Unlike most people, I’ve always been fascinated by ads, and sometimes instead of tuning out, I actually sit down and focus more when the commercial break comes on. For me, ads are fun and educational, at least the first time you see them. When I’m abroad, I pay special attention to the TV not just to watch the shows, but to see what passes for advertising in that country.

I look for two major reasons. One, for the creative aspect. Making a commercial is the equivalent of writing a short story. Contrary to common sense, making something short, and making it good is much harder than making something long; the ability to convey many ideas and concepts and be stylish and artful at the same time is easy when you can do it at leisure, like in a 1000-page novel or a two-hour movie. To do the same thing in a three-page short story or a 30-second commercial is way harder to do by far.

The second reason is I like to find new ways to be effective in conveying the message, whether it be to sell a world-changing idea, or to sell panty shields. Being in the business, it’s of special interest to see how everyone’s doing (or not doing) it.

So now I’m going to ask you guys what seems like a totally unrelated question: How much toothpaste do you put on your toothbrush in the morning?

If we are to believe our TV ads, to make our breath fresh and our teeth sparkling white, we’d need to put a generous squeeze on that tube and create a long glossy couple of inches of paste stretching the length of the toothbrush, ending in a artsy upturned flourish at the end.

But think about it—how much is really enough?

A colleague of mine mentioned he’d gone to a workshop where they were taught how to make the most of their resources, and he mentioned that you actually just need a tiny amount of toothpaste to do the job. Just a little dollop, a tiny pea-sized lump on your brush can just as effectively make your breath fresh and your teeth sparkling white.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never bought into that consumerist myth of more is more. Instinctively, I knew I didn’t need that much damn toothpaste, and my whole life I had been squeezing pea-sized dollops from the tube. Not just because I wanted to scrimp and save and draw out as much use out of a tube of toothpaste as I can, but I felt a whole caterpillar-long amount was really excessive. And, I suspect, a lot of you do too.

Of course, the ads would show the pretty model squeezing out as much as she can fit on the brush. Traditionally, they’ve been squeezing with abandon since TV ads were invented. Of course it’s a no-brainer to realize they do this not only to make the shot look more attractive, but in the process increase consumer consumption, and subsequently increase sales. More is more.

So much for truth in advertising.

As far as the amount is concerned, according to the Chicago Dental Society, there is an actual word for the proper measurement. It’s nirdle, which means a very thin layer of paste roughly the length of the bristles on the toothbrush. A nirdle should be just right for that sparkly white teeth and fresher fresh breath.

Most resources say, in reality, toothpaste is just an aid in dental hygiene, and for adults, a simple dry brush and rinsing with water would be just as effective cleaning the teeth, while children and older people would do better with a wet brush. Additionally, just using dry or wet brushes without paste would reveal potential problem areas such as bleeding at the gum line, locations of which would be lost in all that foam in the mouth.

Admittedly children could be coaxed to brush more easily with the various pleasant fruity tastes of the toothpaste marketed for them (and more often than not would make them swallow rather than spit). But without supervision, children would tend to imitate what they see on TV and put that much on their brushes. The copious amounts shown in ads are certainly too much for kids, and their inadvertent swallowing would introduce excessive amounts of fluoride into their young bodies.

They can argue that toothpaste may have some cosmetic use as an abrasive whitener or breath freshener, but the abrasion would eventually erode the tooth enamel, and the alcohol in the freshener would dry the mouth. They can say it functions as a convenient delivery system to add fluoride, but since nowadays we get fluoride from drinking water, it’s largely superfluous. Additionally, research shows a lot of the other additives tend to be harmful in the long term.

In point of fact, it’s not even clear that toothpaste is as essential to dental hygiene as much as a toothbrush and water are, much less the question of how much toothpaste to use.

And the misleading ads aren’t confined to dental products.

You see models pour generous quantities of shampoo into their hands and massage it into their hair for gloriously rich, foamy lather. Looks great on TV, right? In truth, the recommended amount of shampoo is a tablespoon’s worth for long hair, even less that for short. Mix the amount into a bit of water and lather it into your hair. After shampooing, also know that using two teaspoons worth of conditioners is more than enough, otherwise it’ll weigh your hair down.

Two teaspoons would also be the right measurement for mouthwash when you gargle, not half a glass, and remember that next time when you’re at the beach, a shot glass worth of sunscreen should be enough to cover your whole body, not half the bottle.

We’ve all grown up with these ads on TV. Generations of us have gone through life accepting them as gospel truth because no one’s told us any better, so we never give them much thought. If we let them, manufacturers and advertisers will of course always try to get away with whatever they can. It’s the nature of the beast. I think it’s up to us to say when enough is enough.

You can write to Adel at Adel_Gabot-CTL@abs-cbn.com, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/adelgabot.

Who would have thought graphic, disturbing pictures, like those showing a dead fetus lying amidst cigarette butts, or gangrenous feet, or ugly, bleeding mouth sores, or throats bulging with massive red tumors or black lung tissue would be so widely distributed, and even legally mandated?

