Cartoon from The New Yorker.

To extricate oneself from a sticky situation, suicide is literally the last resort. A person in full possession of all his faculties would naturally hesitate to resort to what has been called a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But there are people and cultures who look upon self-annihilation as a viable option in order to save some vestige of one’s honor. The Japanese are of course well-known for this. Seppuku or ritual suicide is a means not only of recovering some terminal self-respect and atoning for one’s misdeeds. It can also be aimed at shaming a morally bankrupt system to change. This is what spurred Buddhist monks to immolate themselves publicly and dramatically during the Vietnam war. Japanese novelist and ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima thought he could do this too but only succeeded in killing himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Although it won’t be coming from me.

It’s hard to generate any sympathy for a jerk who has been gifted with so much, in the looks (obviously, as those he bedded are as comely as they come) and brains (he’s an M.D. after all) department, yet has thrown it all away for a few destructive and less-than-cheap thrills. Dr. Kho is proof that moral depravity and plain dumb-ass (those who have seen the videos know that I mean this literally) imbecility cuts across professional boundaries. Somehow this makes us lawyers feel better. Read the rest of this entry »

To weigh in belatedly on the Chip Tsao brouhaha, the piece was indeed limp satire. Nevertheless, it’s still painful in that it is uncomfortably too close to the truth. That’s why it raised a lot of hackles.

But are we missing the bigger picture ? Carl, commenting on Manolo’s blog post, correctly points out:

Chip Tsao is a nobody. A trying-hard writer who really doesn’t make the grade. Besides, I am not very fond of the caustic Chinese sense of humor. All this outrage about Chip Tsao will soon pass. And Chip Tsao will continue to be a Z-list writer.

The most important question for me is, after this furor dies down, will we become less of a nation of servants? When one sees those Filipino domestics congregating in public in Hong Kong, it does seem to project that image of our country. For many Chinese, who don’t know better, that is the image they have of the Philippines. I have also noticed how it makes many upper-class Filipinos uncomfortable, preferring to turn another way. They would much rather not be lumped along with those domestics.

I would rather focus my indignation on those who were responsible for making our country a nation of servants. Why are our people fleeing in droves, happy to just be domestics in another country?

Read the rest of this entry »

Apart from the expected loss of jobs, drop in consumer spending, deflation and usual run-of-the-mill outcomes arising from the worldwide recession, there are other trends which may prove interesting to the idle observer. And their numbers are certainly growing everyday.

The hard times will of course impact fashion. Amando Doronila wrote a recent piece on the rise and fall of women’s hemlines which mirror the bleak global economic outlook. Expect a less flamboyant look for the coming year and for so long as the downturn continues. A more muted and conservative image would be in keeping with the difficulties we all face. Read the rest of this entry »