(A post not for the squeamish.)

When I was around nine years old, I rode bicycles with my cousins every time I visited them. We only rode them on the street they lived on, but it was a long street with lots of obstacles in the way–a road that on both sides sloped downward into a canal, driveways we could pedal up and down on.

The most disgusting obstacles, of course, were the frogs that had been haplessly squished by car wheels. Some of them had been there for more than a few weeks and had been run over repeatedly, leaving behind a flat hide that was nearly indistinguishable from the road around it. I’d be cycling on top of one before I could manage to see and dodge it, and I frequently wondered whether people scraped these off the road with a shovel or just let them disintegrate.

These days, I drive a car on more than one street. I’ve found that there are more than just frogs on the blacktop. Ü

Cats are probably the most common dead animals you see on the roads of the Philippines. We may not have big-antlered deer that freeze in front of oncoming headlights, but cats seem to be fine substitutes. There are whole cats, half cats, pulverized cats, and leather. Yes, sometimes the road cleanup crews don’t get to the carcasses. In time, the heat of the sun and the pressure of wheels mashing into the pavement turn the cat into a lovely piece of hide.

But let’s not forget about dogs. They’re not as prevalent as cats on the roads I travel, but there was this one time I had to swerve around a dog lying paws up. The poor expired canine lay there for two whole weeks before finally being cleaned off the road.

The same day the dog disappeared, I narrowly missed turning a cat carcass into leather.

I stumbled across this lovely food blog today, called Market Manila. However, it wasn’t the food stuff that intrigued me, but the entries concerning an unauthorized publication of one of the owner’s pictures in the country’s best-read daily newspaper.

November 18, 2005:
In the Philippine Daily Inquirer yesterday (page C4) and on their on-line website (both with a readership numbering in the millions on a local and global scale, compared with my modest base of 2-3,000 wonderful and loyal readers) an article by James Anthony R. Ceniza on Yema Balls features a stunning photograph of a yema sitting on an unwrapped pink cellophane wrapper…. The problem is that the photo is EXACTLY like a Marketmanila photograph that I took on April 16 (shown here at right) of a yema I had purchased from the Salcedo Saturday Market and which was featured in my own post on yema. And the other photograph used in the article is exactly like the photograph of yema by fellow food blogger Karen at Pilgrims Pots & Pans…

Yikes. MarketMan has a follow-up post about how he and the Inquirer are trying to resolve the issue. Micketymoc has put together pictorial evidence of the plagiarism and Sassy Lawyer recaps it.

The Inquirer is keeping mum on the issue right now, although they did take down the photos. The only coverage I’ve seen on this is entirely from prominent Pinoy blogs. Blog power, indeed.

UPDATE: Inquirer writes:

IN LIEU of the PDI Family Recipes Contest winner this week, we are reprinting these two photos, which appeared with the winning melt-in-your-mouth yema balls recipe in this section (Nov. 17, p. C4), to properly credit them to two food weblogs.

Both photos were submitted by James Anthony Ceniza with the yema recipe. It has come to the attention of the Inquirer that he took the photo of the yema with the pink wrapper from the food weblog Market Manila (marketmanila.com), and the other photo from the food weblog The Pilgrims Pots & Pans (karen.mychronicles.net/?p=53. Mr. Ceniza has apologized to the owners of these food weblogs for the unauthorized use of their photos.

Not quite an apology, but at least an acknowledgement of what happened.

Today, Marielle and I stopped by Eastwood City because several major record companies were holding a sale of audio and video CDs. Yesterday she had already bought a copy of Lifehouse’s second album “Stanley Climbfall” priced at 100 pesos, so I was excited to see what else I could find at that bargain-basement price.

What’s ironic is that a few hours before that, I was at Robinsons Galleria downloading music files off Limewire. For some people this sort of behavior might be contradictory; as the ads want to have it, “Piracy is illegal.”

I don’t necessarily consider downloading music as piracy, though. I don’t download to make profit or to dodge having to buy the artists’ CDs; I use Limewire to find extremely rare tracks that didn’t even exist on commercially-released CDs, or to determine whether an artist’s album is worth buying. In the case of Gavin deGraw’s “Chariot Stripped” two-disc special edition, I haven’t seen a single copy in local record stores, so I downloaded the acoustic disc one afternoon. I’d still like to have an original of that album eventually, since my interest in it was piqued by the downloaded songs.

But what choice does one have when legitimate copies of music CDs come with hidden software that cripples your computer? On October 31, the news broke that Sony Music had packaged software into their CDs for copy protection purposes. I don’t blame them for trying, but the issue wasn’t copy protection; the issue was that Sony had used rootkit technology to hide the software. According to Mark Russinovich, the person who discovered Sony’s doings, “[r]ootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden…” Russinovich detected the rootkit and removed it painstakingly, but this resulted in his computer losing access to its CD-ROM drives.

After Russinovich reported this in his blog, the issue snowballed; Boing Boing has a timeline of events, but basically the rootkit was discovered to serve a more insidious purpose: it opened a backdoor into the infected system, which trojans and other malicious programming could use to install themselves undetected or to play havoc with the system. Sony’s program also violated privacy rights of the people who had bought these discs legitimately; once installed in the system, the program reported disc usage back to Sony, though the company denies paying attention to this data.