I’m talking about cigarette packaging, of course.

Those of you smokers who travel have seen these pictures on cigarette packs abroad. In Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, everywhere. These caring and enlightened governments have long ago made it a law that cigarettes packaging must carry graphic images of diseases and the effects of tobacco on our health, in an aggressive effort to scare people off smoking. The more graphic the pictures, the better to convince people to kick the habit.

Canada, which started doing this in 2000 with a picture of mouth cancer, is now contemplating upping the ante by putting the actual deathbed photos of anti-smoking activist Barb Tarbox, as she looked, emaciated, and withered just before her recent death from cancer.  Their research has shown that the photos elicit an even more intense response from smokers than the usual diseased body parts.

More recently, the United States, which had limited health warnings on cigarette packaging to a short, small text-only message from the Surgeon General on the side of the box, is now about to implement similar graphic pictorial warnings on 50% of the front and back of the pack. President Barack Obama, who is a smoker himself trying to quit, signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act last June 22 that imposes this law on tobacco companies, in addition to a cigarette “sin tax” he imposed in April that raised the tax from 39c to $1.01 per pack to discourage smoking.

I don’t smoke, and I never have, but my father, a soldier who fought in the Korean War and is a retired military officer smoked like a chimney when he was young and in the army. A two-pack-a-day Lucky Strike man, it nearly killed him, until he quit cold turkey. As a child, I remember sitting on his knee, fascinated by the smoke coming out of his mouth and nose, like it was some cool parlor trick, and thought to myself, when I grow up, I’m gonna do that too, yes I was. But I saw the agony he went through recovering, and then dealing with the withdrawal.  I never picked up a cigarette.

I first saw the disturbing graphics warnings on packs being sold in Singapore years ago, and I vividly remember the picture: a full-color shot of a dissected, diseased lung, all red and black, streaked with tar and nicotine. I wanted to gag. Man, that was horrible, I thought, but also thinking, what a ballsy way to get people to quit, and marveled at a government able to force the issue. If I smoked, I would’ve quit then and there.

It also occurred to me what a hell of a compromise that really was, and how it underscored how helpless they really were to do the right thing: outlaw smoking outright. That fact that governments had to stoop to stunts like these told me two things: one, how massively powerful the tobacco industry was, and two, how weak human will was—no, not in quitting smoking as a habit, but in dealing with the problem as a society.

Of course, I’m talking out of my ass here, not being a smoker myself, and I’ve been told passionately many times by my smoker friends how I could never really understand that will power had nothing to do with it. Ok, I respect that. But man, what is the power of this habit that you can still pick out a stick from a box festooned with gruesome photo evidence of the consequences and light up?

I am reminded of the story of a friend of mine, whose father, as much a smoker as someone can possibly be, had gotten so sick from it he had to undergo a quadruple heart bypass that plunged his family into debt. But the minute he got out of the ICU, he asked for cigarettes and snuck out of his room in his hospital gown, with tubes still up his arms and chest, to sneak a couple of smokes out back.

Sheesh. I’m glad I never learned.

So, how does one deal with a problem like this in an organized, systematic way? Two obvious solutions are to make it so expensive that they won’t be able to afford it and stop and/or show them how disgusting and dangerous it is by putting gruesome pictures on the product itself, right in their faces and scare them off it.

Unlike our Asean neighbors, our country’s entire program to discourage smoking consists of seven words in small type on the box: “Cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.”

So what do we do, slap on the gore? Might not work. I have a feeling pictorial warnings won’t wash here, with our overly sensitive and touchy populace. Besides, we love out vices, and denial is our favorite hobby. Gross pictures on my cig packs? I can already imagine the uproar. The other option is sin taxation.  It’s a big, rich mother lode. The two largest companies, Philip Morris and Fortune Tobacco, control 90% of the P85 billion annual business.

But hey, wonder of wonders, our government has finally seen the light! Inspired by the recent radical movies by other countries to finally curb the tobacco menace, we’re actually doing something too!

Just recently, our lawmakers recently began motions to substantially increase the excise tax for alcohol and tobacco. If they can get the law to pass, the Finance Department says it hopes to generate at least P20B in the first year of implementation, and P40B the following year. Great! They figure that it will ease pressure on the budget deficit, which is expected to hit a record P250B by yearend, and minimize our loans. The additional collection will also help fund infrastructure and support social services.

Huh?

That’s why we’re doing this? To pay off our massive debts by charging us more to kill ourselves?

For a minute there, I actually thought we were going to do something right. The entire thing is profit-motivated. I should have known. Not a single word about discouraging smoking. Not even a mention of the possibility, of the remote hope, that if they increased the cost of smoking, people would actually stop the filthy habit and lives would be saved. That it might, just might, make our world a better place. Instead, they’re computing how much money they’ll make.

Oh, man. That’s gotta be the most faithless, cynical and jaded thing I’ve heard yet.

This country is really going up in smoke.

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!

