for years or possibly more so. But because it's a free radical, I feel like suspecting (despite the polular notion) it is countered by glutathione. (As an analogy, glass is technically a liquid but because it flows slowly, it feels as if it's a solid.)

12. For the record, free radicals are good for health in some important ways. Didn't you know that the oxygen we breath is a free radical and hence a poison?. It can even give rise to more potent free radicals.

13. This is the reason why some forms of living things avoid oxygen at all cost -- they die in the presence of oxygen. Examples are the bacteria called anaerobes. Some humans like Usain Bolt avoid oxygen to achieve results such as winning 100-meter dashes. Short bursts of vigorous activity are done w/o the use of oxygen.

14. However, in the long run, it would be to our advantage as a species to use oxygen rather than avoid it. Why? It's all around us; it participates in oxidative reactions that give us a lot of energy. Outside our bodies, it participates in combustion or burning (heat and light energy) that makes our food palatable. And you - the arsonist that you are - can opt to use combustion to collect blood debts. Hehehe.

15. Inside our bodies, oxygen takes part in something similar to combustion, which goes by the name of oxidative phosphorylation. It liberates a lot of energy (chemical energy) in the form of ATP, which we use to fuel our thinking, movements, heartbeats, emotions, genocides, etc. Also, oxygen is used by white blood cells to kill germs that invade our bodies.

16. But in the process, a lot of more potent free radicals are produced. Clearly, oxygen is bad but we need it to live. How paradoxical can you get. Hence our bodies have developed mechanisms to counter these free radicals in the form of enzymes systems and antioxidants blah blah blah blah blah.


The end. Whew.


17. Las hirit/CLIMAX of this post. Some supplements are actually a-ok. Some are not. Don't let the official label "NO PROVEN THERAPEUTIC CLAIMS" drive you to the conclusion that all food supplements are faddish and have no therapeutic effects. The point is, ask a very good doctor w/ no business interests/bias ( warning: a lot of doctors have) and do your research. My last word is this:

We all agree that bananas, carrots, fiber, blah, and all vegetables are good for our health. How come the BFAD and FDA do not require them to be marketed with the label "NO PROVEN therapeutic effects"? Simple. They are food, not food supplements. They don't require clinical trials because our millions of years of evolution w/ them serve as the clinical trial.

Food supplements should be similar, except that they are extracted and processed and thus are much more prone to be politicized because of unscrupulous and evil exploiters and quacks and fakes healers, who claim wonder effects. The "no proven effects" originally implies that there are no clinical trials to back up such claims and means to protect consumers from these evil businessmen.

ANYHOW, remember, food supplements primarily exist because most of us are busy and want to bypass the tedium of eating the correct amount of food as recommneded by nutritionists (usually a lot and on a daily basis).

Both Betadine and antibiotic kill bacteria.


Pero mas iba ang Betadine sa antibiotic. Ganito kasi yan. Gawa ako ng analogy tungkol sa Betadine. The problem with Betadine is that it is similar to an insecticide in some sense.


So in what sense? Insecticides (insect + cide = insect killer) aren't specific for insects. It can kill other organisms, too -- humans, in particular. Hence, insecticides are, in effect, homicidal, hehehe (homo + cidal = man killer).


Suicidals (sui + cidal = self killer) commonly take insecticides, maybe because they are depressed & mistake themselves for lowly insects, haha. Also,you can use insecticides to kill many people (geno + cide = tribe killer; mass killing) but you're better off using Sarin gas siguro. :-)


So what? Ang Betadine ay parang insecticide nga. Hinde sya specific for bacteria. It kills bacteria but it kills living tissue, too. (Besides, irritating siya sa skin.) So yung sugat mo, if Betadine stays there for a long time, mamatay ang mga tissue dun na immediately near sa sugat. Sa med jargon pa, the tissue becomes devitalized. Naks.


SO anong maidudulot ng divitalization ng tissue? Una, mabagal magheal ang sugat. Second, it scars and discolors your Body by Belo. Pangatlo, ang devitalized tissue ay nagbibigay ng sanctuary o shelter para sa mga mikrobyo laban sa Betadine o antibiotic. Mas lalong 'di magheal ang sugat; magkakomplikasyon pa. O di ba.


IN CONTRAST (syempre English na), antibiotics are specific for bacteria. Many of these antibiotics are bactericidal (bacteria + cidal = bacteria killer; others are bacteriostatic [they don't kill but inhibit growth]). Sometimes, antibiotics are called magic bullets, because they kill their target w/o killing people or affecting their tissues in almost all situations.

IN THAT SENSE, antibiotics are comparable to smart bombs (precision-guided munitions, guided bomb units, Joint Direct Attack Munitions, Joint Standoff Weapons), the most famous of w/c is the Tomahawk missile, I guess (sabi ng friend ko it's not a bomb but a missile; o nga naman).


Most of the time, smart bombs hit the target and minimize civilian damage, but hey, nobody's perfect as proven in the Iraqi War. Same with antibiotics. The perfect antibiotic/magic bullet is still elusive and it will take the length of a dissertation to discuss. But most existng ones will work in the real world. :-)


IN TERMS OF BOMBS, Betadine is a cheap dumb bomb, the one used in carpet bombing Germany and nuking Hiroshima in World War 2. Limit the use of Betadine to cleansing wounds.


Remember, kapag may pneumonia, 'wag uminom ng Betadine. Hehehe. Comments?

OMG. There's a picture of me naked w/ an unknown woman that's circulating in the internet. I can't even begin to imagine how disgusting these people who did this, are. Shame on them!

I actually consulted Mark Galer, a popular Photoshop expert. After some careful analysis, he said that my body is fake. See the picture below. You decide.



Nakakababoy!

It rained
Hayden Khos and Katrina Halilis
this morning

I waded through
Hayden Khos and Katrina Halilis
this morning

I was sogging wet with
Hayden Khos and Katrina Halilis
this morning

But as I laid me down to sleep with
Hayden Khos and Katrina Halilis
this evening

I said Dear Lord, all I want is none of
Hayden Kho but Katrina Halili
this evening

(ROTFL. How's my rhyming? Hehehe.)