One of the more popular recipes in my food blog is cassava bibingka with custard topping.
Speedy says the recipe is all wrong. And he has said this more than once — there isn’t enough custard. He said it again today.
Left photo: “The bibingka should be this thin.”
Right photo: “The custard should be THIS thick.”
Told him more than once too that it was impossible — the custard would break and fall apart if it were THAT thick.
So, he supplemented the instructions: “Use cling wrap to shore up the sides of the custard to prevent it from falling apart. Use toothpicks to keep the wrap in place if you need to.”
My husband is such an amazing cook, really.
Speedy and his officemates were in Puerto Galera for three days last week. It was a company-sponsored outing so I couldn’t go with him. He did bring home a lot of photos though.
These sunset photos were taken from the roof deck of Paul’s Place where they stayed.
I had an 8.00 a.m. appointment in Quezon City yesterday morning. Because the server had been overloading for the past couple of days, I decided to check the CPU load at around 5.45 a.m. before hitting the shower. I couldn’t connect. That has happened before. Momentary failure of PLDT MyDSL connection. I decided to check later — I could do it in the car using Smart EDGE. I did just that, the server was fine and that was that.
When I got home at around noon, my DSL connection was still dead. That was when I started to panic. There was a column due and I needed to e-mail it pronto. I called up PLDT customer service.
“Ma’am, with regards to that matter, meron po tayong network trouble sa area ninyo.”
“So, gaano katagal bago ma-restore ang service?”
“With regards to that matter po, hindi po natin masabi pero ongoing na po ang restoration.”
“Gaano kalaking area ang affected?”
“With regards to that matter, Ma’am, hindi po natin masabi…”
“Ano ba nakasulat sa advisory, basahin mo nga sa akin?”
“Ma’am, number 2 po ang Antipolo…”
“So, ano pa yung ibang areas?”
“Binangonan, Morong, Taytay…”
“Eh bakit hindi mo masagot kung gaano kalaking area affected, may listahan ka pala dyan…”
“Ma’am, with regards to that matter po…”
“OO NA, IISANG MATTER LANG NAMAN PINAG-UUSAPAN NATIN, HINDI MO NA KAILANGANG ULIT-ULITIN NA THIS IS WITH REGARDS TO THAT MATTER!”
Anyway, so I had to retype my column in my iPhone and I was finally able to send it. At around 4.00 p.m., I made a follow-up call to PLDT customer service.
“Tatanong ko lang kung ano na ang status nung restoratin ng service sa Rizal.”
“Ma’am, ina-isolate pa po ‘yung problema pero ongoing na rin po ang restoration.”
Huh?
“Kung ina-isolate pa lang ‘yung problema, paano magkakaroon ng restoration?”
“Ganun nga po, Ma’am, ina-isolate nga po pero ongoing po ang restoration.”
“Niloloko mo ba ako? Hindi mo ba naiiintindihan na contradictory yang sinasabi mo? Magkaka-restoration lang pag alam na kung ano yung problema. Kung ina-isolate pa lang, ibig sabihin, walang restoration. So, ano ang totoo — alam na ba problema o hindi?”
“Ma’am, ina-isolate nga po at on-going ang restoration.”
I don’t know if the customer service representatives are simply stupid — can’t they be trained properly before they are unleashed to the public? Or are they trained to talk stupid — public utility corporations lie 99.9% of the time and customer service is a wall between them and the public to cover their asses.
At 10.00 a.m. today, a friend called with better information and he is not even connected with PLDT. Line cables had been cut and stolen, and that was the trouble. How did my friend get the information? He called up the branch office instead.
Those customer hotlines are 95% useless 99% of the time. And those are very generous statistics.
The title, of course, is a line from one of the many thought-provoking dialogues in what must be my favorite movie of all time, The Matrix. It seemed to be the most accurate phrase to describe the following photos of the egrets preying on fish raised by man for food and profit.
The photos were taken on the drive back to Roxas City after a visit to the Pan-ay Church on Good Friday. The birds appear to be egrets, they belong to the family of herons and they are feeding on bangus raised in fish ponds. Fish pond owners consider them as pests.
My server overloaded six times today and I had to reboot each and every time. I was wondering what was causing the spike in traffic until my editor sent a text message regarding the controversial pronouncements of Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales on gay santacruzans.
See, if you Google “gay santacruzan”, this blog lands on the top spot of the search results. If you Google “gay flores de mayo”, this blog is on the second place.
The photos were taken in 2004 and 2007, respectively, but they are still worth a gazillion words.
Gay santacruzan photos, circa 2004.
Gay flores de mayo photos, circa 2007.
As to Cardinal Rosales’ statement, here’s my response: The dignity and solemnity of the Santacruzan has been destroyed long ago even before gays decided they could parade as sagalas. The Department of Tourism itself has prostituted the occasion by commercializing and exploiting it with the able assistance of high-profile couturiers.
