(Window Cleaners, uploaded by brownpau.)
Two men washing the windows of the NAR Building near the Capitol. For a few minutes their movements were almost perfectly synchronized.
FBCDC+204
Quite a lovely day yesterday: sunny and breezy, the first sign of the warming trend portending the coming of spring. It was also the 204th anniversary of my church, First Baptist DC, so the choir sang special music at service (Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine) with a guest harpist. Post-service, we had a sumptuous potluck lunch, followed by sandwich-making for the homeless. (I also found out for the first time that Gordon was engaged — I’d been away the Sunday it was announced, apparently — so a big congrats and good luck to him and his fiancé.)
I spent the afternoon with a few of of the young adults: David, Rebecca, and Lydia from church, watching Memoirs of a Geisha in Georgetown. (Excellent movie, and the Oscar for cinematography is well-deserved, but I won’t post a review until I’ve read the book and watched the movie one more time.)
Ash
It was Ash Wednesday this week, and I’ve had ash on the mind — and not on the forehead.
Coming from a predominantly Roman Catholic country whose minority of Evangelical Protestants tend to actively shun the trappings of Catholic ritual, it came as a surprise on my arrival here to discover Baptist churches which not only have Ash Wednesday services, but actually practice imposition of ashes on foreheads — my current church included. (My surprise was not unique, though: as Real Live Preacher points out, it’s the “quirky” Baptist churches that do the gimmicky Lenten stuff.)
I did attend last year’s Ash Wednesday service at First Baptist DC, a beautiful and somber time of reflection on sin and mortality, but this year a conversation with a coworker about the growing number of Protestant churches adopting this ritual, plus some points raised by Blog Corner Preacher, got me to thinking.
“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.”
BCPreacher’s take is that the ashes are a sign from the Old Covenant, not necessarily an indicator of pride or hypocrisy, but one unnecessary to those saved in Christ. Now, “unnecessary” doesn’t mean forbidden, and symbol-on-forehead doesn’t mean disfiguring faces to be seen by others. As holyoffice reminds us, the ashen cross is a memento mori, a reminder of death (“ashes to ashes”) and a sign to ourselves to mourn for our fallenness — and to some, sadly, still a status symbol to show the world how mournfully reflective they are.
So get the ashes if you wish, if you feel that they are a powerful sign to you of death and sin, but the moment they become an emblem to show off to the world rather than a reminder to yourself, wipe them off. Wash your face.
I shall go to Ash Wednesday service next year, I think. I shall stand with my brothers and sisters in Christ, and we shall remind each other of each other’s depravity and mortality in that ashen communion, that we are dust and we will return to dust, and we will receive the imposition of ashes, with gratitude for the sacrifice of Christ and hope for the rising promised by Easter. But at the end of the service, I think I will wipe the ash cross off and go back out into the world with a clean forehead. My pride may kick in, otherwise.
B/W Pandora
(Pandora B/W Closeup, uploaded by brownpau.)
Until recently, “black and white photography” for me meant importing color photos into Photoshop and desaturating. Now it means putting my camera in B/W Effect Mode with auto shutter speed and exposure.
More on Gloria’s 1017
From some old friends, more thoughts on Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s “State of Emergency” Proclamation: Rowster, Cross-Eyed Bear, and Amee. Also see the Ateneo stand for my old school’s response.
(Amee is an old friend and colleague from Ateneo. She was editor-in-chief of The GUIDON when I was graphic design editor, and now writes for the Asian Journal in CA.)
Google Goodie Bag
This is a followup to the Google Pages incident. Justin, the project manager, said he’d send a goodie bag, and so he sent me a goodie bag! It arrived yesterday. There’s three Google T-shirts, a “Google Pack” (that is, a small bag with “pack.google.com” on the strap), a Google notebook, and a bunch of little magnetic flashing body lights with the Google logo on them.
Thanks, Google! Now hire me!
Weekend With Amy Feb 2006
Amy came to DC for the weekend. We watched Galaxy Quest and LOST reruns, checked out North Pacific Native Art, viewed Da Vinci’s De Benci, and browsed the protomodern anachronisms of Dada. Also, at church, our anthem was Carolyn Jennings’s “Climb to the Top of the Highest Mountain,” and after worship, Amy and I went to Mount Everest for a Nepalese buffet lunch. Heh. (Great food, though.)
