Sniffing out Page 23

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Tracking the Page 23 Meme to its source, starting from where I first saw it:

OKCalvin < Tulipgirl < Thinklings < Jared < Elfin Ethicist < Limey Brit < Woodlief < Collected Miscellany < Caterina < David Chess < Long Story Short Pier < Elkins < Happy Potterer < Sternel (fails to credit, but leaves hint in comments) < Peg Kerr < Kij < Chris < Bob Howe < Silvertide < Sentimental Curmudgeon < Tully Monster’s Fair and Balanced Fossil Record < Paintbrush Sage < Cyn < Seamus D.

Deep into LJ territory, the trail abruptly ends, with Seamus D reattributing the meme back to Tully, who in turn cross-attributes it to BluishOrange, whose trail returns through the A-listers to Seamus D. This trail was also sniffed by CrushingKrisis (Wish I’d seen that earlier, *kick self*). Unfortunately, neither the Google cache nor the Wayback Archive have mirrors of Seamus D’s entry, so the source is lost to the ages.

Update: Or is it? Some LJers have been meme-tracking in plaintext, starting from Andpuff’s list, we can pick up a new trail to: Ranger Rick < Stone Mirror < Artistic Chaos, who points to Cynaguan as having taken the first question in Paigh’s survey post, and changed it to the “23/5” format.

Imagine that. It all started as one of those mundane email surveys posted to someone’s LJ.

(Oh, my results? Well, the nearest “book” to me is The Scarlet Letter, but it’s in Palm DOC format, so there aren’t any “pages” or “lines” in CSpotRun, so I’ll pass on the meme, thanks. ;)

Update 2: Duh, it was done, and researched, and concluded. Even tracking the meme is a meme in itself, I suppose.

Run and Soak

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Summer-y weekends are here, and I spent Sunday after church mostly outdoors: skating to Da Hua for siomai and rice crackers, and going for a run down the National Mall. I have neither gone running nor been in hot weather since last summer, so my embarassingly less-than-optimal condition manifested itself in an ever-slowing pace — though I at least managed to sustain a jog-like pace from the Capitol to Lincoln Memorial. Um, not counting traffic lights.

The National World War II Memorial is almost complete, and with the former Rainbow Pool properly dammed and paved, the NPS has seen fit to refill the Reflecting Pool with fresh water. I caught it at a good time; the water was clean and clear (unlike in previous years where it has been either muddy and mossy or else completely absent) and tourists eagerly waded in to cool off. There is nothing quite like finishing off a hot afternoon run with a cool foot soak between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And inquisitive ducks coming up to you to see if you have tourist crumbs to offer.

Ouch. Now my thighs ache.

Slam, Boom!

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People were quite livid that a “SLAM” and a “stink” stunk of anti-Muslim bigotry, but where was the outrage over suicide bombers on Star Trek? Or could it have been simply because B.C.’s Gary Hart is Christian, and is therefore, like Mel Gibson, an easy target for such unqualified derision? (Yes, yes, an old issue, but seeing Enterprise reruns on tape brought it to mind.)

Yank the Wonk, Jump in the Swamp

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If you’re tired of all the buzz, hype, and ado over the Denton Empire’s Gawker-like DC blog (and even if you’re not), then check out Swamp City, who’s been running the DC news-and-gossip bloggage circuit for a season longer. (Actually, Wonkette cites Swamp City as a source and helper, so they’re probably not clawing at each other’s faces the way we sometimes wish whey would. <g> Swamp City deserves the recognition.)

Two To-Do-List Checkmarks

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Consummatum est: the websites of Electromedia and Imagineers are back up, two of the first professional* commercial websites I ever worked on. Once, they were entombed in Flash menus, frames, nested tables, and buggy HTML — wrought by my own hand! Today they are resurrected: PHP-driven, faster, tighter, gloriously robed in XHTML and CSS. (To save time and energy, however, I made it a point to use the graphics from older iterations, since those were still good for use, embossed and drop-shadowed though some of them may have been.) Whew. That’s two sites out of the project bottleneck. Feels good.

* (Well, there was also MyPhilippines.com before them, but my work on that was hardly “professional,” I admit with great shame.)

Khaaan

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“I shall leave you as you left me, marooned for all eternity, in the center of a dead planet, buried alive, buried alive…”

“KHAAAN!!!”

A definitive Shatner moment forever immortalized. (Link via MeFi.)

Update:

Pardon Who?

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(Update: Arnold just pointed out that Philippine elections are May 10, not 20. I don’t know how I missed that. Maybe it was from thinking of 2010. And I think Erap really does have Gloria dancing in the palm of his hand: she even sent him a penholder for his birthday. Update: And golf carts! What a sellout.)

