Holy Cheese

I was watching CNN over lunch today when they featured this odd little item which took in a fortune at an auction. It’s a piece of bread with cheese toasted for breakfast 10 years ago yielding burnt traces that resembled that of a woman.

That could be the image of any woman but for hardcore Christian believers, that woman is nonetheless the virgin mary who has the divine power to conjure up signs to deliver her messages, and til just recently delivered it in a more unusual package, say toasted bread with cheese.

She looks more like Madonna to me.

Go forth and gamble, and win thee shalt

"I think she protects me, I guess I'm lucky because of her, I've had a lot of wins at the casino." owner Diana dursey said. I suppose both its religious value and being a gambit's trinket made it cost so much at the auction.

I was thinking, what if the whole toasted bread miracle took place in our country, where devotion to faith is at the extremes. Since this is not corporate America, I tried to figure out possible events aside from an auction that would happen if somebody here did toast up the same cheesy miracle.

• The cheese toast will snag every headline on every local newspaper
• Nationwide pilgrimage to the kitchen of the cheese toast
• Construction of a church beside the kitchen
• Proclamation of Nuestra Senora de Queso or the Feast of our lady in the cheese
• Outbreak of more images of women in cheeses across the country
• Strange tales about the cheese curing blindness, lung cancer and hair loss from those who took a bite
• People in proximity to the cheese doing irrational acts such as hallucination, convulsions and emotional outbreaks

Certain Death

Slim chance for anybody to die on a plane crash. But I'm one heck of a jetsetter that I had a brush of this kind of excitement just recently.

I took the plane to manila Tuesday morning, I didn’t have much sleep the night before and I was already up 4 that morning. Upon taking my seat I the plane I dozed off like a log unmindful that the plane already took off, and if not for this loud blast that came somewhere from the left of the plane that woke me up. There was this smell of burnt metal inside the cabin and the passenger beside me was praying like hell while the others up front were turning their heads in a frenzy, all under a premonition of a plane crash. I was on the verge of probable death but I wasn’t the least tense about the situation, I looked like a drunkard the morning after, trying to straighten myself up (I did take a couple of shots of liquor the night before though) surrounded by nervous passengers.

Then this guy about 3 rows in front of me stood up and yelled at the stewardess in trembling english with something like “…didn’t you just smell it? You better tell the pilot right now that there was an explosion!”. This guy looked hell serious and he did put up quite a show up there. If there were any hijackers on board the plane, I’d bet this is the kind of person who would play hero and spring into action.

I turned back to the praying person beside me and I asked if he heard about that plane which lost its tailwing at touchdown in tacloban airport a week ago, hoping that tale would give more adrenalin to his prayers to heaven. But just like every denouement after the initial thrill, the excitement of having a plane crash soon faded. I went back to slumberland again til the plane landed in one piece in manila.

It was a great thing I was oblivious to the whole incident while on the plane, else I wouldn't have caught up with my sleep. And I needed my sleep so badly since I had a great deal of things to do and I have to take the plane again home the next day.

Streetball

I don’t think streetball would be the right term, Streetball would be better off defined as those unorganized and spontaneous basketball games in urban back alley courts. Last weekend, the neighborhood gangs held a basketball tournament using this wide open space which is unfortunately the road outside our house as their court. I think this is more of a traffic nuisance movement than a streetball game.

The road outside our house is one of the key roads around the city, two of the bigger downtown malls is connected to this road and a hospital right on the on the other end. It did piss a lot of motorist over the weekend for the trouble of going around another block just to let a bunch of punks play ball in the road.

Saturday night I waited for a friend to pick me up at our house to go have some beers. I stood outside our driveway waiting and watching the crowd the road court blockade brought. I felt some of them weren’t there for the thrill of the game, but rather for this triumphant mood of invading the road even just for a weekend. Seemed like a peasant uprising because its not everyday that these kind of people can have the glory of claiming the road for themselves.

Amidst complaints, the streetball roadblock was legally absolved because of some silly permit they got from the traffic police. I think it was plain ridiculous for the traffic police to give out such permits to mess traffic which is completely contradicting to their mandate. If they wanted to promote goodwill and friendship and all that crap and celebrate humanity through sports plus sore loser brawls after the game, there are a lot of other public ball courts around the city to herd these road raiders to play in. But hey isn’t what roads are for anyway? And they aren’t the traffic police for nothing.

Local Halloween

When does halloween fall? Really I dont know if it were on the 31st or 30th or before that. And it isnt much of a concern to me since it is not part of either our local culture or my chinese tradition. But a lot of urban people are still trying to introduce the idea of a halloween custom in this side of the globe with all those trick/treating in costumes and pumpkins that we cannot even grow in our own backyards. perhaps it can work out well as a marketing statement giving us a reason to put up a halloween sale or a halloween party on the weekend closest to the end of october, giving drunkards more reason than oktoberfest to go out and get drunk, and more reason for other people under the influence of an american invasion to go out and dress in silly costumes and for the rest of the people to laugh at.

I was at a mall lining up in a fastfood today for an afternoon meal when I saw some kids in costumes with their parents going around. I heard a mother whisper to her son to go over the fastfood counter and ask for candies. The boy managed to go over to the manager mindless of the crowd he just made and got some candies and returned to his mother bewildered of this whole routine he will be doing.

We do have a local holiday that seem too similar to halloween in some angle. Every Nov 1 we flock to the cemeteries and cherish our dead (sort of the day of our dead). But it doesnt come with costumes and pumkins but with candles and flowers, and for some suckers who must have gotten the eerie feeling of staying too long in the graveyard, fairytales of ghosts and undead who come to join the celebration. Such ideas must have linked our holiday with Halloween because of the concept of ghosts being around at this time of year, or perhaps a reason long used to introduce halloween into our culture.