Sony confounded matters even further by providing an “uninstaller” of the rootkit. Unfortunately, one was required to provide personal information before downloading the uninstaller, and the additional program didn’t actually do anything to remove the rootkit, but only made it visible. Additionally, the uninstaller opened an even bigger security hole in systems where it was installed. And the End-User License Agreement is even worse than these security holes: here are the conditions you must agree to before you can even listen to the CD.

Note that none of these things would have happened if the consumers had simply just downloaded the songs file-by-file off peer-to-peer networks. I’m not advocating illegal behavior, but Sony’s deeds were a serious disservice to the people who trusted them and attempted to do the right thing by buying original CDs. Here’s a full list of the infected CDs from Sony.

And since I’m supposed to be a good mass comm student, I have to mention the media angle to this issue. Apparently CNN failed to pick up the story in the early days of the controversy, in stark contrast to the tech news sites that were abuzz with it. A conspiracy theory attributes this to CNN being part of Time Warner and the RIAA (the industry body that is attempting to rein in digital piracy of audio and video).

As for me, I was able to find a good CD at the sale. One hundred pesos for “Long Gone Before Daylight,” The Cardigans’s fourth album. Ü

As an addendum to my uber-excited post about Constantine Maroulis in Manila, I’m pleased to report that Mig Ayesa (of Rockstar: INXS fame) is also in Manila.

From Inq7.net:
TWO CHARISMATIC rockers who became famous worldwide this year landed in Manila yesterday.

Filipino-Australian rocker MiG Ayesa and New Yorker Constantine Maroulis stepped off the same Philippine Airlines flight from Los Angeles, California, and into a quiet welcome each from a small group of fervent fans. It was 3 a.m.

Ayesa placed third in “Rock Star INXS,” which featured 15 contenders and was broadcast worldwide for 11 weeks from the CBS Studios in Los Angeles. The prize was the position of new front man for the Australian band INXS, a phenomenal success in the 1980s whose lead singer died in 1997.

His impressive showing, Ayesa believed, was boosted by text messages from his two home countries. During the final leg of “Rock Star,” he said in a previous Inquirer interview that, win or lose, he was definitely Manila-bound “sooner than next year … to personally thank every single fan” who sent an SMS in his favor.

“It’s nice to be treated like a long-lost son, to feel the nation behind me. It’s very nice to come home this way,” Ayesa told a handful of reporters upon arrival at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Centennial Terminal 2.

It was a surprise, too. Ayesa was initially expected on Dec. 1 to perform at the “MTV Staying Alive Music Summit for HIV/AIDS.” As it turned out, he had to turn up two weeks early as negotiations pushed through for him to perform the finale number at the opening ceremonies of the Ad Congress in Cebu City on Thursday.

At NAIA, he briefly exchanged “hey, man” hugs with “American Idol” finalist Constantine Maroulis, who is in the country for a series of performances at Ayala malls nationwide.

Like Ayesa, Maroulis did not win the competition he joined, but emerged as a big audience favorite. “I did not expect to make friends on ‘Idol.’ I treated the audition like a job interview,” Maroulis said at a press conference later in the day. “But I did make friends. In fact, we were like family.”

Ayesa, 35, describes himself as a “funk soul rocker.” His fans have heard him render classic rock songs like they were his own. He has also treated them to soulful ballads.

After a little prodding, the rocker revealed that he was also performing at the Ad Congress with Lea Salonga. “We will be doing a duet,” Ayesa said, grinning, the handsome face lit up by his amazingly beautiful blue-green eyes.

He wouldn’t say what the duet would be, but for his solo numbers, he said, he would reprise a song he did on “Rock Star” and the legendary British band Queen’s signature, “We Will Rock You.”

I have a silly little smile on my face now. Those lucky Ad Congress people.

Constantine Maroulis is coming to town.

Who? He’s that nice Greek rocker boy from the latest season of American Idol. He was one of the early favorites (and my personal favorite), but the one week–the ONLY week–that he fell into the Bottom Three, he got eliminated. Some people said this was stage-managed by American Idol’s producers, who felt that if he didn’t get eliminated, the singers they had pegged to advance to the final would exit. Others said that Constantine purposely wanted to leave because his band, Pray for the Soul of Betty, was already releasing their own album. In any case, I stopped watching American Idol after he left.

And now he’s going to be in Manila next week. Drool. Swoon. Shriek. Rub shoulders with hundreds of people who want to see him as well. To that I’d say, “No, thanks.” I love Constantine dearly, but I think I could handle not actually seeing him live.

The embarrassing thing about this post is that I accidentally entered it into my tennis blog. The poor people who subscribed to the RSS feed from that blog must be wondering what in the world Constantine Maroulis would be doing in a tennis blog. Oops.

So yes, again I am cramming. It seems to be a genetic predisposition, as both my parents are expert crammers. Ü But yes, I am rushing on my thesis. I didn’t set myself any deadlines earlier, and now the last sem of my residency in UP is upon me. My adviser has limited time, I have limited time, time to get cracking.

