Here we go again

I'M feeling a bit under the weather today, folks. The heat was just sweltering yesterday and I was going in and out of airconditioned places. I also think I've been too anxious about this A/H1N1 flu that I've literally scrubbed away even the helpful bacteria from my body.

Like I interviewed this businessman who just came from New York and as soon as we finished talking, I went to the restroom to wash my hands. I washed my hands so many times yesterday (yes while I sang 2 Happy Birthday songs, not aloud though, people might think I'm touched in the head), it's surprising my hands haven't bled yet. So ironically, now I feel a bit flu-ish, if not, foolish. To top it off, I didn't win last night's P168 million Superlotto. Blast!

Anyhoo, BusinessMirror columnist Manuel Buencamino has this interesting take on the foolishness that's been going on our squalid part of the world. Not only have we become illiterate, as PDI columnist Conrad de Quiros has declared, we've become humor-less as well. We can't help Sen. Bong Revilla's brain condition, but I can't understand why even Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel, an Ateneo graduate at that, and who I thought was an intelligent smart non-traditional politician, has succumbed to the same silliness as well.

(I used to think Rep. Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel was such a great congresswoman, until she started taking issue w/ non-issues.)

Methinks, many of our countrymen's so-called patriotism, nationalism and politically correctness have become misplaced. And I've said it all before at the height of the Desperate Housewives and Jon Stewart controversies; it's like we're suffering from some weird superiority complex that masks how inferior we feel towards other nationalities, that we have to keep lashing out at them just to prove we're such patriotic citizens. If you're so patriotic, why don't you follow traffic rules and pay the correct taxes? Pwede ba?

It's true, what Buencamino says. Because of this furor over these TV shows, now I've become oversensitive to other people's stupidities that everytime I make a joke, sarcastic remark, or use irony in any of my comments/writings, I have to put a parenthesis w/ the words, "joke!" or "joke lang!" I miss those days when we didn't have to explain too much bec. everyone got the joke.

Here's Buencamino's latest dispatch from the Enchanted Kingdom:

Explain the jokes ‘naman’, please
By Manuel Buencamino
BusinessMirror, May 27, 2009

A chip on the shoulder is not a sign of patriotism. It’s the mark of an inferiority complex.—Philip Gilmore

I don’t get the patriotic furor over Alec Baldwin’s remark. “I’d love to have more kids. I’m thinking about getting a Filipina mail-order bride at this point, or a Russian. I don’t care, I’m 51.” I suspect “mail-order bride” had something to do with it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

A mail-order bride is a woman who chooses a different route to marriage. She is not a slut. She is not morally inferior to a woman who opts to be courted in the traditional manner. (Click here for the rest.)

Here's one more for Golden Acres

Why can't these old fogies just roll over and die? Sure they were deserving of some amount of respect for being senior politicians, which we grudgingly accorded them for some time. But now Enrile and his ilk are just bratty geezers. period. And they have become a nuisance.

Btw, why is he starting to talk like a colegiala, too? Graduate ba 'to ng Assumption?

From my favorite columnist, Manuel Buencamino of BusinessMirror.

Dispatches from the Enchanted Kingdom

Letter to Senator Enrile

“I am furious at hypocrites, those who pretend to be someone they are not.” —Juan Ponce Enrile

Dear Senator Enrile,

I saw you on ANC’s Morning Show telling Ricky Carandang, “I don’t make bola, I don’t tell lies.”

But if only I had forgotten that you staged a fake ambush on yourself in 1972 and lied about it for 14 years. . . .

I also read your reply to Speaker de Venecia’s charge that you’re engaged in destructive politics.

“Ako engaged in destructive politics? You talk about morality, you’re not entitled to talk about morality,” you said.

But if only I had forgotten you vanished right after you agitated the crowd in Edsa 3. . . .

(The rest at Dispatches.)