I can’t even begin to imagine the number of successful and otherwise honest and respectable enterprises running multi-million-peso businesses with “illegally obtained” or reused software here. And that most of them don’t even give the matter much thought. To be sure, there are deeper issues at play here – developers should use democratized and tiered pricing for third world markets, for one, to spur growth and level the playing field.

But hey, I’m rambling. I had meant to write about Apple’s update to their Mac OS X operating system, Snow Leopard 10.6, released last week a month ahead of schedule. And why, aside from being a great, inexpensive product, it’s also a step in the right direction for the industry. We’ll get to that a little later. Let’s talk briefly about Snow Leopard first.

It’s for Intel-chipped Macs only, of course. Officially called Mac OS 10.6, it retails for P1690 (US$29) only. Users looking for bells and whistles in Snow Leopard will be disappointed, because there’s not much new, really, and it looks and works the same as before.

So what’s the fuss? The fuss is, it’s been improved and tweaked to be a even better operating system, so it runs faster, more efficiently and more reliably than the already fast, efficient and reliable previous version Leopard—more than any modern-day OS has any right to, actually. Most of the changes are all under the hood, an improved Leopard. (I guess that’s why it was just named Snow Leopard, as opposed to something different, like Lion.)

So as not to bore you, let’s run through the new features quickly and just pretend we all understand them: the OS upgrade maximizes use of the existing hardware – it’s fully 64-bit now, and can address almost any amount of RAM you can throw at it; it uses multiple cores more efficiently, and even deputizes the usually idle but powerful graphic processors to do work with something called OpenCL; code has been optimized, streamlined and tweaked even more and routed more efficiently with GCD; homegrown apps like Safari, Finder, Mail, Address Book, iCal and others are now natively 64-bit apps; it supports Microsoft Exchange out of the box (even Microsoft itself charges extra for that); there’s an all-new, full-featured version of Quicktime in it; it’s easier and faster to install; it frees up an additional 6-10GB of hard drive space after installation; and it has small improvements too many to mention here.

Detractors call Snow Leopard a service pack rather than an upgrade, since there’s nothing earthshakingly new, but the fundamental bedrock improvements say otherwise. There’s actually precious little than can even use 10.6’s changes yet. Developers are still creating the apps that will take advantage of Snow Leopard, but they are encouraged to do them, and do them well, because there is an actual user base now waiting out there. Upgrading is an investment in the future. For the moment, Snow Leopard is basically an operating system that’s all dressed up with nowhere to go. But more than anything, it’s forward-looking and future-proof, while others are just barely living in the now.

The bottom line is that Mac OS X 10.6 runs better and faster than before, while actually shrinking in size, getting cheaper than ever, with reasonable hardware requirements and released ahead of schedule. Seems almost surreally different from everything else out there, which are invariably slow and confused, bloated, expensive, needy—and late to the game.

There’s only one version of Snow Leopard, for both 32- and 64-bit versions, plus truckloads of free useful apps, all on one disc. It’s so sanely priced, actually paying for it becomes a realistic option. As opposed to the forthcoming 32-bit Windows 7, which comes in six different varieties so far – Starter/ Home Basic/ Home Premium/ Professional/ Enterprise/ Ultimate – all with different pricing (as much as US$320 for Ultimate.)

While Snow Leopard’s supposedly just an upgrade for Leopard (10.5) users, it’s an open secret that you can upgrade even from Tiger (10.4), or, surprisingly, even do a fresh, clean install on a new, empty hard disk (as long as your Mac runs on an Intel chip, of course). There are no activation hoops you have to go through time and again, or even serial numbers to install. Longtime Mac users will tell you there never have been. WTH?

Apple’s insistence not to treat all users as thieves and criminals by default is refreshing, as is the way they are literally, “thinking different” with where they’re taking the industry.

God forbid this catches on.

When I wrote about Avatar last week, I got a few comments chiding me for writing a kinda/sorta movie review when this column is supposedly for consumer issues. Worse yet, it wasn’t even a review for a real movie, it was a review of a preview for a few minutes of something that is still in production.

Why, a movie isn’t a consumer product anymore? Everything is, these days. I won’t even get into the argument that the Avatar preview was a glimpse into the direction that movies are heading, which is a very important point. Products don’t have to be material things like canned food or cosmetics; they can well be novels, plays, TV shows and movies. I’m actually doing research for a consumer review of our presidentiables, which you’ll probably get to read sometime in November when they actually file for candidacy and I get a more definite product line-up.

That said, at the risk of being perceived as an entertainment column, I’m doing another movie-related thing today. Not exactly a review, but a criticism of certain practices involving film releases in this country. (I would love to get into a full-blown discussion of ratings and censorship, but this space would hardly be adequate for something like that.)

I speak about the very provocative and intense District 9, a science-fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson that manages to criticize and skewer everything that’s wrong with us. Basically the movie is about how humans deal with a refugee flood of aliens derogatorily called “prawns.” It talks of discrimination, apartheid, poverty and squalor, avarice, corporate greed, prostitution, crime, gun control, weapon production, immorality, perversion and human atrocities, and features wholesale murder and extreme scenes of butchery and violence.