So what the hell am I doing writing here?

(I’m taking advantage of Robinsons Galleria’s free WiFi access.)

I rarely mention this nowadays, but back in 1999 I was heavily involved in anime mailing lists and consequently the local anime community. I actually was introduced to Charles (of Stalking Manila) at monthly anime screenings in UP Diliman; I also met several other lovely and loveable people there. (In fact, I can take credit for introducing two people to each other at these anime screenings. Their relationship is still going strong. Hi, Paul and Sheila.)

The reasons for my drift (or should I say abrupt break?) away from anime are detailed in the graveyard for my anime-related ramblings and creations. However, I didn’t exit without leaving some sort of legacy. In those two years of anime madness, I had gotten into cosplay and had started Pinoy Cosplay, the first Philippine-based cosplay mailing list open to the public.

I handed off moderation duties to trusted friends, and so far I hadn’t heard a peep from them–until lately. Apparently, a forum with a domain had been created in October 2005 with the name “Pinoy Cosplay,” and this had the lead moderator up in arms since the name had been taken without my (and the mailing list’s) permission. I felt I was the last resort, so I contacted the founder of the domain and worked things out. He could keep his domain, but the mailing list would remain a separate entity with claims to being the first and original Pinoy Cosplay.

This got me thinking that we can’t totally leave the past behind. As we move through water, we leave ripples in our wake; in the same way, as we go about our own lives, we affect other people’s lives whether we mean to or not.

Remember that little crash into a manhole I had? Well, apparently, the car didn’t escape unscathed. Today the damage reared its ugly expensive head as I drove the car up into our driveway. Something cracked in the front right wheel assembly, and a nut popped loose. Plus it made a horrible groaning noise and I screamed in fright.

There was no particular reason to scream, but I had been left jumpy from something that had happened only a few minutes earlier. I was at the intersection of two main roads, and there were pedestrians crossing. They had already stopped when they saw me approaching, so I drove on. Just as I cleared where those pedestrians were standing, a red blur of a boy crashed pell-mell into the left rear portion of the car. My jaw agape, I slammed on the brakes and threw the car door open to check if I’d hurt someone.

A man standing at the corner was looking at me. “Andun siya o! Tumakbo!” he told me, and pointed at the boy in red running across the street and onto the sidewalk. He seemed fine and in one piece, and he just kept running away from the scene of the accident.

I closed the car door and drove away. And then came the groaning tire.

I hope that kid didn’t hurt his internal organs from slamming himself into my car. Otherwise, that’s an ugly injury waiting to rear its head.

These days, I only go to two coffee shops: The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf or Starbucks. See, I don’t go to expensive shops to drink brewed coffee or sample their pastry selections. I go to have their specialty drinks. I only have one single rule that must be met: what I drink must be sugar-free.

Ever since I discovered that CBTL gave its customers the option of using No Sugar Added vanilla and chocolate powders to flavor their drinks, I have been an avid fan of their Ice Blended drinks, particularly the Pure Chocolate and Pure Vanilla Ice Blended. Recently I added the Hot Chocolate to my repertoire for days when I’m not feeling particularly in need of a cool drink.

Starbucks came out with the Frappuccino Light series this year, and I thought the Frapp Light drinks also used sugar-free ingredients. At least, that was what I was led to believe when I first bought one. After what happened today, I’m not sure I’ll be going to Starbucks again in the near future (tampo ako).

Today was the last day of Starbucks’s Halloween treat: a free upsize on all drinks. I had decided to order a grande Caramel Frappuccino Light, which would be upsized to Venti. They handed the mixed drink to me without the whipped cream, so I requested some. Unfortunately, they also drizzled caramel syrup over the whipped cream, which led me to ask some questions.

Me: Is this caramel syrup sugar-free?
Barista: Uh, no, Ma’am.
Me: Oh. So what makes it Light?
Barista: It has 60% less calories than regular Frapps, and we usually serve them without whipped cream.
Me: But it’s not sugar-free.
Barista: No, Ma’am.
Me: (looks at the drink) I can’t drink this.

The barista offered to help me change my drink, but she kept showing me options I wasn’t familiar with–and frankly I had my heart set on a Frapp. Confused and a little bit cranky, I just asked her to give me the drink anyway. I didn’t want her to go to any more trouble when it was my fault.

As I left the Starbucks, though, I started steaming. Now that I knew my Frapp Light wasn’t sugar-free, what was I to do with the drink I held in my hand? It was Venti size, too…

I ended up giving the drink to the housekeeper when I got home. I hope she enjoyed it; I spent a third of my weekly allowance on that drink and got nary a taste of it. Oh, well. I think I’ll go make a late-night run to CBTL and get myself a nice Ice Blended. Na-udlot kasi eh.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that rain always falls on Metro Manila on All Hallows Eve? Ü It’s strange that a predominantly Catholic country has taken to celebrating this pagan holiday (Samhain, according to the Celts) by dressing their children up as ghouls and goblins, devils and demons. About two years ago I was getting the distinct feeling that Halloween was beginning to rival Christmas in festivities.

That, of course, makes me sad.