Posts filed under “culture”
Party Princess
“The Princess for Hire”: excerpts from a very long and fun SomethingAwful forum thread about being a professional party princess, by AssassinSparkle (aka AssassinPrincess on SA forums). Her stories are a simultaneously hilarious and profound glimpse into a world of princess-worship among little girls, of which I had only been peripherally aware before now. She’s [...]
Getting Cable While Losing the TV
Through years of apartment living, we’ve watched relatively little television — just LOST, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, and the occasional Simpsons/Seinfeld rerun, really — so we’ve been satisfied to not have cable, sticking with just bunny ears, DVDs, and the internet; especially the internet. Services like Joost, Miro, Hulu, and various networks’ online episode viewers [...]
Smithsonian Folklife Festival 2008
The 2008 Folklife Festival covered Bhutan, NASA, and Texas. (Yeah, yeah, I know, NASA.) Time constraints caused us to miss the Texas part — in violation of that popular Southern precept, “Don’t miss with Texas” — but we got a lot out of Bhutan and NASA. Bhutan My first impression of Bhutan was “Wow, there [...]
Drive-Thru Nativity
I was looking through Stynxno’s “Christmas 2007″ photoset and found a fascinating series of photos of a “Drive-Thru Nativity” — a concept with which I had been unfamiliar, but made for some remarkable pictures. (Update: More on this from stynxno himself.)
AMNH – Philippines
One thing I was especially interested in seeing at the AMNH was if they had a display for the Philippines in the Culture Halls, and how accurate and up-to-date that would be. I didn’t find it in the Stout Hall of Asian Peoples, where I would have expected it, but rather in the Margaret Mead [...]
Banahaw in US News
Happy Thanksgiving! Be sure to open up this week’s U.S. News and World Report to page 60, where you’ll find my article “The Draw of a ‘Holy Mountain,’” on Mount Banahaw in the Philippines, part of a larger series on Sacred Places. I’ve never actually been to the “pilgrimage” parts of Banahaw myself, (though my [...]
Skull Pop
Amy just showed me this Mexican “Skull Pop” she got from someone at work. Something to do with Day of the Dead, I guess.
Note on Family Nomenclature
According to the Relatives Chart, the standard English label for a first cousin’s child would be “first cousin, once removed.” Filipinos, however, use the term “pamangkin” — preferably translated to English as “nephew” or “niece” — to clarify the generational removal, distinguishing cousins (“pinsan”) from their children, as well as from more distant relatives further [...]
Gross Frankness
Heh, if you thought my deodorant reminiscences were TMI, you should check out Kutitots’ thoughts on constipation. It’s one of the fun things about Filipino culture (and East Asian culture in general, I guess, with the possible exception of Japan) — our conversational frankness about the grossly biological facts of life. I remember newspaper columnist [...]
Starting Them Early
So you’ve got your Bratz, you’ve got your Li’l Bratz, and you’ve got your Bratz Babyz. Well, if we’ve reached the “babies” stage in indoctrinating our children into this fabulous culture of vain, vapid, materialistic, sexually unsubtle consumption, then the next logical step in the product offense — and I do mean offense — should [...]