Which the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, in its infinite wisdom, ratesPG-13 and banners in print ads that it’s been released without cuts. And then cuts out scenes anyway. The wrong ones.

The Board of Censors’—I mean, the MTRCB’s— habit of cutting out ‘objectionable’ scenes when they should just be rating the movie is patently ridiculous, more so when you consider the simple logic that they if already cut the bad stuff out, why even rate it for adults anymore? It’s like making non-alcoholic beer and still saying that only people over 18 can drink it.

This whole District 9 debacle is so wrong on so many levels, it’s dizzying.

It’s a great film, but I won’t get into a synopsis of the story. If you haven’t seen it yet, please, just put the laptop to sleep, skip work and go watch the movie, and then come back to this page. You’ll thank me for it. Without exaggeration, it’s an excellent movie, and probably one of the best things you’ll see this year. Despite it being a sci fi adventure with elements of Schindler’s List, Iron Man, Independence Day, Aliens, and The Fly, it’s a thought-provoking drama with important, relevant ideas about life, xenophobia and the nature of humans.

Here’s how it started: a few days before it opened, a local blogger wrote that the local release of District 9 was butchered by the MTRCB to keep the ratings at PG-13. Word got around, and I, for one, got discouraged to see it. Then, later in the week, I noticed the ad in the newspaper for District 9 proclaimed it was “PG-13 WITHOUT CUTS”, presumably to counter the negative talk that it had been butchered beyond comprehension and wasn’t worth seeing anymore.

Really? So which was it? Cut, or uncut?

Having given up trying to catch it on the big screen, I’d gone ahead and seen an online copy, and found the violence there no more objectionable than your typical National Artist–level massacre epic, certainly less than the gore-porn that routinely escapes MTRCB scissors like Hostel, Saw and any number of modern Hollywood horror movies. Left alone, District 9 was a provocative, exciting film. If they had cut fundamental and integral scenes, then its premise, concept and filmic integrity was likely compromised and it had become an emasculated, empty mess of a movie.

So, curious about the ad’s claim, I went and caught it on a big screen over the long weekend. With me in the theater were a number of toddlers and young children with their parents, excited to see this new sci-fi movie.

I discovered that, contrary to the newspaper advertisement, it was cut. The ad was a bare-faced lie.

But what did they cut? Did they remove youngster-warping scenes of violence, cruelty and butchery? Morally-compromising scenes of injustice , persecution and crude racial-discrimination metaphors substituting prawns for African-Americans? Psychologically-devastating scenes of poverty and squalor? Inter-species sexual abuse and prostitution?

Nope. The MTRCB left those scenes alone for parents to guide their 13-year-old-and-below kids over. As far as I could tell, what they did cut were a few fleeting seconds of a some mercenaries being blown to bloody bits by alien weapons. Simple blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bang-and-bloody-spray stuff. Nothing you don’t get to see everyday on cable TV at home. That was it.

God help them, they don’t even know what to censor; they can’t even do their misguided job right.

On the one hand, I am grateful that the MTRCB’s meddling was so superficial, shallow and predictable that the film survived nearly intact and still made complete sense.

On the other hand, it was still a bit strong to just be PG-13; should’ve been an R. If they had meant to remove the bloody bits for the sake of the kids and the box office, I’m puzzled they left alone a great number of overtly violent scenes—like main baddie Col. Venter being literally dismembered by a mob of prawns, or Nigerian warlord Obesandjo getting his head blown off spectacularly by the mecha suit. They didn’t even touch the discussion of hero Wikus Van Der Merwe getting infected by having sex with prawns or trim the scenes showing the atrocities committed by human scientists experimenting on the prawns. I’m sure the kids had lots of questions to ask their parents after the movie.

You gotta hand it to the MTRCB. They rate the movie wrong, leave the strong adult bits in and cut out inconsequential stuff, then allow children into the theater. And then they lie about not cutting the movie. Jeez. They can’t even make mistakes right. Way to go, guys.

(First published 0n  08/26/2009 12:05 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

When the Avatar title card faded in in big letters hovering in the air in front of the screen, right after James Cameron spoke to the audience, a friend who was with me at the preview, a big, strapping, mature, serious man with a wife and grown-up responsibilities and not given to silly childish utterances at inopportune times, loudly and audibly …giggled. The rest of the audience tittered at the sound, but didn’t begrudge him the reaction. James Cameron does that to people; I wanted to giggle myself; there, but for the grace of God, go I. Crazy, right?

But it was a crazy event we were at. It was part of a simultaneous worldwide screening in IMAX 3D theaters all over the globe of 15 minutes of Cameron’s new film Avatar, a science-fiction adventure done in ground-breaking (people say game-changing) new three-dimensional film technology. Fifteen minutes. Crazy! Who’d do such a thing? And who’d watch it?

We would. And millions would, across the world.