Some photos:
EDSA 1986 History
Ah, but enough of dwelling on the grim and cynical realities of Philippine politics! As they say, it’s the study of history which keeps us from repeating the mistakes of the past, so to history we go! Take a look at this wonderfully detailed timeline of the 1986 EDSA Revolution, featuring hour by hour updates of the event, with locations, people, and source citations, all painstakingly compiled by the late Teddy Benigno for the 10th anniversary of EDSA back in 1996. (I’ve linked it before, but it’s definitely worth another look today.)
Also see CountryStudies.us: From Aquino’s Assassination to People Power. And of course, the EDSA Revolution Wikipedia entry.
EDSA 1986 + 20
Today (more like yesterday, given the time difference) in the Philippines, it is the 20th anniversary of the ousting of dictator Ferdinand Marcos by the EDSA People Power Revolution. Sadly, the celebration has been marred, not only by the attempts at a military coup, not only by the draconian measures taken by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to quell dissent and rebellion, and not only by Cory Aquino’s own alliances with forces very like those she helped to displace in 1986; but by the simple fact that EDSA has shown itself wasted. The democratic institutions it established have failed, the people it freed are still beset by poverty and ignorance, and the process repeats itself again and again every time this failure manifests itself in the form of the nation’s own poor leadership.
This is not a new opinion for me; the seeds of it formed even while I watched Gloria sworn in at the EDSA shrine, and I realized, while violence raged in the streets three months later, that the common Filipino’s liberation at EDSA had not resulted in the common Filipino’s liberation from himself.
Ah, but that’s the cynical reality of life and politics for you, in the Philippines and just about anywhere else in the world.
More links and commentary:
- Philippine Daily Inquirer: “It reinforces public perception that the Arroyo administration is prepared to sacrifice democratic principles on the altar of political survival.”
- From Time Asia: People Power, 20 years later, and a Time reporter witnesses the coup conspirators.
- EDSA Mo Mukha Mo.
- Salamangkiero has commentary on People Power and the shedding of blood, Cory Aquino’s shameful political stance, and the invasion of the Tribune. (As for the Tribune, I believe in a free press, and they should not be padlocked, yet at the same time I cannot help but feel some “BEH BUTI NGA” schadenfraude at seeing this blatant pro-Erap/Marcos organ reap the consequences of its spite.)
- Sassy Lawyer and UnLawyer on the “State of National Emergency,” which, with the arrests and media clampdowns, looks more like a thinly veiled declaration of martial law.
- MLQ3: “Bastusan na.” (He does invoke Godwin towards the end, though.) Update: Also see Pro, Anti, Indifferent.
- Jove Francisco covers the State of Emergency.
- PCIJ reports that ex-President Ramos calls the declaration “overkill.” Ramos was himself one of the key rebel leaders of the original EDSA.
Google Pages
LOOKIT IS TEH BROWNPAU GOOGLE PAGE! So Google Pages gives you 100MB of free HTML and image hosting, a WYSIWYG editor with limited HTML coding capability and themability, and a googlepages.com subdomain. The markup produced isn’t so great, though: lots of crufty tag soup with deprecated elements and invalid code. For me, it’s just part of the kitschy amateur charm, but Drew McClellan has problems with that.
I found bigger problems, though, when I looked at the page edit URL — /edit/brownpau/home — and thought to myself, wow, wouldn’t it be funny if I entered someone else’s username in there and got his edit page? So I tried it with Mathowie’s edit URL, and got, whoa, his edit page — and I was able to edit it.
I filed a bug report — and belatedly told an alarmed Mathowie of the hax0rage — and later got an email, and then a call from Justin Rosenstein, Google Pages project manager. Apparently there was a huge number of factors working in the background which happened to synchronize — Justin described it as “a dozen stars aligning just so” — that somehow gave me admin-level access to edit and publish several other users’ Google Pages. The bug was fixed, and he thanked me for being nice enough to report the bug and not go on a wild vandalism spree.
I told him a lesser mortal would have given in to the temptation to “goatse all over the place,” to which he responded, “Goat what?” He should totally Google it. (Note: Don’t Google it. If you don’t know Goatse, don’t ask. You really don’t want to know.)
Anyway, there’s my Google-related 15 minutes for today. Justin said they’d mail me a goodie bag or something for being so nice. That’ll be something to look forward to. In the meantime, enjoy my new home page on the internet web!
Also see other people’s Googlepages as they make them.
Update: The Google Goodie Bag is here!