Is it more acceptable if the sagalas are starlets wearing expensive designer gowns? Is it more respectable if society matrons serve as emperatriz? Is the dignity and solemnity of the occasion retained if people participate and watch not for any spiritual or religious reason but just to ogle at celebrities?
Let’s go even one step farther. Haven’t Santacruzans become a venue where mothers pimp their daughters, putting them on display, some very young girls, in the hope that their beauty would be talked about and they would get discovered by some talent agent or that they would catch the fancy of some rich boy who happens to be watching?
Oh, come on. How come no howls were raised when all that transformation was taking place?
Truth is, the move of the gay community to become part of the annual Santacruzan festivities is only a reflection of one glaring truth: Many Catholic feasts, including town fiestas, have lost their real meaning. The gay community did not invent it; they gay community did not spearhead it.
If the Catholic population sees the gays’ participation in Santacruzans as a disgrace to the occasion, the gay Santacruzans in Marikina wouldn’t be jampacked. But, goodness gracious, I was there in 2004 and 2007 and the crowds were as thick as the ones on Good Friday processions. These events were much-awaited and crowds lined the streets hours before the Santacruzan began.
If schedule permits, I’ll go again this year and take even more photos.
Which would you consider more shocking—the art student who got herself pregnant several times over a nine-month period and aborted the pregnancies so she could put the fetal blood in an art exhibit or the father who locked up his 18-year-old daughter in a basement, kept her a prisoner for 24 years, raped her regularly and fathered her seven children?
It was the case of the Yale art student that I read about first. Aliza Shvarts of Yale University underwent artificial insemination several times then took drugs to abort the fetuses. Art, she said. She was scheduled to stage an exhibit about a week ago featuring the babies she killed. I first came across her story in the Web log of a mommy-blogger who, months after suffering a miscarriage, is still grieving over her loss. She said it was insulting that Shvarts called what she underwent as miscarriages.
Jaw-dropping concept of art, no doubt. I was still getting over the feeling of shock and amazement when I read about the 73-year-old Austrian named Josef Fritzl. Back in 1967 when Fritzl was already married, he raped a 24-year-old woman at knife point. He was convicted and served an 18-month prison term.
Fritzl lived in a house in Ybbsstrasse with his wife and children. In 1978, he secured permits to extend his cellar. Above this extension is a structure that had been subdivided into apartments which Fritzl rented out. In 1984 when his daughter Elizabeth was 18, he brought her into the cellar, drugged her and raped her. She wouldn’t see the outside of that cellar until 24 years later. That was where she gave birth to seven children, one of whom died.
It gets even stranger. Fritzl reported her daughter missing after forcing her to write a note to her mother telling her not to try to find her. She was supposed to have run away to join some sect. But for the duration of her disappearance, she was also supposed to have stolen into the house three times, leaving a baby at the doorstep each time. These three children, hers and her father’s, were legally adopted into the Fritzl household.
The horror ended after the secret cellar was discovered. Elizabeth and her seven children are now under psychiatric care. Meanwhile, Fritzl is facing criminal charges and his lawyer is already talking about a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
When I first read this entry about a mother’s reaction to something written by a media personality named Rachel Campos Duffy, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. The Duffy person says shows like High School Musical and Hannah Montana are not allowed in her house because we’d rather our girls aspire to be astronauts or veterinarians rather than gyrating wanna-be “rock stars”. The blogger retaliated by saying yes, her daughter watches Hannah Montana because she likes music and, as a mother, she allows and encourages it because she wants her daughter to aspire to be anything she wants.
Okay, High School Musical and Hannah Montana are staples for Alex. And I don’t discourage her from watching them. I watch High School Musical with her but Hannah Montana is not my cup of tea. I did watch Lizzie MacGuire and Raven though with both Sam and Alex when they were all the rage a few seasons ago. Just as we did The Suite Life of Zach and Cody.
Even when the scandal about Vanessa Anne Hudgen’s nude photos broke loose over the internet, I did not tell Alex to stop liking High School Musical. And when Mylie Cyrus posed for Vanity Fair just a week or so ago, I didn’t tell her to stop watching Hannah Montana either. I never had to spell it out but my kids were always aware of the difference between the character that an actor plays and the actor as a private person.
I do not find anything objectionable with the songs and dance routines in High School Musical and Hannah Montana. It’s not like anyone there danced a la Sexbomb or Mariah Carey or Britney Spears in her music videos and concerts after she dropped her sweet girl image. There is a difference between dancing and gyrating. There is a difference between dancing and mimicking sexual acts on stage. There is a difference too when a singer wears beachwear or underwear on stage even when the song being performed is not about the beach, swimming or, well, underwear. And a bra and panties are still either a bikini or underwear no matter how much glitter you sew into them.
In short, there is a world of difference between being sexy and sensual, on the one hand, and on the other, trying so hard to look sexy that one ends up looking slutty.