We waited a full hour-and-a-half in the lobby of the new IMAX Theater in SM City North Edsa last Monday to catch a free preview of just 15 minutes of footage from the first half of the film, and for which we waited gladly. We’d waited years for any morsel of info about Avatar, any precious few seconds of advanced footage from this legendary production. Fifteen minutes of it was a feast. Sight unseen, except for the quarter-hour of selected scenes we were giggling over in anticipation of, we have might have as well declared it a success then and there, for all the objectivity we tried to muster.

The hype for Avatar is unmatched in the annals of cinema history. For years, people have been chattering about it online and endlessly theorizing and speculating about James Cameron’s next project since his Oscar-award winning film Titanic 12 years previous. Cloaked in impenetrable secrecy, fans waited hungrily online for tidbits of info, casting details, bits of behind-the-scenes gossip and (often-fake) leaked photos about Avatar. They didn’t get much.

If there was a category for it, whoever is handling the viral marketing strategy for the film deserves an Oscar this early. For the campaign’s first major salvo, lucky attendees of the San Diego Comic Con last month were treated to the same footage we were about to see, but I’d venture to say seeing those scenes in a conference hall, without the plush theater seats, polarized 3D glasses and Dolby Digital sound systems couldn’t have been as impressive as what we were about to experience.

Yet the reaction was wild and enthusiastic and stoked the fires even more. The night before Global Avatar Preview Day, August 21 (the Philippine preview got pushed back a few days) Apple released online a special two-minute movie teaser-trailer that some people, me included, stayed up late to catch. Smart move. It only served to turn up the heat past red and made people crazy for the 15 minutes to screen the following day, and pine for the December release date even more.

(Not to worry, Avatar should be filmfest-proof. Despite a ban on foreign movies, it will likely get screen time over the holidays, as Warner Bros. Marketing Director Sionee Lagman told me, “There are no digital local movies for the moment, and no Imax 3D festival entries as yet, so the D3D and IMAX theaters should be free to show Avatar this December, in time for the simultaneous international opening.”)

Scalped tickets for the complimentary one-day only preview were selling for US$500 on E-Bay. Crazy, right? I pulled strings to make sure that I got invites (I’d be damned if I missed this), but I needn’t have bothered, the PR group had already made arrangements to accommodate us.

The footage we saw yesterday lasted just 18 minutes in total. There was a one-minute personal introduction to the five scenes we were about to see by James Cameron himself, speaking directly to the audience (in 3-D), then the much-awaited fifteen spoiler-free minutes from the film’s first half, and then finally the just-released two-minute teaser trailer I’ve watched a couple of dozen times over the weekend, but in Cameron-3D and Dolby Digital sound this time.

So, does it live up to the hype?

In a word, spectacularly.

We’ve all seen lots of 3D fare this year. Up, Monsters vs. Aliens, the first five minutes of the new Harry Potter, the latest Ice Age, Coraline …only Cameron’s 3D is light-years beyond everything we’ve seen thus far. But if you asked us to pin it down to a specific characteristic or feature, we’d be hard pressed to explain it to you—I guess the simplest way to put it is that it’s more 3D than anything 3D I’d seen previously. Tech-wise, I’m sure there is a concrete scientific explanation; the gear was engineered by Cameron himself and is said to be revolutionary.

But in viewer terms, it’s less concrete. Maybe they’ve calculated the optimal optical stereo-separation math to make depth more realistic, and figured out the perfect fore/mid/background ratios, but the closest thing I can describe it with is the term that’s been bandied about since the footage was first shown: photo-real. And that it’s not precisely something you see. It’s more something you experience.

The first scenes weren’t too striking. It was the 3D we’ve grown used to, albeit clearer and brighter, but Avatar came into its own when the battle scenes in the forests of Pandora got started. I was astounded.

It was crazy. It was all I could do to take it all in …and keep from giggling.

Three major things occurred in my head rapidly.

First, being awestruck at how …real it all looked, with the bright swirling action and the unselfconscious and natural 3D-ness of it all, done without the artifice and manipulation common to most 3D features.

Second, marveling at the technology and how it was done – it all looked so solid and real and with weight, without anything ever physically, actually being there. Intellectually, I knew it was all just bits and bytes, it was just numbers. But …it was also all there, hanging off and within the screen, running, galloping, flying, fighting, shooting.

And third, and most astonishing of all, amazed that I was able to just effortlessly settle in and forget completely about the first two things after a couple of minutes, and just unconditionally accept the reality of an alien world with ten-foot-tall blue aliens, floating islands and savage flying creatures and just get lost in the story and the action popping off the screen.

I believed.

I can’t wait for December 18.

Damn you, James Cameron, you wonderful son of a bitch, for making movies that make grown men giggle.

In recent tech history, there hasn’t been a more liberating gadget than the USB modem internet dongle.

It’s finally allowed the regular Juan to cut the umbilical internet network cord and wander with his laptop, even way beyond the comfort zone of the wifi router at home and still remain online anywhere. Today’s HDMA speeds practically make this kind of surfing indistinguishable from surfing on a wired connection. The unprecedented freedom it allows us to update our FaceBook page from the backseat of the car in heavy traffic, or amidst the mayhem of the mall food court with near impunity is incredible.

