What is it with stardom?

Ate is now, as of present time, a BLOOMER. And what is a BLOOMER? A BLOOMER, my friends, is someone who is an enthusiastic disciple of THE BLOOMFIELDS.

I've never really understood how some people can be groupies. As in, follow the band around, be friends, get backstage invites and the privilege of being protected from the backstage bouncers. I've often wondered how I'd act around a band that I was crazy about. Probably I'd be too starstruck to even ask for a picture, let alone doggedly follow them around. I shun talking to "stars" (well, not that the chance comes by that often)-- I think I might make a bad conversationalist. If you talk to someone you admire, of course you can't really say anything else except how good they are when they do their thing. Most likely this is going to come out in an excited rush, topped off by a fan girl squeal and glittering eyes and nimble fingers reaching for that camera button. But who wants to be treated like that 24/7? It does get awkward after a while (according to my imagination's theory), because if you don't run out of exasperatingly redundant compliments (that most likely everyone else is tired of), you're now faced with the problem of talking to them in the setting of Real Life. Meaning, how you talk to anybody else. That's one thing I crack my head thinking about. I know it's supposedly simple but-- oh bugger. I'm just not good at it.

I'd rather watch, thanks.

On a sidenote to this whole thing (my bland musings aside), I'm actually happy that Bloomfield groupies have a decent name. I thought they would be called FIELDERS (which is campy) or BLOOMIES (which, honestly, reminds me of flowery underwear worn by old ladies).

Since I am on this topic already, one other thing that often had me wondering was how bands with hopelessly unconvertable names cope with it. Cueshe didn't have much of a problem with that one-- they just forced an '--ean' on the end of their name: we now hereby declare this legion of ardent fans as... CUESHEANS!!! Awkward stressing, and it's damn fugly, if I may say so.

I haven't heard Orange and Lemons' groupie name. Nor Bamboo's. Nor Mayonnaise's, nor Kwjan's... Come to think of it, there are a lot of unconvertable band names. *shrug* Maybe I'm just unimaginitive with these things.

I'd like to discuss that interesting topic of band groupie names a little further, but that's a story for another time. I need research.

Some people have too much time on their hands.

I tried cleaning out my spam-swamped email account a while ago. I love the bulk section. Just one click and --whee!-- everything flushes down the virtual toilet. I sometimes look through it though, just for kicks, and the material it has is so NUTTY, it's awesome! It's random! It's fantastic! Most of it doesn't make sense, but it sounds smart, hahaha.

Here are some email subjects I got. Sometimes they're sentences...

-The desire to have children is a barrier to protection
-Asbjorn Lonvig for sale
-One in every ten people in the world live on an island (come to think of it-- hey! I live on an island!)
-We are in Iraq as Iraqi doctors and union, building a union
-In the UK, News Corp has more unique visitors each month than Expedia

Sometimes, they're just wonderfully random words...

evocative gigantic
stint than conversant
italicize consumption
wiretap offspring
approachable misogyny
demotion merriment
weed (haha, anlabo)
tatty than trio

It's tatty, and it's more than a trio (although 'approachable misogyny' looks sensible enough). Where they come from, I don't know; the senders' names never repeat themselves. I think it's one of those email+name+gibberish generators, but what purpose it serves, I don't know. At least none of them have suspicious attachments. A bit of it is uncomfortably infiltrating my inbox, but deleting is quick, so no worries about being flooded there.
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Raul Gonzales has run off with his famous mouth again. After blaming Campbell for being stupid and uncareful and likely to be killed with the way she was acting (damn, she's dead, okay? Why would you say such a thing???), he now offers P10,000 to every barangay captain who could make 12-0 (in favor of Team Unity) possible.

How dare he.

HOW DARE HE.

The insolence of that man is just... appalling. And he has the balls NOT to call it vote-buying. Peter Cayetano immediately commented against this action, which Gonzales waved aside, saying that Cayetano had a wild imagination.

It is not vote buying because it is just a promise. There is no real action yet, therefore there is no violation. I heard someone on TV say that.

But even if it "wasn't", technically speaking, vote buying, this action is encouraging people to do exactly that. And why wait for a "real" violation to happen?! Why argue on the technicalities? You can call it anything you want, but it all boils down to this: it's a bribe for your votes. You can't call it anything more indignified than that.

Ode to THE COLD

Maybe I'm socially backward but am too insane to realize it. Sigh.

I never really did get people. As in minsan... hindi ko lang talaga sila gets. I thought friends were people who were warm and cheerful and sympathetic, even if they didn't want to be. I thought friends were supposed to be "the shoulder to cry on", "the wall to lean on", "the hanger to hang with", "the box of chocolates-which-you-never-know-what-you're-gonna-get"(okay, malabo yung isang yun), but aside from being the embodiment of every well-meaning cliche conceived in this language, they are supposed to just BE THERE. Regardless of distance. Or situation. Or ANYTHING at all!

They are FRIENDS. Doesn't that mean anything?