Remember this? Estrada out to delay trial until 2004, in hopes that the elections would install a more lenient loyalist administration. Well, it seems to have worked. Here we are, three weeks to May 2010, and Estrada can’t wait to be set free, he’s milking Gloria’s populist-oriented opportunism for all it’s worth, and playing her like a kulintang.

If Gloria loses to FPJ, and she and/or her husband gets arrested for corruption, will they get the same treatment, I wonder? Will Lacson pursue his “Incredible Hulk” case for the opposition considering how they treated him in favor of Da King?

(Okay, just to recap: Roco’s Denouement, Wife vs Puppet, and Bro Eddie’s Chance, and this. Barring the likely event of some other massive development, this is probably my last post on the May 2010 Philippine elections until, well, May 2010. I’ve just had a lot to get off my chest since I started moderating politics on Pinoyexchange.)

Bro Eddie’s Chance

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When one thinks of TV evangelists running for president, most Americans probably think of Pat “Nuke the State Dept” Robertson, but it’s Bro. Eddie C. Villanueva who’s on Filipino Christians’ minds these days. ECV is no ordinary born-again televangelist. Check out this fairly dramatic bio.

Hailing from an entrepreneurial background, ECV studied economics, commerce, and law; then lived life as a labor leader and communist activist, from which he later converted, to become a born-again Christian and founder of “Jesus Is Lord,” one of the Philippines’ largest evangelical movements. He has family in politics, he knows how to manage, organize, speak, and fight, and he has the considerable backing of the JIL denomination. He has a principled yet non-theocratic platform, and I’m pretty sure we know where he would stand on justice where the Marcoses are concerned. This is a guy I could stand behind for the presidency — if only he had more political experience under his belt.

I don’t think Bro. Eddie can win the 2004 election without a miracle; not with the FPJ and GMA monsters overshadowing him. But miracles can happen, eh? Regardless, these first steps are good ones. If he were to try for Senator or even Veep, or something to get his political feet wet, that would give him an excellent fighting chance in 2010.

2010. How the years fly.

Wife vs Puppet

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Meanwhile, FPJ now has Marcos backing. Marcos! Yes, the family of the late kleptocratic dictator Ferdinand and his wife Imelda “3,000 pairs of shoes” Marcos! FPJ can now draw financial aid from the Philippines’ own Gold of Tolosa, along with moral support from his best friend, an ousted corrupt incompetent.

Welcome to the family, FPJ.

Small comfort that, at this moment, the only apparent hope of beating him is from the incumbent Gloria, who, with her husband, in a case of “meet the new leader, same as the old,” appears to be just as much a kleptocrat as those who went before her.

Perhaps another glimmer of hope (?) comes from the continuing “unity” talks between Lacson and FPJ. With his roots in the police, Lacson stands for tough, disciplined, harsh, uncompromising governance, which the Philippines needs, and FPJ’s popularity can only help. (Right?) But he is also a Marcos loyalist with a dubious human rights record. I sometimes rationalize that Ramos was one too, but Ramos, at least, stood on the right side EDSA in 1986. Where was Lacson?

Right now, the wife of a thief and a puppet of thieves are leading the electoral pack. Filipinos forgive their abusers far too easily.

Roco’s Denouement

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Just three weeks to May 2010 elections, and it looks like Raul Roco is out of the race, having left for the U.S. to seek treatment for what might be cancer. Back before May, he says, but the damage is done: already trailing in surveys, now he is unable to make campaign appearances or attend debate, and his good health is in doubt.

I remember seeing Roco in late ’97, photographing him up close when he came to Ateneo for a presidential election debate with then-administration candidate Joe de Venecia. Roco had no chance at the time, then: an upstart senator known mainly for championing women’s rights (he had been dubbed “honorary woman” by certain groups), who wore wild Hawaiian shirts and had a winking tick in his eye when he spoke; his giant stature was overshadowed by other “giants” in the election: Miriam, Erap, JoeDeV. But we students were starry-eyed about him, the “choice of the youth,” who stood for so much we could stand for: education, women’s rights, honest governance, dropping mandatory ROTC. Remember those days? In 2002, after the triple farce of Erap’s impeachment and ousting, GMA’s waffling flip-flop presidency (John Kerry has nothing on this lady), and the threat of FPJ’s candidacy, I’m sure many Filipinos were ecstatic that Roco came out on top of early opinion polls.

I don’t know what happened, whether he was resting on his laurels and failed to consolidate his political gains, or if he was simply eclipsed by FPJ’s overwhelming celebrity power, but for 2004, at least, this appears to be Roco’s untimely political denouement. How the mighty have fallen.