I cannot deny, however, that there is a grain of truth in the observation that many of the Disney series that target teen and pre-teen girls do have that “sexualization” factor. The heavy make-up, the long tousled hair, the tight shirts and jeans… these are all projections of how the “attractive” girl of today should look like. And, girls being girls, there is a tendency to emulate. It is the subliminal effect of those images that are more dangerous than the actual singing and dancing.
But if a girl has been raised to know the difference between decent and prude, and between sexy and slutty, then, by the time she reaches her teens, she would be secure in her own femininity and identity and she can enjoy the entertainment that these shows offer without the danger that she will try to look like the girls in the boob tube. Because there is a heck of difference between the entertainment value of a show and believing that the characters should be emulated. Otherwise, the real problem would be the inability to tell between reality and fantasy.
Finally, while there are stage performers who look and act slutty, it doesn’t follow that there are no sluts among veterinarians and astronauts. Some are comfortable with displaying sluttiness in public; others prefer to do it in private.
The scientific name is Hypostomus plecostemus and every aquarium has one. I’ve always known it as the janitor fish because it eats the dirt in the aquarium and keeps the interior of the glass clean. There is an article in the Department of Science and Technology website however that says the fish has been misclassified. There are actually two species of the janitor fish, the “Pterygoplichthys pardalis found in the Marikina River and Lake Paitan in Cuyapo, Nueva Ecija; and the Pterygoplichthys disjunctivus found in Laguna de Bay.” The same article says that contrary to claims that the fish is inedible, according to Dr. Jonathan Armbruster, curator of fishes at Auburn University, South Americans “usually gut and grill them whole or make soup with them.”
We used to keep an aquarium, we had several actually in various sizes, and we always had a janitor fish. Years ago, when we were living in the city, we moved from my family home to my grandmother’s house next door. At the time, Alex had a five-gallon aquarium in the bedroom. Because we didn’t know where to put the small aquarium in my grandmother’s house, we convinced her to leave it behind and we would just keep the 20-gallon aquarium.
So, we left it there. I didn’t even have time to clean it out. I just transferred the gold fish to the bigger aquarium, turned off the water filter and left the thing half filled with water. I didn’t know that a janitor fish got left behind.
Months later, my brother and his family moved into the house we vacated. They have sons and the oldest, a year or so younger than Alex, wanted to revive the aquarium. My sister-in-law asked if he could have it, Alex did not object and so my sister-in-law started the process of cleaning it out. One afternoon, she came over to tell me a most amazing story.
So there’s this Yale art student named Aliza Shvarts who got herself pregnant “as often as possible” over a period of nine months (through artificial insemination) and then took drugs to abort all pregnancies. Her reason? She says it’s art. And she had her exhibit a couple of weeks ago.
The project, which begins showing Tuesday, features a hanging cube containing blood from Shvarts’ miscarriages combined with videos of her going through them in her bathtub, the Daily News reported. [UPI]
She insisted that the project was not conceptualized for “shock value.”
Even by purely visual aesthetic standards, I don’t see how blood from aborted miscarriages can be art. But then again, there is the famous Angelina Jolie who, for years, wore a vial of ex-hubby Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck. Although some eyebrows rose, there were no howls. Okay, perhaps, Angelina Jolie’s taste in jewelry is tame compared to Aliza Shvarts’ idea of art.
The UPI link is via Rebecca is Fabulous.
It is summer; there are illnesses associated with the heat just as there are illnesses that are more common during the rainy season. My younger daughter has been sporting a cold for the past several days and she has her supply of milk and juices. No tablets, no pills.
Unlike most households, the only medicine you will find in my house is a couple of paracetamol tablets and antacids. We are not among those who believe that there is a tablet or a pill for every little illness that we contract. We don’t take vitamins either. Not as syrup nor in tablet form. We don’t call the doctor every time one of our daughters has a runny nose. Neither do we run to the drugstore. And we’re fine. In fact, we’re great. No serious illness in so many years.
What we do is try to maintain a healthy diet. While the definition of “healthy” may range from vegan to pure organic diets and everything else in between, in my family, it means “natural”—no instant noodles, minimal cured or processed meat, no canned corned beef and the like, no softdrinks and powdered juices in the house. No kidding. See, whatever vitamins and minerals our bodies need, we intend to get them from the natural food we eat. No supplements in bottles. So, we stick to fish, chicken, the occasional red meat, vegetables, fruits and dairy.
It isn’t a perfect diet and we don’t have the perfect healthy lifestyle. We do have our own share of unhealthy habits and we know we ought to exercise regularly. But remembering the lessons from grade school about go, grow and glow food helps. Drugs are drugs and the chemicals in them may stay in our system all through our lives. An aunt took aspirin for headaches all her adult life and she died from gaping holes in her stomach where the acid triggered by aspirin bore through.
But in this day and age of technology and food crisis (why does that sound so ironic?), some problems are starting to crop up. What is “natural” these days? There is a persistent rumor that poultry raisers feed chickens with progesterone so that they will be big enough for the slaughterhouse in less number of days. Will eating a lot of chicken make young boys develop breasts and curvy hips by they time they are adults?