But it’s a double–edged sword; the reasonably equipped 21st century drone now has no more feasible and defensible way to dodge responsibilities. No more excuses. You can write that report your boss is demanding and send it in from the department store’s toilet stall if you had to, thanks to that dongle.

Unless of course you run out of prepaid load, and even if you wanted to reload your account, the service won’t take your money. This highly improbable incident happened to me last week, courtesy of poorly designed customer-service procedures and a dead-end call center setup from one telco.

I got myself a SmartBro dongle soon after the launch of the service at an expensive rate (nearly twice the price today; rates usually plummet soon after launch). Just like a cell phone, you can keep using it as long as it has credit, and you just need to top it off by transferring load at the store, or by buying a card and loading it up.

Last Tuesday, my SmartBro dongle ran out of credit and promptly quit working, which usually happens during times I need it the most, like sending an important file to the boss. No sweat, I thought. I got myself a P500 Smart Buddy card from a store and tried to reload the account from my postpaid Smart number. I got thwarted each time and got a message that the PIN was invalid. Which was ridiculous, because I had just scratched off the backing from the card number with a coin and the grit was still fresh on my desk. Of course it was valid.

So I figured I needed to go call the Simply Amazing World of Smart at 888-1111, go through the tedious button-mashing until I found a human I could talk to. The human I found said the long and short of it was I had to verify the status of the PIN. And to do that I needed to call a different number for Smart Bro – 672-7277.

Fine. With patience, I wade through all the prompts at that number. Many minutes later the robot voice tells me to enter my SmartBro number. I do, then I am told in order to proceed from there, I have to enter my TPIN, or Telephone PIN, and that in the event I did not have one, to please go to the website at http://smart.com.ph/connect, register and make one, then come back and enter my TPIN.

TPIN? WTH? If I could get online to make a TPIN, I wouldn’t be calling them in the first place, would I?

So lemme get it straight: to confirm the status of my load’s PIN so I can l finally load up my account and go online, I first need to go online somehow to their site, make me a TPIN so I could call the number again, sort out my Load PIN’s status from their customer service so I can finally get the account reloaded and get online. It’s the 21st century version of Catch-22, that curious situation of self-defeating logic first described by Joseph Heller.

Before I get hot under the collar I try the saner approach of trying to pin down another human again from the Simply Amazing World of Smart and see if I can explain my dilemma and get somewhere. The number they sent me to was no help, because the predetermined prompts all lead to automated replies and had no human option, so I went back to the first number I called (where I was at least able to talk to a human) to tell them their advice just sent me to one of the outer rings of Hell.

Back at the old number, the new human patiently listens to my predicament, and then cheerfully says I have to verify the PIN status at the SMARTBRO number, (which was what their first advice had been). I tell them (again) where that led me, and why I was back here, so was there any number I could call that wasn’t automated? He puts me on hold for a few minutes and come back and tells me I had to call the SMARTBRO number.

I tell the human about the TPIN problem, and the human says that is the only way to get to the PIN verification portion. Helpfully, he suggests that when I get online to get my TPIN, I could go ahead and check the status of my load from the website, which was one of the convenient features of the site.

Trying not to expire from apoplexy, I ask to be transferred to a supervisor or a manager or the head of their call center or someone that can think for himself and not be confined to a preset page of answers on a computer screen. No, there is no person they could transfer me to from where they were. OK, fine. Did they have the trunkline of the Smart Mothership? Maybe I could call them? No, sir, we can’t give you that number.

Holy crap! I figured it out! I was in an inner Circle now. And apparently, there was nowhere else to go from here. So there I was; an hour wasted on the phone talking with robots and useless humans, with P500 of credit, a laptop and an expensive USB HSPA modem I can’t use, and I still couldn’t get online to send my file to my boss if my life depended on it.

What a brave new world we live in! Simply amazing!

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.

Nothing fancy at all. In the box you get the Aeropress syringe-thing. A tube of special paper filters good for a year, a scoop, a funnel for putting in the grinds, a stirrer, the filter attachment. All plastic, no metal. No electricity required, just pure muscle. Not that it’s hard to press – maybe just 20 to 25 lbs of pressure. No sweat. And it takes just 30 seconds to prepare a great cup of coffee, all told.

I’m not going to make a habit of writing recipes in this column, but here’s how you make a delicious cup of Café Americano in half a minute with an Aeropress: Attach the filter holder with a paper filter to the syringe body and mount it over your mug. Position the funnel over the open end and use the big scooper to ladle in two scoops of a medium or coarse grind. Pour in a half-cup of hot water. Remove the funnel and use the stirrer to mix it all up for ten seconds. Then insert the plunger and push it in slowly for about 20 seconds or until all the liquid is squeezed through the paper filter into the cup. Put the Aeropress aside, top off the cup with more hot water, then add sugar to taste.

