Pounding The Keyboard

"Komiks? Meron pa ba niyan?" --Ruben R. Marcelino, former Komiks Writer Last Friday, 18th of December, me, KC Cordero , Randy Valiente and Ronald Tabuzo met in Quezon City. Randy, finally, was able to hand me the complimentary copy of his Pinoy Komiks Rebyu. If you love local comics, (especially the ones created by GASI and Atlas eons ago) and its artists, you’re going to love Pinoy Komiks Rebyu. It is very informative and very entertaining. Interesting interviews with writers Ofelia Concepcion and Ruben Marcelino can be read in its first issue. Randy publishes it with Fermin Salvador, another former komiks writer back when GASI and Atlas still rule the local comics world. Its roster of contributing writers includes me, KC, Arman Francisco and Jose Mari Lee . You can find copies of the magazine at the following outlets: branches of Comics Odyssey, Popular Bookstore in Tomas Morato, QC. Nameless Shop and Monkeyman, both in Recto, Manila (near Sogo Hotel, Randy’s favor...

Last Sunday, December 6, my brother, a brother-in-law and a cousin, for want of better things to do, dragged me to Carmona, Cavite, the home of San Lazaro Leisure Club, the foremost racetrack in the Philippines today. The racetrack had been there for many years now but it was only our third time to the place. We arrived at around one thirty in the afternoon and quickly found out that the food there remained priced exorbitantly. The club was packed with not only the racing program-wielding kareristas but also with their families (their wives and their small children). It was the day of Presidential Gold Cup, the biggest and most prestigious event in Philippine horseracing—the prize money for the winner was a whopping two and a half millions pesos, and one of the horses running in that event was owned by the boss of my brother-in-law. The Presidential Gold Cup ran at around five in the afternoon and was won by a superhorse named Don Enrico, the favorite horse in the race, beating ...

Last week, an LBC delivery man knocked on our door, bringing me a magazine and a comic book. Since LBC men are famous (or infamous) for their spelling wizardry (they even made a TV commercial showcasing this skill), I put the delivery man to test. “Spell hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia ,” I challenged him. He smiled condescendingly, “It’s easy, it’s spelled L-B-C,” and off he flew on his motorcycle. The magazine he brought me was ASAP! a magazine solely, I think, distributed in England. I wrote a few articles in its first few issues while the comic book was KC Cordero’s Comicspotting, which contained fours stories, three of them illustrated and one in prose. All four stories are very good but my favorite is Kriminal! , a story of a delinquent who after being mishandled by a petty thief cunningly provoked two crooked cops into avenging him—cruelly and unintentionally. It is one of those stories I wish I had written myself.

"Manny picked a wrong man to fight for a seventh wold championship..." ---Miguel Cotto Manny Pacquiao keeps enthralling not only the Filipino people but also the whole world. Who would’ve thought that this pugilist who began fighting at 106 lbs more than a decade ago would grab a welterweigth (141-147 lbs) title in style? Yesterday, he demolished Miguel Cotto—said to be one of the finest welterweight fighters to grace the sport—in an awe-inspiring fashion that made his fellow Pinoys breathless and proud. At the packed moviehouse where we watched the thoroughly exciting –at least up to the eight round; Cotto did nothing but run and backpedal at the later rounds—fight, the audience would scream and shriek with delight with every landed Pacquiao punch while there’d always be a collective nervous gasp whenever Cotto would connect. We arrived at the mall at nine in the morning and the fight ended at past two in the afternoon (the supporting bouts were quit...

I wasn’t able to attend the Komikon last month that was held in SM Mega Mall, which resulted in me not getting my complimentary copy of my friend Randy Valiente's Pinoy Komiks Rebyu where I wrote a little article. I also failed to buy some comics/books which I was intending to feature/review here in my blog. We were planning to attend the said occasion but a series of unfortunate events derailed it. I’ll probably just hunt those materials someplace else. Much to my chagrin, a few more unfortunate events occurred, some of them had catastrophic effects that would be felt not just by me but by the whole nation. Two weeks ago, my computer monitor broke down. When I turned it on that fateful morning, it emitted an ear-piercing sound like it was going to explode so I jumped out of the window. Luckily, it didn’t blow up. It was my emaciated wallet which blasted when I bought a replacement—a Samsung LCD. A few days after that and it was our stereo/DVD player’s turn to collapse...

For few days now, my sister had been trying to empty our closet and it really wasn’t hard to do since we really didn’t have many clothes (the last time I bought a new shirt was, ahmm, wait... Fidel V. Ramos was still president). My sister was looking for clothes to donate to Typhoon Ondoy’s victims. They say it was a flood of biblical proportion, it’s just that Noah or his ark was missing. Our place in Manila wasn’t really affected—thank God— but that fateful Saturday, the cell phones in the house wouldn’t stop beeping and ringing. Some friends and relatives were asking for help because the flood was threatening to sweep them to kingdom come and since nobody in the house could fly, we weren't really of help. “Every one who can afford to give must give,” my ever charitable sister said as she was taking a peek at my empty wallet. And I wholeheartedly agree with her. “Give” is the word these days and everyone should spread it. And it is heartening to know that a lot of Pinoys kno...

I was up to my neck in work lately and I wasn’t planning to update this blog site when I stumbled upon this tragic news on the internet. In that senseless tragedy, a man was killed because he didn’t know the Korean song “Nobody.” Witnesses said that one of the four suspects was singing “Nobody” (by Wonder Girls) when the victim approached him and asked naively, “Pare, ano ‘yang kinakanta mo?” I asked a friend to tell me more about the news and he said that according to the newspaper he read, the suspects first thought that the victim was just joking but they were all aghast, one of them even trembled, when they realized that the victim didn’t really know the song. What kind of a man is this? the suspects murmured to themselves. The suspects probably thought that since the victim didn’t know the song, he didn’t deserve to live. My friend added that every Filipino who heard about the news was appalled, not with the brutal killing but the victim’s ignorance about the song. ...