Snacking with Adel

(First published 0n 09/09/2009 12:11 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

In our country, buying a computer system is a weird concept—it means buying hardware. Period.

Yes, I can imagine you agreeing and nodding your head. So why is that weird again? It’s weird because that’s just half the purchase. A computer system is hardware and software. One doesn’t work without the other. And the last time I checked, most software isn’t free.  It isn’t?

The conflict is rooted in the old-fashioned belief that if it isn’t tangible, if it isn’t a material thing, it’s hard to ascribe any financial value to it. It’s the whole crux of the concept of intellectual property. Pay for software? Really pay for it, not get pirated copies in the basement of Makati Cinema Square for P90 each? Why? It’s not like they’re processors, or RAM, or hard disks, or flat-screen monitors or gaming video cards or anything real like that. It’s just …software! Pakopya na lang!

People in most third-world countries have this deep-set idea that software is an afterthought, an accessory for the computer, and consequently should come “free” with the hardware. (Sure, open source is nice, but face it, the good stuff is in the commercial apps.) With branded computers it’s factored into the cost. But that makes the whole package expensive so we just assemble our own and get the software from MCS, or borrow installers from the office geek.

Fact is, hardware and software are often separate commercial enterprises, and hence separate purchases, with software often costing more. And to a lot of people the idea of “one copy, one install” is patently ridiculous and impossible to swallow. What? Whaddaya mean one per computer? I bought one already! Ok na yan for the whole company!

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(First published 0n 08/12/2009 12:56 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

A friend of mine loudly expressed a considerable amount of cynicism about a line in my first column, when I wrote about the things this space will be about that went, “Less often, we buy something so phenomenally wonderful that we turn into evangelists for the damn things.”

Do such things still exist, she asked? In this world of poor quality control, shortsighted vision, substandard materials, programmed obsolescence, uninspired innovation, cost-cutting and lack of originality, do “phenomenally wonderful” products still get made?

Great question, really. Conventional knowledge says, after endless disappointment, empty promises and overstated advertising, we’re hard pressed to think of something, anything so good that it’s worth that most mythical of appellations “A Good Buy.”

As the nature of things in commerce go, I will certainly have a surfeit of things to bitch about here in the future, but as often as humanly possible I would like to write something positive in this space rather than negative. In point of fact, I recently came in possession of such a rare creature: an espresso maker.

No, not a shiny European steampunk copper contraption with bells and whistles and hissing valves that cost as much as a new car and requires two semesters of barista training and weeks of tamping practice to make coffee. It’s an inexpensive hand-operated plastic-and-rubber gizmo made by an American company that makes frisbees, but a gizmo that brews coffee better than nearly anything else on the planet.

It’s called the Aeropress, invented in 2005, made by a company called Aerobie, which makes toys. The official name on its birth certificate is the Aerobie Aeropress Coffee & Espresso Maker. The device it comes closest to is a French Press, but that would be like calling McGyver a handyman.

What it does look like is a big fat syringe. It’s a thick and tough transparent polycarbonate tube with a big polycarbonate plunger with a rubber stopper at one end. You put ground coffee in the tube, add hot water, mix it up, stick the plunger in, and push the mixture through a paper filter at the end where the needle would be if this were a real syringe, straight into a mug. A perfect espresso, without fuss or French horns.

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(Warning: Here there be spoilers.)

During the scene of Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup)’s first full-on appearance as Dr. Manhattan, at the lab cafeteria where he manages to reconstitute himself days after being blasted apart by the Intrinsic Field Center, there was a crude, jarring and ham-handed jump cut in the movie, the first of many, and I thought, ok. So it was the blue penis that threw the MTRCB censors into apoplectic fits and made them cut up Watchmen. So are they going to censor every instance the big blue banana makes a screen appearance? If that was true, we were in for a lot of jump cuts.