If you’re making espresso, skip adding more hot water and take it as is. Krema purists will miss the fancy foam, but as one connoisseur said, krema is “just decoration”. Believe me when I say it puts most other coffeemakers and café-chain brews to shame. In fact, it’s so easy to prepare, the biggest problem is keeping yourself from over-caffeinating before leaving the house. I’ve since stopped buying brewed coffee from the usual sources and find myself wanting to get home and just make a better cup at home. I look forward to getting up in the morning to make my Americano.

The big dealmaker here is the ease with which you clean up after yourself. Just remove the filter holder, hold the Aeropress over the trashcan and push the plunger all the way in. The hockey puck of grounds will just pop into the trash. Rinse off the rubber top of plunger (the syringe itself remains squeaky clean) and stirrer and put them all away for the next use. You can even reuse the filters; just let them dry flat and use until they fall apart before you pop in a new one. Extra filters are easily available.

Of course, all the myriad variables of preparation still hold – freshly roasted and ground beans are better; the fineness or coarseness of the grind; the beans, or blend of beans, used is a matter of preference; the heat of the water, the length of time mixing or pressing, prolonged steeping are all still parts of the Great Coffee Debate. But the fact remains that the thing is idiot-proof; it’s hard to screw this up and not make a clean, great tasting cup, without floating grounds on top or sludge in the bottom, on your first try. Google it, don’t take me at my word. You’ll find coffee experts worldwide give it top marks.

For less than P2000, the Aeropress is A Good Buy, if you love coffee. That’s just about two weeks worth of Tall Drips at the usual café chain. A good deal, if you realize fancy metal espresso makers that require training to use can cost anywhere from P20,000 to P200,000.

Full disclosure: Of course I’m not getting anything from the Aeropress people. I bought my unit on the recommendation of a friend, and I am a Thoroughly Satisfied Customer just paying it forward. If you want one, the local distributor of the Aeropress is Blue Sierra Enterprises, and you can call them at 02-746-6384/85. And wonder of wonders, they even offer free delivery.

Yes, Virginia, there still are ‘phenomenally wonderful’ things in this world of ours.

A large part of this column is about user/consumer experiences and your stories about how things go down in your adventures in free enterprise. I hope to get first-person accounts as to how your after-sales experiences turned out, if you tried to return something or have it fixed or replaced (in most instances, merchants will no soon return your money after they get it then they would part with their first born.)

I figured, where best to start than a story of my own?

FULL DISCLOSURE. I am an Apple nut, a Mac evangelist and long-time fan and apologist for the company, not because I own stock, but because I am a part of that rarest of consumer breeds, the Thoroughly Satisfied Customer. I began my Applehood with the Apple II in the early 80s, and worked my way up the ladder to a Macbook Air today. My fandom extends even to my extracurricular activities, being a longtime moderator of the Philippine Macintosh Users Group, and have been a member of the Board of Directors and chairman of the organization for two years straight. Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid. Wherever I go I tend to be known as the Mac Guy, the Walking Wiki and Mac Hardware and Software Troubleshooter Extraordinare. Everyone in the office comes to me for advice in the office. Everyone. Even ABS-CBN CEO and Chairman Gabby Lopez asks me stuff. I kid you not.

BACKGROUND. I currently own a year-and-a-half old Macbook Air; that’s the impossibly thin, incredibly lightweight laptop that never fails to turn heads at Starbucks. It’s not cheap, it cost me an entire term’s teaching fees and more to pay for the darned thing, and despite it being underpowered compared to the latest models, I love it to death. Which of course means I take care of it.

THE SYSTEM. Before I go on with my adventure of going toe-to-toe with Apple Inc. Here’s how laptop warranties work with them. All portable units have a one-year international warranty, which is a good thing, because parts and services are notoriously expensive for Apple. One of the advantages of being a Mac user is something you can avail of called AppleCare, which is an extended comprehensive two-year warranty, as long as you purchase the insurance plan and activate it within the first year. So when something goes wrong, just bring the Mac to the Service Center.

MY PROBLEM. No big deal really. It was just a loose, wibbly-wobbly hinge. When you open up the lid the LCD screen lifts up a little off-kilter. Must’ve come loose somehow. Otherwise, everything worked fine. I was just afraid it might worsen, so I brought it in.

REPAIR 1.Yes, the warranty covers it, and yes, it can be fixed, said the repair center. No sweat. Took a week, which wasn’t too bad because I requested for, and got, a service unit so I wouldn’t have too much separation anxiety and could continue to work—I’m as dependent on the Air as much as I am with air in my lungs. (Props to PowerMac Center for acceding to my request for a temporary unit.)

BACK TO NORMAL. It was normal, at least for a couple of days. I got my Air back, and the hinge was fine. Then, as I was shutting down for the day and closed the LCD lid of the Air, I heard an unsettling metallic snap, ad discovered that both hinges had become completely loosey-goosey. If I didn’t prop it up against something, it would fall on its back on the table. Repair FAIL.

REPAIR 2. I brought it back, and would have been overly irritated had they not agreed to lend me a service unit again. (In the Mac world, something like this was just a minor nuisance, because of the ability to clone precisely, bit-by-bit, the same setup on another Mac. Cool, right?) Since, like before, they had lent me another Air, I wasn’t put out too much.