It means something to me! Why is it that whenever I give myself fully, I always end up on the losing side? I just want someone to look in my direction, squeeze my hand say it's all right to buckle down and sob into my pillow, to say that loneliness is a poverty which afflicts more human beings that I can imagine possible, and that it's not true people forget friends so easily. I just don't want to go through this paralysis alone; I just want someone to be there even when peple are snowblasting me in my face.

But if not...

Well then.

I just wish you'd tell me you've stopped being my friend, just so I won't have to think about you. At all.

"The SCI-FI Channel ruined my books!"- Ursula Le Guin

A Whitewashed Earthsea
by Ursula Le Guin (excerpt from article posted at http://slate.msn.com/id/2111107/ on December 16, 2004)

"On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities are. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the film, he's a petulant white kid. Readers who've been wondering why I "let them change the story" may find some answers here.

When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave me the standard status of 'consultant'—which means whatever the producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. My agency could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as though they genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when planning the film. They said they had already secured Philippa Boyens (who co-wrote the scripts for The Lord of the Rings) as principal script writer. The script was, to me, all-important, so Boyens' presence was the key factor in my decision to sell this group the option to the film rights.

Months went by. By the time the producers got backing from the Sci Fi Channel for a miniseries—and another producer, Robert Halmi Sr., had come aboard—they had lost Boyens. That was a blow. But I had just seen Halmi's miniseries DreamKeeper, which had a stunning Native American cast, and I hoped that Halmi might include some of those great actors in Earthsea.

At this point, things began to move very fast. Early on, the filmmakers contacted me in a friendly fashion, and I responded in kind; I asked if they'd like to have a list of name pronunciations; and I said that although I knew that a film must differ greatly from a book, I hoped they were making no unnecessary changes in the plot or to the characters—a dangerous thing to do, since the books have been known to millions of people for decades. They replied that the TV audience is much larger, and entirely different, and would be unlikely to care about changes to the books' story and characters.

They then sent me several versions of the script—and told me that shooting had already begun. I had been cut out of the process. And just as quickly, race, which had been a crucial element, had been cut out of my stories. In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers). A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned. When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence."

Oh Ursula, I share your anguish.

I hated the movie. Sometimes, you have this it's-so-bad-it's-actually-good kind of movies, but this one is just... BAD. It had a less than stellar script (full of horrific cliche one-liners delivered in a deadpan voice), chilllingly fake special effects, ineffective acting and a bad story. It's sacrilege! You can't treat Earthsea like that! Ah, piss on them. It's so disappointing for another book to convert to movie waste.

Remake! Remake!

Wanderlust

Wann wird das Licht mein Auge finden?

"When will my eyes find the light?"
"Soon, soon, youth, or never."

I haven't realized this before, but I'm actually consuming roughly 2 books per week. I've read The Hobbit for the SRP though I haven't answered the sheet yet. I hate answering sheets, particularly because I'm weak at those. Hmph.

I'm reading Violet Clay at the moment, by Gail Godwin. It's one of those random books with a good enough cover and large enough font size; thank goodness for that. I don't really feel like tramping through a book with ant-size text.
The book is pretty good, though one may get a little impatient at the author's style of moving the story forward, then doing chapters of flashbacks to conveniently provide the backstory. There's actually little happening in the present timeline, but I think the value of the book lies in the fact that the character has so much feeling. It's hard to explain, but I'm connecting with her startlingly well. Portrait of an Artist Without Direction. That could also be me.

I hate stagnation. It puts me out of shape. I can't even gather my thoughts properly now, neither could I organize it into orderly paragraphs!

Stagnation makes me ramble.

Boo.

But then this is my writing space. Maybe I could even say this pointless wandering and rambling on is some sort of abstract writing style that I can own somehow. Wait, that would be terrible. I'd hate to own this mediocrity.
---

I was looking at a back issue of Preview magazine about some days ago. The price of those designer things are appallingly overkill. There is something obscene about advertising those P55,000 designer shoes or P47,000 designer bags while a million people in the Philippines are dying of hunger. I swear, there really is something wrong with that, but I can't put my finger on to what it is. Maybe you could help me, and then we'd write to them and ask them why.

I wonder if they feel any satisfaction with their jobs. It's so sickeningly worldly.

Since we're on the subject of sickening things anyway, I'd also add that Philippine news shows (particularly on the leading networks) are degenerating more and more into a muckier version of themselves. The way they sensationalize and dramatize things, plus that loud exaggerated narrating voice is getting so obnoxious!!! I hate it! It's like watching an indecent tabloid. What's worse, they do all these pakitang-gilas announcements about being true to public service. Grrrr. I wonder if public service includes getting the latest scoop on bikini contests and which young starlet has decided to go bold. They aren't even delivering news anymore. It's like... entertainment + talk show + features + Manny Pacquiao + nonsense. Argh. I just hate it. They're not helping the masses intellectually, and I'm always more confused by the end of these things.

Everything about them is irrelevant. Nakakainis.

Wunderkind

I haven't forgotten this.

Dreadfully behind though.

I think I poked Sab's eye with my hair. Do birds get blinded by that? It makes me feel uneasy to see her close that eye for such a long time. Eep.