PJB

Two words: Chip Tsao (or To Kit).

Writing a satire is one thing, but adding racism, bigotry and dumb wit into the mix is another matter.

Oh how the Filipino and Chinese blood in me churns.

Today is Ash Wednesday. It marks the first day of the Lenten season and occurs forty (40) days (hence the local term,“cuaresma”, for Lent) before Easter.

I’m glad that Conne and I were able to go home in time to attend the 7:30PM mass and have ash imposed on our foreheads. And I noticed that the queue heading up to the imposition of ashes wasn’t that long, this is probably because most parishioners already attended the early morning and afternoon services.

So what’s next? Well, the forty day period gives us ample time to reflect on our lives, make amends, and prepare for the coming Holy Week. So let’s do it!

God is good! Cheers!

I previously blogged about my earlier “triumph” on changing my car’s busted headlight.

Now, in relation to this, while I was driving this evening on the way to pick Conne up from work, I happened to pass by a couple of vehicular mishaps involving jeepneys. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the most probable reason why these accidents occur is because, as some of you might agree, there are a lot of jeepneys plying our roads at night that have busted headlights, or even worse, deliberately don’t turn their headlights on! Do these guys have super vision or something? If they do, well, here’s some news for them, most of us ordinary drivers and pedestrians don’t!

I’m not sure what the statistics are, but by my own observation, I believe that one in four jeepneys travel our roads at night without any headlights on. Come on, if some of these negligent drivers can afford to dress up their jeeps in avant-garde art and spend a lot on ear-damaging sound equipment and funny(?) clown-laugh horn signals, then I think it would be easy for them to spend a small amount to have their lights fixed.

There ought to be a law on this. Or is one already existing? And what are our metro traffic enforcers doing about it? Nada! Nothing! WALA!

With the way things are being handled, we might as well be driving armored personnel carriers (APC’s) – a la Manila Pen siege tanks – to protect us from these rogue drivers.

Lock and load!

Is subscribing to cable TV really worth it? Sometimes it is, but most often it isn’t.

You see, it all starts with the way it’s marketed. You can see it everywhere. One of the marketing points being touted by competing cable TV providers is by stating how many channels they serve. In this case, the usual spiel would be for them to: 1) list how many channels they have; 2) list some of their well known programs such as HBO, Star TV and ESPN; and 3) list channels that are targeted for a specific demographic community (Chinese, Indian, Arab, Filipino, etc).

Not that this is bad in any way. It’s actually good – if you’re a motel or realty owner and plan to resell it, that is!

You see, the Pinoy Juan’s instinctive reaction to these ads is to see which deal offers more bang for the buck. He does this by computing for the effective cost per channel by dividing the subscriber’s monthly subscription fee over the number of channels they offer. So if Cable Provider A offers a monthly cost of Php 600 for 60 channels, and Provider B offers a monthly cost of Php 700 for 80 channels, then the cost per channel of each provider would be as follows:

Provider A: Php 600 / 60 channels = Php 10 per channel
Provider B: @ Php 700 / 80 channels = Php 8.75 per channel

At first glance, this makes Provider B the better deal. And so Juan opts for Subscriber B. He even pats himself on the back for making such an astute choice, only to find out later on, to much consternation, that he might have ended up with a lemon.

You see, everything changes once the subscription starts. Why? Well, for starters, of the 80 channels, half of which use foreign language. Of the remaining 40, roughly half of this is pretty much useless stuff such as virtual aquariums, flight scheds, race results and the like. So what’s left? Oh, just about a dozen or so local VHF/UHF channels that could be seen even without cable, and about 7 or 8 channels that are good enough (at least until they start showing re-runs for the duration of the month’s program schedule) for viewing.

Juan suddenly feels gypped. He just spent 700 bucks for a measly 7 watchable channels on top of the local ones – that’s a hundred bucks per channel!

Don’t you ever wonder why won’t cable companies just sell us channels of our own choosing, a la carte style, instead of the unpalatable smorgasbord gunk of what they call intelligent programming.

Oh well, just imagine what Juan would do if it were his day off or he called in sick. You can almost picture him either catching up on a good read or just snoozing the day off.