(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!
Photo Retrospective: Mantis Shrimp
(Mantis Shrimp, uploaded by brownpau.)
My brother took this with a Canon Powershot A70 on our diving trip to Verde Island in December 2004. It’s a mantis shrimp, or a stomatopod. Here’s what stomatopods look like in their larval stage. More just-uploaded photos of Christmas 2004 to New Year 2005: JFK-DXB-MNL, Christmas in Manila 2004, Virra Mall (pre-renovation), Verde Island, and Verde Island Diving.
A Few Lost Notes
Okay, okay, LOST fans, here are some notes on recent episodes, since I haven’t written about it for a while. Some spoilers follow, so those of you who haven’t been watching the second season should stop reading right here.
The Hunting Party
Jack, you didn’t ask “Zeke” enough questions. That’s all. Oh, and Kate messed up, thus driving Jack to Ana Lucia and Kate to Sawyer. Smooth plot move to reshuffle island romances. See Pompatus of Lost 2.11.
Fire + Water
Mister Eko got the concept of baptism wrong, especially with regard to Jesus and John the Baptist. Eko claims, “It is said that when John the Baptist baptized Jesus the skies opened up and a dove flew down from the sky. This told John something, that he had cleansed this man of all his sins, that he had freed him.”
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, MISTAH EKO, WRONG. Jesus, being God Incarnate, was not in need of John’s baptism of repentance, as he had no sins for which to repent. Indeed, when Christ came to John for baptism, John said “I should be baptized by you,” to which Christ responded, “Let it be done that all righteousness may be fulfilled.” And when he was baptized, the heavens opened up, a dove descended on him, and a voice spoke, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” These were but some minor details which Mr. Eko seems to have missed. (I’ll write more on why a sinless Messiah would submit to baptism in some other non-Lost post.)
I guess Eko gets a pass for not actually being a real priest with an actual seminary education. Still, you’d think that someone who knows Scripture well enough that he can give you the story of King Josiah and tell you that Aaron was Moses’ brother, would know something as basic as the details of the Baptism of Jesus. Maybe his knowledge of the Bible is like Alex de Large’s in A Clockwork Orange: he preferred the Old Testament since it had more action and violence and naughty bits. Oh yes, brother.
More on Eko and Baptism from Just Another Pretty Farce, TenNapel, and Thinklings.
You’ll want to read Pompatus of Lost 2.12.
I loved the visual execution of Charlie’s visions, by the way. The scene with Claire and his mother as haloed saints was priceless.
Locke seemed totally out of line hitting Charlie like that, since Locke himself — and others — have also been subject to island-induced visions and impulses which drove them to irrational behavior in the past. Sawyer’s right; it seems to be more about man-versus-man competition for Claire’s bedside favor than it is about protecting the group. And that’s why I cheered for Charlie at the end of The Long Con, speaking of which…
The Long Con
This was great — and I normally hate Sawyer. (Which is exactly his intention according to Kate’s psychoanalysis, right?) The Jack-Locke-Control-Freak conflict was due for a wrench in the works, and we’re seeing a shift in the way Locke is portrayed — more antagonistic, losing the air of benevolent mystery which used to be his trademark, becoming more manipulatively secretive. We also distinctly see the island’s chance-and-karma effect in operation: Sun earlier attempted to poison Jin, thus downing Michael, and now the Sawyer-Charlie Con Team becomes her unwitting venue for cosmic retribution. 2.13: Sawyeriana.
One of Them
Yeah, yeah, hieroglyphics on the timer. Maybe “Crooked-Stick Flame Bird Crutch” is Island Egyptian for “-1”? But more importantly, wow, isn’t it so obvious that guy is an Other? He’s named for a fictional character (Henry Gale was Dorothy’s uncle in The Wizard of Oz, which also featured ballooning), he uses the past tense to describe his wealth, he claims to have been on the island for four months and didn’t hear the plane crash, he can’t remember how deep he buried his late wife, he doesn’t inspire guilt in Iraqi torturers, and he dresses in that loose Banana Republic Island Khaki Casual fashion which Ethan and Goodwin carried so well. He’s sooo an Other.
Next week: caduceus on a hatch! Spoilers mention that the “DHARMA” in Dharma Initiative could be an acronym. I’m willing to bet that the “H” is for Human and the “R” is for Research.
(Bigspaceship1.com makes you download a PDF on Egyptian Hieroglyphic Uniode Character Sets. Don’t do that. Don’t set a PDF as a root directory index. Setting a PDF as a root directory index is bad.)
Photo Retrospective: Capitol at Twilight
(capitol-at-twilight, uploaded by brownpau.)
Walking by the Capitol on my way home after a long day in November of 2004. See full size panorama here.
