Neil Gaiman is coming to Manila!

Or is it just an urban legend?

Nice little innovation

Every now and then, I buy turon from the neighborhood wet market. Tasty, affordable treats, those turons. The vendor would place my order in a colored plastic bag.

The last time I bought turon, however, the vendor lined the plastic bag with a piece of banana leaf. And that made all the difference. The turon looked really delicious, real fresh when lined with that banana leaf. It has the same effect as placing that sprig of parsley on any steak.

This reminds me of other little things that make a big difference. One of the nice little innovations in apparel is the inclusion of spare buttons in your button-down shirt/pants. After all, this saves you from finding identical buttons in the event you lose one.

It’s like Hawkgear installing a rubber hole in its bags to accommodate any earphone wire you might have.

What is/would be a nice little innovation for comics? Would it be resealable plastic bags? Contact numbers for author/publisher?

What do you think?

Meeting new people

Chompy asked me if I could have with her and her friends next Saturday.

I immediately imagined that scenario. 4 girls talking about people they know, their current lives, and updates of topics they discussed before.

And I could relate with none of the above.

I’m not a people person. I would like to be a people person. People skills are one of the significant factors that lead to success. After all, we live among people.

But I’ve always found it difficult to relate with most people. Heck, I’m 31, and I’m not bothered that I’m starting to meet people who don’t remember Depeche Mode and Spiral Zone. I’ve always met people who don’t know about dark matter and concept of making your money work for you. Forget the generation gap; I can’t even relate with my own.

BEERKADA helped me a lot with connecting with others. Every situation becomes a potential storyline. Every person could be a new character. I’m encouraged to try different things.

But the difficulty still exists. And it’s still preventing me from living a fuller life.

Toycon 2005

Visit the gallery.

Crowded as ever.

It was 18 odd years ago when I first watched this…

http://www.doubleagent.com/video.php?v=406&ct=38&cps=0&sb=mr

They showed this Nike ad in a televised Clio awards. It was human soccer players vs. the soccer-playing minions of hell.

I’ve been wanting to rewatch this commercial ever since.

Ah.

The Myth of the Single Factor

In our efforts to improve ourselves, in our work, love or our lives, we make the mistake of looking for that one single factor that will make a difference. It is ingrained in our minds, in in our inherent desire for simplicity, to look for the one. But life is not that simple.

Solutions for improvement usually come from several factors, all related together. In line with the 90-10 principle, I believe it is in 10% of the factors involved that will produce 90% of the results.

I still believe it is in the small, critical changes that makes big differences, as Malcolm Gladwell would espouse. But it is not in the one single change. Several changes must be made for tremendous improvement to follow.

Keep that in mind.

Myopia

A few years ago, IT education was all the rage.

The demand for IT professionals was driven by the internet revolution. Right now, after the internet bubble has burst, the demand for IT pros has saturated.

And nursing education is all the rage.

The demand for health-care professionals is driven by the aging baby boomers, who are now in their 60’s and 70’s.

The problem is, by the time the current batch of nursing students graduate, the baby boomer generation has moved on. To their 80’s and death.

I’m a believer of the 90-10 principle: 10% of any group possess 90% of the resources, receive 90% of the income. This imbalance is caused, first and foremost, by mindset. The 10% refuse to think the same way the rest do.

They refuse to be average.

Those who are taking up nursing now is part of the 90%. They see what’s trendy now and take part in it. By the time they graduate, by the time they are qualified, the trend has moved on. Most of these students didn’t even choose to become nursing students. It was decided by their parents and relatives, who see all these success stories in the health-care industry and recommended it for their undecided college-level students.

If they wish to become part of the 10% who will earn 90% of the income, they should foresee the next big industry and prepare for it.

The death-related services.

And by the time you read this, the 90-10 principle has become way overrated.

I’ve been a passion advocate for years now.

I used to be a discipline advocate during most of my formal schooling. Discipline got me up through college, the willful sacrifice of drawing for the 100% focus on passing engineering. But I never could stay up all night studying for an exam or finish a paper. It was later that I found out the one thing I could stay up all night for was drawing. Blessed drawing.

That’s where I de-emphasized discipline for passion. Passion creates an effortless performance that discipline only dreams of.

But as of late, I feel the need for discipline, to do the things I must, even though I don’t feel like doing it. Government requirements, for one. Financial matter is another. Being part of a business entity allows them to take care of the things that’s not your core competence. Some businesses thrive on impartiality, the lack of emotions being an asset. Financial and banking institutions, for example.

I feel the lack of time. Time to do all the necessary things to push on with success. An obvious solution is to delagate the non-core competence work to others. But I’m not a manager; I’m a doer. I’m a hands-on man, and keeping track of others work keeps me from doing what I love. 

I just had an insight about influence.

Being influential requires that your work can be imitated/copied. That’s why John Carpenter’s Halloween is infuential and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is not; the effect of the latter simply cannot be imitated.

Creating a quality work and creating an influential work are mutually exclusive activities.

