Now/here no/where woman

"The 99" is a comics series about a group of Islamic superheroes that embody the 99 attributes of Allah . Author Naif Al-Matuwa created the series as a symbol of toleration. The series' biggest critics are not Islamic clerics, but conservative Americans. The more they protest it's appearance on the American comics market, the more I want to read it! Anybody have a copy?

Oh wow (: for several reasons :) Baguio Green Ride coming soon! Watch this space for details.

This feels familiar. Eep.

"... I just hope and pray that I'll find a way to say, Can I dance with you?..." Yo La tengo - A Take Away Show - Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo .

I know this is going to seem silly but things like this fill me with inexplicable happiness -- which is the simplest and bestest kind of happiness there is.

Today I want to remember Pinay heroines. Image credit: by Francsico Coching, seen at komikero komiks Gabriela Silang , who taught me that women could be warriors, and who has had a fierce grip on my imagination from wild childhood days when I would ride whooping through the rain, bareback on a galloping horse, thinking of what it might've been like to be waving a bolo in one hand, charging into enemy ranks. Image taken from kapuso online Corazon Aquino , who taught me another way of being a woman and a warrior, and who made history at a time when I was just beginning to learn what it meant to be a woman, and to be Pinay. Hmmmm, wala bang heroine dyan na may asawa? Hmmmm.

A NERD BOYFRIEND. Check out these fine specimens. More diversions on nerdboyfriend.com . Thank you, Miss Mika O .

http://xkcd.com/77/

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin! Here are three different takes on the man and his legacy. Darwin, Prescient with 'Origin,' Is Still Influential. Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live. The Darwin Awards. This year there is even a Double Darwin Winner! Meanwhile, I press on with my sayangtist adventures in my own backyard. Who knows what great discoveries might lie ahead!

Another flyer/postcard I picked up. This one I got at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco. There I had the pleasure of watching this vibrant documentary about dance, identity, and crossing cultures. AND I also got to meet Mitch Teplitsky, the film's maker, AND buy a dvd from him at a discounted rate. He was carrying a whole lot of copies around in his knapsack and was hoping to be rid of them by the end of the week-long conference. I think I got the second-to-the-last copy on the second-to-the-last day of the conference.

On a recent sojourn to North America, I collected more flyers and brochures than souvenirs. I can't keep them all -- already too much clutter in my little lungga, so for posterity I'll post them here in random order. If anybody wants to adopt a flyer or save a few from the garbage bin (the paper-designated garbage bin, to be precise, my dear Thompson), just say the word and it's yours. I wanted my own copy of this film sooo bad because it sounded like such a good story (and a soundrack by Youssou N'Dour!), but my budget was running low so I settled for the postcard.

According to Adbusters, "The international audience finds it's own media, free from western bias." Oh really? Here in this cowntry* national and community tv channels continue to broadcast shows and news slanted towards the West or mimicking American tv, and the U.S. continues to make headlines or appears on our national newspapers' front pages almost daily. Are we still so tied to the U.S. that whatever happens there makes waves of tsunami proportions here? Or is it just the media that makes American news so important in the Philippines? Perhaps it works both ways? Compared to the US, how often do our Southeast Asian neighbors -- with whom we (once???) shared many cultural, historical, economic, and social realities -- make headlines in this cowntry apart from around the time of the ASEAN meetings, or if and when GMA goes on another of her junkets in the neighborhood, or if and when Filipinos find themselves in a tight spot in those countries, or if and when they ha...

Goodbye, White Rabbit . In the last decade we have witnessed the surfacing of previously invisible dangers in the food we eat. Some of these things were dangers that the industry put into the food to make plants and animals unnnaturally highly-productive, to prolong shelf-life, to make products that are stripped bare of essential vitamins and minerals appear healthier or "fortified", and to make it cheaper for transnational companies to sell processed food all over the world. Now is a good time to rediscover fresh, locally grown food in your palengke or neighborhood talipapa. Over yesterday's lunch of chicken curry cooked in kakang gata with a salad of winged beans, tomatoes, and sili, my nanay and I started drawing up some rules of thumb for choosing food. So yesterday's thoughts on food were: 1. Don't buy it if your lola would not recognize it as food. 2. The less distance the food had to travel to get to your table, the better. 3. If it's known n...

... white beer! Cheers!