Cardboard Omelette

After tens of thousands of flight mileage, I finally got airsick on one flight back home two days ago. There was this new inflight program on the cabin screens which had a live video feed coming from a camera right in front of the hull of the plane while it was in transit. It was like being strapped to your seat to watch a flight stimulator with the maneuvering at the mercy of the pilot. And what made it wonderfully nauseous was that you could now both see and feel the plane shake to the turbulence.

The night before I drank about 6 bottles of beer with imer at superbowl, but it wasn’t a big deal since I have taken the plane a lot of times with alcohol on my head the night before but I feel pretty great up in the plane, heck I even drink a lot on board international flights. I woke up that morning around 8 with a good head start, I wanted to go back to sleep since I didn’t have much to do for that morning, but anyway I got hooked to the saturday morning cartoons for another hour or so. I had a terrible breakfast after that, I went to this coffee shop about 2 blocks from my hotel, I ate this mushroom omellete that tasted like cardboard and looked like live coral slapped with a hell lot of butter underneath it. I ordered that crap since I got fooled by the picture on the menu that the omellete was being served with brewed coffee with a big 55 bucks sign underneath it, only to find out that there was a smaller line on the bottom quoting that meal would actually cost 75 bucks if it did came with coffee. And the fat guy who took my order kept calling me sir, which sounded pretty phony coming from somebody who looked crummy and like he was just pulled right out of bed. He asked me if I wanted donuts to go with my already terrible breakfast, I refused but he had to ask me all over again, like he couldn’t get my freaking no into his dumb head. I had to ask for a glass of water to drive this guy away, and I seriously need water to flush the omelette down my throat. I would have some crap to disgorge anyway if I did throw up for being airsick on my flight later that afternoon.

Today is valentines day, almost all of our employees psychologically wore the shade of red to work, because of that fuzzy feeling of love or hopes about spending today with somebody. I just wore a plain empty white shirt and I worked the day away and spent the rest of the night alone in my desk writing and drinking some beers. Happy Valentine's Day anyway.

Lenten Indulgence

Christianity is perhaps the most domineering religion across the globe, it has convinced people of its institution regardless of their culture, including chinese. And last Wednesday these chinese christians were about to see their faith clash with tradition.

Last wednesday was the chinese lunar new year which was also coincidentally Ash wednesday for christians. The chinese new year is always welcomed with a lot of great food on the dinner table, while ash wednesday is contradictingly a day of fasting and self-restraint to simple rations to mark the season of lent. For chinese christians, it was a decision between indulgence or abstinence.

Days prioir to the event, priests and bishops under a chinese-christian order in the country finally agreed to waive the chinese from their obligation to fast so they can celebrate the more significant lunar new year better by feasting, only at the condition of doing acts of charity towards humanity such as giving food to the poor as an alternative for fasting.

What about abstinence and penitence?

By giving an exemption to fast, it connotes that this religious fasting is merely a human decree, that its obligatory act only rests upon the choice of men. And with a circumstance such as the lunar new year enough to warrant a non-observation of fasting, it might be soon enough when somebody can figure out a justification to totally ignore fasting, say when everybody goes through the atkin’s diet therapy.

And in fact there is another reason not to be fasting on ash wednesday: that for being poor shall also have the privilege of an exemption, for it can be read through the lines that they were even to receive great food this ash wednesday by virtue of the charity due for chinese-christians in celebrating the lunar new year.

Dawn of the Chicken

I took the plane to the manila first thing in the first morning of the year of the chicken. I didn’t bring much luggage on this flight, so when I landed in manila, I just took the jeepney (a cheap public transport) to my hotel.

My Hotel was down in chinatown and the lunar new year brought forth dozens of lion dancers with a couple of segmented dragon marionettes to screw up traffic. En route to my hotel, I took the last hundred meters on foot since I felt like watching the lion dance up close. The essence of having lion dances is that when these mascots come prancing into your shop, enterprise or whatever business on new year’s day, it is supposed to rake in good luck and fortune to the place. Heck the only people getting any luckier on that day are those people under the lion suits, since the only way to get these mascots to prance into your place is by hanging a red sachet with cold cash inside for the lions to “eat”. No wonder the streets of chinatown are crawling with cash eating lions, the practice itself has proven to be so lucrative that people from other walks of life are joining the pride, including those who should be fasting in the first place.

We hanged some cash filled red sachet back home in our shop. Our employees told me by phone that it did attract one lion into our shop, but we hanged the envelope way up high in the ceiling on purpose that the duo in the lion suit had to take one guy on his shoulders to grab the sachet. It was well worth their stunt anyway.

Sunderban Man Eaters

My parents took the first flight to manila yesterday morning at 7:00. Around 5:30 I was already up having coffee watching the national geographic channel on cable tv. The feature for that hour was these man-eating tigers of India.

Most tigers in India do not hunger for man flesh often, only on certain occasions when they are overcome by the urge or as in most cases the cats are in a sick or disturbed state that they eat so. Researchers believe that the tigers must have learned not to mess with homo sapiens the hard way a century ago when India was still a british colony. Tiger hunting season was opened and it brought in Briton game hunters to India in a tiger-killing spree. Today inland tigers must have disregarded man flesh as some sort of a dangerous delicacy eaten at the risk of their own survival.

But in the sunderban delta of the eastern Indian coastline, the tigers in this particular place are still on top of the food chain and still has man flesh listed on is regular diet.

A lot of researches tried to explain this predatory behavior of the sunderban tigers against the homo sapiens. In short they came up with a few explanations.

• The sunderban area was spared from last century’s tiger massacre. No man ever bossed around these big cats and now with preservation laws at their side, the whole human population is now at the tiger’s disposition.

• Bears hanging around in upstream rivers are used to eating salmon. Crocodiles living in African rivers are used to eating drowned wildebeests. Tigers in the sunderban rivers are believed to have been used to dining in drowned human corpses. India is hit by cyclones so often that these rivers are always flowing with drowned corpses, and most Indian rivers find their way back into sea at the sunderbans. But of course tigers love a fresh catch rather than something that has been drowned for days.

• Tigers flash urine on key places to mark their territory (fascinating on how distinctive each of their urine smells). Since the sunderbans mangrooves are always overflowing. The smell is always washed away and the only way to defend their territory is through aggression.

• Salt water. The sunderban mangroves are close to sea that tigers wading in the mangroves drink too much salt water. Thus the hunger for man flesh (remember not to put too much salt in your soup).

Anyway, in a desperate attempt to counter the aggression of the tigers, the people of the sunderban wear masks with imposing human faces, but interestingly wear them backwards. Observations show that the big cats are backstabbers and are more likely to strike preemptively. By wearing masks backwards, such a distraction will confuse the tigers.

Oh how soon did the tigers outsmart such a ploy.

But the reverse mask tradition lives on.

“When they started wearing masks backwards, it scared the stripes out of everybody thinking it was an mental epidemic like the mad cow or something. Til I caught one yesterday and it still tasted pretty much the same.”