Bopis

.

For lunch today, I ate bopis. For those of you uninitiated into the ways of Filipino cuisine, that’s spicy minced pork lungs. Sauteed with tomato, chili, and onion, bopis has a chunky texture somewhere between the consistency of tofu and cartilage, depending on what part of the lung you’re eating. Sometimes it’s an air tube, sometimes an air sac, sometimes a bit of fat and gristle between. It’s all mixed in there, and you never know what you’re going to bite into next. Needless to say, it is, like dinuguan, best eaten with rice.

Borrowed Scanner Dies

.

My poor old scanner is dead. It must have been jostled too much on the way to the office. :(

On the up side, my Logitech 3-button serial mouse is still working. That mouse has served me faithfully for almost six years, ever since I started using it as a lowly layout staffer for The GUIDON. As I rose through the tiers of graphic design, my trusty mouse remained at my side, comfortably rolling and clicking away, the wheel never sticking, the buttons never jamming. I love that mouse. But its time may soon come; the wheels haven’t been as smooth as they used to be, and the Age of Serial Mice is fading fast, giving way to PS/2, and I hunger for a Wacom tablet.

But even when I finally decide to retire it, my little Logitech mouse will always be my bestest friend in graphic design.

HEALTHY THE FEET. HEALTHY THE BODY.

.

I went malling yesterday. Three things caught my attention:

1.) A little brat pushed a shopping cart down the escalator in SM Southmall. I was walking around the houseware section when a giant racket turned the heads of everyone on the lower floor. As I passed the down-escalator, I saw the much-dented cart rolling away from it, to be caught and pushed away on broken wheels by an attendant. When his supervisor asked what had happened, he pointed and said, “Bata.” I felt distinctly annoyed. I hate little brats.

2.) I also spotted a sign advertising a therapeutic foot massager. The heading said in big, red, bold letters: HEALTHY THE FEET. HEALTHY THE BODY. Cringe.

3.) In one of the restrooms at Alabang Town Center, the toilet seat was down. I opened it up to take a pee, and double-ugh, the back portion of the seat was a mess of gooey brown splatter. The first thought that crossed my mind was: “How could anyone have such bad aim sitting down?!” You can be sure I washed my hands vigorously. With soap.

Coming NEAR.

.

On February 12, NASA is going to try landing the NEAR spacecraft on the asteroid Eros. Exciting! I sure hope the satellite lands successfully, even if it wasn’t designed for it. It’ll be the first time humans land a craft on something other than the inner planets. (Or have we dropped something on one of the outer moons already?)

Pyra Woes

.

Pyra is not doing so well. Poor Ev; I hope he manages to keep things together. Blogger is a wonderful tool, and an even greater community, and these folks deserve all the best for having made it.

How about advertising banners? Won’t those generate some revenue?

Yahoo Mirrors and Streetkids

.

Hey, cool! A mirror of Yahoo as it was back in 1994! Thanks to Kottke for the link. I should add him to my blog list. He’s reasonably cool. ;)

I’m so glad the government is now more actively supporting programs to help shelter Filipino streetchildren. If you haven’t been to Manila before, you can’t imagine how awful it is to see these kids going from car to car, begging for alms from drivers and passengers who pretend not to see them. You can’t give to them, because it just encourages them to beg more, but you can’t just leave them in the streets with nothing. The part that gets me really angry is that many of these kids’ parents make them do it, to sustain their income, often because they don’t try to find work themselves — or can’t find work. More annoyingly, other kids just do it for fun, to make an extra buck.

This is a terrible social ill that needs to be solved on a systemic level. You can’t just keep giving these kids handouts of coins; you need to make an economy that can sustain livelihoods for their families and provide for their basic needs. These shelters (if they ever push through; you know how government can be) are a step in the right direction: get the kids off the streets! Stop supporting a culture based on pity handouts, and provide for these kids’ needs while getting their parents some decent financial support!

How to do that? I don’t know. It’s late and I need my sleep.

Electromedia.com.ph

.

Today I made a Flash interface for a production house website; my first real Flash project! It’s still all just dummy text, but the links work, and there’s even music! (8kbps, 22050Hz, Mono music, but still music!) Wanna see it?

Update, 2006: The site has been redesigned by a different designer. I wash my hands of it.

Erap made a public appearance today. He still insists that he’s the president (but on leave of absence) and that Gloria is just an acting president and an unconstitional usurper. I can’t wait till they throw him in the clink. Maybe he should attend AA meetings while he’s there.

Cremation and Burial

.

I was just wondering about the morality of cremation from a Christian perspective, and I found an excellent position paper on it here, by a pastor from Grace Presbyterian.

As I wonder about this, my reflections constantly acknowledge the fact that the Christian faith is not entirely about rituals and customs and traditions; not so much as it is about the kingdom of God and the redemption that comes through Jesus. Our sights as Christians should be set on the eternal perspective; on what happens to our immortal souls, not just our mortal bodies. From that view, cremation is not a crucial moral decision that should affect our salvation.

At the same time, however, we have to consider the example of the bible, where nominal Jewish and early Christian custom shunned cremation as a defilement of the body and of tradition. The Testaments’ standard, then, leans toward burial, but without any outright statement directly prohibiting cremation.

I’ev been leaning towards the desire to be cremated when I die. Should I rethink that?