Pounding The Keyboard

      Today is Chinese New Year but one of the first few posts that rolled out of my Facebook Newsfeed this morning was this Valentine’s Day-worthy GMA NEWS Video of two unusual lovers . Theirs is one of the strangest love stories you will come across with (probably as peculiar as the love story in the movie The Shape of Water —okay, probably not, my bad).       But it is really unusual, so unusual that at first, I thought it was just scripted to amuse—but it’s apparently real.       He, a small businessman, was 28 when he first saw her, and she, a vegetable vendor who went house to house, was 71. That’s a ginormous 43 years age gap and it was the woman who was older. Okay, I am probably being chauvinistic here, but it’s really more acceptable when the man is older. But he fell in love with her and wooed her, and naturally, his family objected.   They told him to find a younger woman, prob...

2017's history and it is our duty to commemorate it. Here are some of my favorite things that came out or I discovered in the year 2017: Movie Get Out Album Is This The Life We Really Want? Song The Most Beautiful Girl In The World Book Mga Kuwento Sa Dilim Food Pik A Pikel Pickled Mangoes Drink Clipper Organic Tea TV Show Black Mirror So there, the basic necessities in life. Get Out is a fantastic and a highest-grossing horror-thriller movie that deals with racism while Black Mirror is an awesome Twilight Zone -ish series which episodes deal with modern technology and mankind's dependency on it. Is This The Life We Really Want? is the fifth studio album of former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters while "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" is a haunting track from it.  Mga Kuwento Sa Dilim is a little horror book that contains true supernatural stories, Pik A Pikel Pickled Mangoes is a great-tasting delicacy and ...

       Manny Pacquiao immediately fought again after announcing his retirement and so did Floyd Mayweather. Pink Floyd quickly regrouped again after announcing their disbandment—so it’s probably not too embarrassing if I continue this blog after announcing its end.   Moral of the story? Never make a decision when you’re drunk. Lol.        Anyway, I just want to share this little anecdote involving our family’s current apple of the eye, my 17- month old nephew named Julian.   My sister’s family was in our house last week and I was tasked to babysit Julian.   My nephew   still couldn’t speak except for the obligatory “Dada!” “Mama!” and “Papa!”   “Dada,” incidentally, is my family’s pet name for me. So there was our boy,   in our living room, busy with his toys, when suddenly, a Lego piece slipped from his hand and fell to the floor, causing the collapse of his tower. He looked at the toy, shook hi...

A gentle college boy accidentally met a young, enticing female stranger. They had drugs and kinky sex in her house, and when he awoke the next morning, still reeling from the drugs he had taken the night before, he found her dead. She had been stabbed repeatedly. College boy, accused of killing her, went to jail and an eczema-stricken lawyer, sleazy but sympathetic, defended him. While incarcerated, naive college boy became a hardened drug addict and an accessory to a murder. Meanwhile, the trial to determine his innocence or guilt continued...        Not the most original of plots, but The Night Of, HBO’s limited crime-drama series which starred Riz Ahmed and John Turturro, stood out because of how it presented its story—the critically-acclaimed, eight-episode series was dark, realistic, depressing and gritty.   The satisfying season finale aired a few days ago. Its last shot was fascinating: the lawyer going out of his flat to m...

       Season 6 of Game of Thrones has ended and a lot of fans are saying that it is probably the best season of the show, owing to the strength of its last two episodes, Battle of the Bastard s (Ep 9) and The Winds of Winter (Ep 10, Season Finale). There’s a word that best describes these two episodes: stunning. It bolsters my suspicion that TV, really, was invented for Game of Thrones.        Battle of the Bastards features a mind-blowing battle (see fantastic GIF above) between Ned Stark's bastard, Jon Snow and his wildlings-fortified army and Roose Bolton's bastard, Ramsay Bolton and his soldiers. And yes, Ramsay Bolton finally dies in this episode, but not in the battlefield. Sansa feeds him to his dogs, which is a far more fitting death for this repellent character.        The Winds of Winter is literally an explosive episode. It is here where Cersei unleashes her villain...

       Two Filipino (film and TV) directors recently passed away—both suffered a heart attack and now, a lot of their colleagues are saying that the culprit for their aggravated health conditions is “the horrible working hours and conditions in television.”        I worked briefly as a TV writer (for teleserye /soap operas) and I can attest to the fact that, indeed, you’ll be eating, drinking and breathing stress—mental and physical—in this job. 24-hour brain wracking meetings aren’t really unusual while the regular meetings which often start at noon usually last after midnight. Meetings are often held in a room teeming with caffeine, unhealthy snacks and second-hand smoke and discussions are often intense that without you knowing it, while you’re busy spewing out the reasons why it’s not good for your show’s main character ( a tough NBI agent) to die from rabies after being bitten by a puppy after surviving two pl...