Pounding The Keyboard

       Finale (Episode 13 of Season 6) of Better Call Saul aired a few days ago, capping off a truly brilliant (crime/drama) series, a worthy prequel to Breaking Bad  and a lot better than Ozark. T he scene I like most in the finale is the one ( a flashback) where Saul is asking Walter White on where he’d go if he’d stumble on a time machine. Walter (a high school science teacher) refuses to answer it on the ground that time travel is simply impossible. Instead, he says that a discussion about time machine is nothing but a conversation about regrets (and mistakes and the desire to rectify it). They then tell each other their biggest regrets.      Walter is of course right, time travel is impossible, that’s why movies about time machines and time travels are called fantasy films. So questions about where you’d go if you stumble on a time machine don’t need profound answers, just whimsical ones. So me, if ever I find a time machine, I...

       Sad News: Actress Anne Heche was declared brain dead on 11th of August after being severely injured in an accident fifth of August, 2022. Her heart was allowed to keep beating so her organs could be donated. Miss Heche, while under the influence of drugs, drove her car at high speed in a residential area and crashed into a house (it burned and the tenants were injured including the pets). Her filmography includes Six Days, Seven Nights (with Harrison Ford), John Q (with Denzel Washington) and a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho . She had been battling mental illness for years and was (sexually) abused by her (ironically gay) father (who died of AIDS) when she was a child. She was 53.      Very Happy News: The Humane Society of the United States is removing and rescuing around 4,000 beagles from a mass breeding facility in Virginia. The unfortunate dogs were being sold to laboratories for drug experiments. They were repo...

       There’s no doubt that the price of commodities are going up. Just yesterday, the dog food I could buy for 150 pesos had risen to 170, and the lechon manok I used to buy at 320 had jacked up to 340. And just this noon, I stumbled upon a beggar who beseeched me for loose change while I was walking in front of a church, so I scrambled for money in my pocket and came up with a shiny five-peso coin. I dropped it into her can and to my surprise, I saw her almost frowning, although she didn’t say anything. And I realized that five pesos is too small even for alms these days. Really, what could five pesos buy these days?   Let’s see, you can buy two pieces of pandesal with it, but that’s it, there won’t be butter on it, or peanut butter. And who eats pandesal without butter or peanut butter in it?      So I walked away from her embarrassed.      Then I remembered the beggar I saw on Facebook who earns six hundred...

       I stepped on the scale this morning and saw that I was officially grossly overweight.      Standing five feet four and weighing 165 pounds.      It was incredible how I gained so much weight in such a short time. Still, no surprise there, I had been binge eating almost every day. There were times, lots of times that I’d wake up in the wee hours just to eat. There’d always be cake and ice cream in the fridge. And those milk teas, French fries, burgers and beer. I’d stopped exercising; couldn’t recall when I last jogged. My bike now just gathered dusts at the corner of our house. I couldn’t do push-ups to save my life. I now refused to walk even for a short distance. At a mall, the first and last establishment I would enter would be a fast food restaurant. And at home, I’d just sit in front of either the TV or computer all day while eating snacks.     I was still at the scale when I felt somethi...