According to the University of Virginia's Oracle of Bacon, I am 4 degrees away from Kevin Bacon. The deciding "linking" movie seems to be Death Raiders, which I've never heard of. Still, woo-hoo! :)

And thanks to Eddie Garcia, I'm four degrees away from Natalie Portman, too. Yeah! Man, I must've played with this site for about an hour. :)

--

Potlatch sucked. Most anthologies really are a gamble. Most of the time, though, there's a fairly acceptable ratio of good and bad. But this one was mostly bad. Oh well. Good thing it was cheap. Speed Racer is amusing to me because none of the drivers (when was this done, the 60s? I'm not too sure) wear seatbelts. Also, Speed seems so quick to just punch or slap people- even women! And is that really his name? Speed Racer? First name Speed, last name Racer? Shouldn't his brother be X Racer, then, instead of Racer X? Or is it like a Japanese thing where the last name goes first and oh no I've gone cross-eyed.

Speaking of Japan, Jeline's leaving for the US and Japan to visit relatives. A safe trip to you! Wanna know why her name's a link? Because she got a blog, and didn't bother to tell us about it. Hmph. Well, let me direct you there now. She's in the links box now, along with Beth, Kathy, and Bodge. There are some more I need to add, but I don't know the addresses of others. I didn't even know Bodge had a blog; her boyfriend neglected to mention it, tsk tsk tsk. I had to find out through Kathy's blog.

And speaking of Bodge, Justin! Stephen Hawking has a new book out! It's called The Universe in a Nutshell and is already in hardcover illustrated format for us morons! P1650 at Powerbooks. If you decide to get it tell me, I'll lend you my Powercard (10% discount) and you lend me the book when you're done. :)

Also got to read, thanks to Harvey, a short story of Alan Moore's called A Hypothetical Lizard. Not really short, since it was about 40 pages. But it's another reminder why Moore's my favorite writer. It was written about a year or two after Watchmen, and it's beautiful. His language is superb. I kept reading passages out loud to Neva on Holy Thursday. It was interesting to see him work fully in a fantasy setting, though it was actually a love story, but then became a revenge plot at the end. But it was amazing.

--

FOOD

There should be more A&Ws. They've got this burger with three patties that comes in a value meal with the same price as a Big Mac meal. And their breakfast menu is available all day! The one on Makati Ave.'s 24 hours, too. And dammit, it was bad enough when McDo lost their milkshakes (Jollibee's is made of some powdery shit that I can't stand on a regular basis), now they're no longer serving strawberry sundaes. But do they announce this? No, they trot out the fucking Rice Burger. I had to find out the worst way possible: while craving for it.

--

Holy Week is usually the most boring week of the year. Remember the years before cable? Man, that was torture. Nothing on TV but religious stuff. Good thing I liked to read.

Maybe two, three years ago, I was in Samar with my family, and I finished From Hell, Moore's 500-page graphic novel. Finished the anecdotes, too.

Another year, I took a walk in Makati during Good Friday, and it was spooky yet amazing: there wasn't a soul around. No cars, no people, nothing. Ghost city. Urban landscape, tall buildings, working traffic lights, not a soul to be found except me. Perfect time to get mugged, I realize now. That used to be my favorite Holy Week story.

Because of that experience, I wanted this year to take advantage of the vacancy of Makati by shooting some stuff: stock footage of empty streets, particularly popular, recognizable landmarks, places, intersections where you expect to find the teeming masses of people and vehicles.

I told Quark about it, and he thought it might make a good music video for Ciudad, and suddenly boom-impromptu music video. We shot on Good Friday, but unfortunately fate wasn't smiling on us. First, there were more cars and people than we expected. Second, the sky was overcast at times. Third, we found out only upon watching the footage that there was some dirt in one of the camera's lenses (or filters). And sometimes the auto focus wasn't switched on.

Joey talked about how, just a few years ago, he could lie down on EDSA and no car would pass for 15 minutes. Now it looked like a regular Sunday. The overcast sky meant that much of the footage came out darker than we expected (it was difficult to gauge the brightness with a small LCD screen, especially since outside, it was pretty bright to our naked eyes). And the dirt and lack of focus meant that some of the footage is actually unusable (barring taking advantage of the dirt).

So I don't know if we have enough for a music video or not. I suspect we don't. This was an experiment, and experiments can go either way: this just seemed to be more down the middle. I imagine we're going to have to shoot some more, and that means expanding the concept of the video since we obviously can't recreate those conditions without waiting another year.

Shooting it was a lot of fun, though. We only got caught once (in Makati), but there were a couple of near-misses in Ortigas and the Skyway. We saw Pearl Drive looking like an empty lot. A yellow wall that looked like it belonged in bombed-out Baghdad. The Skyway might've been the most fun, though. It was really empty, but when a car did come by, they'd be traveling at incredible speeds. One time a bus passed by so fast, the entire flyover was slightly shaking beneath our feet. Scary. We'd stop, shoot some stuff, travel a bit, stop, shoot some more, and so on until we couldn't afford to anymore for fear of getting caught.

I don't regret the experience at all. In fact, I'm thinking of ways to improve it for next year. :) Including getting permits.

--

And so it's happened, as it was bound to: I can't remember if I've blogged about something I was about to write. And I'm too lazy to look through the archives and provide a permalink, if ever I did write about it. Though I'm pretty sure I haven't. Anyway, it's another step in this blogger's journey. Next up: blogging about something I've already blogged about, and then: blogging about something twice, with marked differences in details. Then senility.