It was just the one time, if it was even a cut; the blue banana made subsequent full frontal appearances unmolested by the MTRCB later on in the movie, to uncontrolled giggling of largely juvenile audiences. (I suppose these are the same people who giggle at the UP Oblation every time they pass by the statue in the Diliman campus.)

Apparently the MTRCB’s major trims were reserved for the backseat action in Nite Owl’s ride, between Patrick Wilson’s and Malin Akerman’s masked heroes (and apparently, we discover, Nite Owl performs better in costume that he does in civilian garb.)

Unsurprisingly, there were no trims for the graphic double arm amputation scene at Rorshach’s cell, or the dogs fighting over the partially eaten shin bone and still-shoe’d foot of the murdered and mutilated little girl, or the goodfella intestines hanging off the ceiling of the club courtesy of Dr. Manhattan. I was especially taken aback by The Comedian’s exceptionally brutal and vicious attempted rape of Silk Spectre.

Loving, passionate sex always trumps unflinching, graphic violence, as always. So snip snip snip. No gratuitous sex! Gratuitous violence, yes, but sex? No frakkin’ way. (But that’s a ranting for some other post. Like my mother-in-law loves to say about most things in life, what can we do?)

A large part of the adult nature of the material is precisely that unflinching violence, present in the graphic novel, and front and center in the movie. It is this violence that sets it apart from even the already sobering and serious tone of The Dark Knight. This is the nasty stuff. The bone-crunching, flesh-rending kind of brutality more at home with recent gore porn like in the Saw series of films. Viewers looking for pop-culture superhero-ness in the vein of Iron Man or Hulk will be in a for a surprise. This is a comic-book movie?

But Zack Snyder’s stylized treatment puts a glamorous veneer over the violence of Watchmen, and the slow motion stop-starts of the action make the fighting less draining and somehow exhilarating. The Dolby punctuation of the teeth-jarring punches and the juxtaposition of incongruous, yet appropriate music makes for exquisite contrast. I will never listen to “Unforgettable” in the same way ever again.

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Watching the Sci-Fi Channel “reality” series Ghost Hunters has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s really a ridiculous show, about real-life ‘ghost hunters’ or paranormal investigators who are just regular folk off-cam. Like Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes of Rhode Island, who are plumbers during the day, and unschooled, pseudo-scientific ghost-busting hobbyists at night, who somehow managed to get their own TV show on a major cable network. They go around the US, investigating cases of hauntings, stumbling and tripping around old creaky houses in the dark as a camera crew follows them and the rest of their team.

Most of their results are cases of wishful thinking, evidence that is more fanciful than definitive. Mumbled audio noise that they claim to be Electronic Voice Phenomena are actually dubious and ambiguous digital burps. Grainy video of ghosts are floating patches of mist. Blurry pictures of spooky shadows that are just dark spots thrown by objects in the house. Moving lights are car beams from outside. Mostly they just do a good job of scaring each other, and, hopefully in the process, us. To be fair, every so often they come across something genuinely weird, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

The show’s been on for a few seasons, and a large community of gullible, fiercely loyal fans have sprung up from the woodwork. The show is the highest rated on the SciFi Channel. It’s hard to find fault with the hosts, as they seem to be genuinely nice, sweet guys who are sincere about their work, if misguided. Stupid show, to call a spade a spade; I once posted a long list of reasons why the show was ludicrous on Twitter, stuff like, why do they have to do the investigations at night, with the lights off? I largely find them incoherent, but strangely irresistible, and I watch what I can.

But they’ve gotten so popular that a spin-off has been made—Ghost Hunters International, featuring an equally earnest, multinational team that traipses around the world doing the same stuff Grant and Jason do, only with a bigger playing field. This other team has been all over the planet, checking out spooky places in Russia, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, France, England, etc.

I figured, hey, one of these days come on over to the Philippines, and we’ll show you spooky. We got great mumos here.

So to my surprise, I got this week’s GHI episode, s01e20, and was greeted by this opening shot:

Is that… Baguio? Are those jeepneys? And isn’t that Burnham Park to the right?

WTH?

When did this happen?

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