The Lessons of Nauru

I used to think that all the Philippines need is a sudden discovery of an abundant natural resource, like oil, and all its problems will be solved. We’d live like Saudi Arabia, with its absence of income tax and sheik lifestyle (pun intended). But then I think of Nauru.

Nauru is an island in the Western Pacific that was discovered to be rich in phosphateafter WWII. (Their phosphate comes from guano, or bat/bird droppings). So the government made a deal with a phosphate extraction company and invested its share of the phosphate revenues to secure the nation’s future. Problem solved, right?

Unfortunately, in the 1990s, mismanagement and corruption ruined the once-substantial savings of the island government. The huge earnings from the phosphates mining have been wasted, and now Nauru faces a very uncertain future.

For a nation that built its hopes on crap, its no surprise that its hopes ended in crap. And for us, no discovery of an abundant natural resource can save us from our true national heritage: our worsening government mismanagement.

Can you say, ‘bleak’?

This gist of Gloriagate, for me

GMA is being accused for desecrating one of the cherished institutions of our democracy.

However, accusers are using evidence that violates another cherished institution of our democracy.

Try again, gloria-haters.

What ruined summer movies for me this year

First, it was Revenge of the Sith.

RotS was all about the fall of Anakin Skywalker, how he betrayed his Order, slaughtered Jedi younglings, lost all his limbs and got burned to a crisp. The rise of the baddest of bad-ass villains.

And then we see the Lord of the Sith besides a peanut M&M, dressed in identical regalia.

Kind of takes the thrill out, don’t it?

And now Batman Begins. The so-called movie event this summer. His parents were murdered, he trains in ninja skills, he becomes more than a man; he becomes a legend.

Brought to you by KFC.

Just watched Sin City

Wow. Pure film noir. The coolest thing about the film is that some of the actors in the scenes didn’t even act together; for example, Rutger Hauer (Cardinal Roarke) was the last actor cast in the film, never appeared in the shot together with Mickey Rourke (Marv).

Why women’s basketball isn’t so popular

Women’s ice skating:

Women’s volleyball:

Women’s gymnastics:

Women’s beach volleyball:

Women’s tennis:

Women’s basketball:

Revolutionary

The Aeron chair.

The Eiffel Tower.

The Mercury Space Program.

Each of these revolutionary ideas were laughed at by the experts the time of their introduction. The Aeron chair was described as ‘ugly’ by focus groups. The Eiffel Tower dominated the Parisian skyline during the 1889 World’s Exposition; art critics hated it. The Mercury Space astronauts were ridiculed by rocket plane pilots, who scoffed that ‘a chimp was gonna make the first orbit.’

These ideas were mocked because there wasn’t anything like it before, and were being judged by the standards at the time. The problem is, by their very nature, these ideas couldn’t be judged by the existing yardsticks. It took the next generation to appreciate the works for what they are - the next stage of development in their respective fields.

The Barrier

Beerkadet Naja once told me how she tried promoting BEERKADA to her co-workers. In word-of-mouth marketing, this is a good thing. But you know what her co-workers said?

‘Naja, when will you stop reading children’s stories?’ (or something to that effect).

So there it is: word-of-mouth vs. public perception. And word-of-mouth loses.

How do you get to change public perception? When cool people promote it for you? Ah, further research…

NEW STRIPS! NEW STRIPS!

I’ve been productive.

For the past couple of years, The Artists’ Den regularly meets every Friday night in Starbucks EDSA Shangri-La. It’s not surprising that the baristas would pick this up:

And finally, ents!

News Blackout

Who is Saleng-ga? What does it mean that he discovered the electron is positive?

I took this photo in Quiapo. I’ve been seeing this piece of urban legend since the 90’s, in Larrazabal. I’m sure it dates way, wayyy earlier. It qualifies as an urban legend because the message never changes, suggesting one person/group is doing all the posting up to now.

The question of whether the electron is negative or positive dates back to Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with electricity. He discovered that electricity has two particles with opposite charges. He dubbed the particle with the smaller mass the electron and arbitrarily  gave it a negative charge.

My brother used to say Franklin got it wrong; he should have gave the electron the positive charge (something about the right-hand rule, I think?) So the claim above may have some credence.

Now the WANTED : MAID, YAYA, COOK is another urban legend entirely…

The JEEPNEY Issue

I experimented with a new format for observational humor for BEERKADA a few weeks ago. I started with street vendors and that got a good reception, so I continued with jeepneys. You can read the strips right here.

Anyhoo, who else would write to me in reaction but the official BEERKADA mascot Psychocow! And oh boy, is he mooed.

Duly impressed, I wrote an entire positive criticism. To date, only one beerkadet liked the jeepney series.

Just watched an episode of CSI:NEW YORK

You know the appeal of shows like CSI, and The X-Files for me? The characters take second place to the events.

This is the failure of wanna-be shows like Dark Skies. They turned it into drama. Labelling the above-mentioned shows as drama seems wrong. Maybe it’s my perception of what drama is: angsty, self-focused characters epitomized by Dawson’s Creek and Desperate Housewives.

Maybe its the idea that I’m learning something with each show instead of, ‘Ooh! How will Dawson tell Joey about his new-found love for Joshua Jackson?’