WHAT PUT ME OUT. I got a call a week later, when they told me I had to pay P33,500 to repair my hinges. Yes, I had to pick my jaw off the floor. The repair guy said that, due to the vagaries of production, there was no such extant part as just-the-hinges. To replace the hinge meant that entire top of the Mac, meaning the lid and the LCD screen, which in their inventory was just one single part—would have to be replaced—and it wasn’t covered in the Applecare warranty. Much as they wanted to accommodate me, their hands were tied by policy. I wanted to faint. Holy crap. A white Macbook that was even more fuller-featured than my Air would cost around P55,000. The cost of the LCD part plus the cost of Applecare (P12,500) is almost the price of a brand new Mac, right?

THE ARGUMENT. Of course, one simply doesn’t roll over for things like these. Three main consumer-side arguments: (1)Aside from the ridiculous notion that the hinges and the LCD seemed to cost the same in the eyes of Apple, (2) the fact that it’s not covered in the warranty, with the implication that part of the fault is user-negligence (and a slight on my character that I’m trying to abuse the warranty), (3) there’s also the issue of the specific warranty on the repair itself – that some negligence on their part aggravated the problem; they didn’t put it together properly. Who’s to say?

OPTIONS. Two untenable options for me the way things are at this stage: (1) use the computer as is,(which gives a new definition to the word floppy), or, (2)buy a new one. A third, more doable, option – fight it.

THE FIGHT. The charming and efficient Sales and Marketing Director Lesley Ang of PowerMac advised me to elevate the case to a higher power – Apple Inc. itself! Lesley said, call the hotline and make your case, maybe they’ll give in and relax the rules. They’ve been known to. Urban legends persist that directly emailing Steve Jobs gets results, so why not? I know he’s not been feeling well lately, so as not to bother Steve, I just called 1-800-1-441-0234.

THE PHONE CALL. The hotline was available 9-5 so I called first thing in the morning last Friday. I got through to a call center agent who immediately reverted to Tagalog as soon as he realized where the call was coming from. I was glad because I was able to emote better in Pilipino. Sympathetic, he put me on hold as he brought up with my situation with the proper Apple department. Then the guy from that department got on the line and asked me to explain my situation again, which I did, and then again to his boss, who asked probing questions as to the particulars. The call took over an hour. (I was a bit apprehensive because I wasn’t sure 1-800 calls were really toll-free in our country.

THE RESOLUTION. Yesterday I get a call from the PowerMac service center that the Apple mothership had emailed them Friday asking about my case, and requested for photographs of the unit. They deliberated on it over the weekend, and then called them up this morning to go ahead and order the part from Singapore and charge it to Apple, immediately repair my unit and honor the warranty.

MORAL OF THE STORY. Do what you have every right to do. Sometimes things still turn out the way they’re supposed to.

I recently started a new online column every Wednesday called Beware of Buyer (particulars below) for the ABS-CBN News Online website. Nice feeling. I used to write a couple of weekly columns for The Manila Times for a couple of years in the mid-90s. I hadn’t realized I missed column writing, which in essence is old-fashioned, formalized and institutionalized blogging. Only difference, really, is accountability.

In case you’d rather not go to the site on Wednesdays, I will reproduce the full text here on my blog on the following weekend after it appears. The link to our news site is in my blogroll, if you want to visit it.

Here is the first one:

Time Apart

[Beginning today, I'll be writing about that eternal quandary we find ourselves in: whether or not to fork over hard-earned cash for something. And after much agonizing, once we do, to find out if we got the short end of the deal or not, whether or not we were treated properly and fairly in the process, and if we will be so treated after the purchase. Many of us have been screwed over buying something not worth getting in the first place, and to add insult to injury, treated like crap when we complain about it. Less often, we buy something so phenomenally wonderful that we turn into evangelists for the damn things.

This column will examine the whole consumer experience from soup to nuts. We'll snipe and shoot and study and praise and condemn and muse about all manner of consumer issues, from services to all manner of products, all from the point of view of the ordinary person.

Let me quickly introduce myself then. My name is Adel Gabot. My day job is Chief of Copy for ABS-CBN Publishing, which makes me Style and Grammar Police for a couple of dozen magazines ranging from gossip and entertainment rags to fashion and society titles. I am also a regular contributor of product reviews for a major newspaper, and a former editor of a tech magazine and a men's lifestyle magazine. I have also been a guest editor-in-chief for a variety of titles, including Golf Digest Philippines, PC Magazine Philippines and Maxim Philippines. More to the point, I am also an inveterate consumer with a snarky attitude, which I guess makes me suited to this task.

So before we begin this bumpy, snarky journey together, I'd just like to hit the ground running and encourage everyone to tell me about your particular experiences with commerce, capitalism and free enterprise in general. You can just vent and complain, or share your comments, suggestions and violent objections. You can reach me via email at Adel_Gabot-CTL@abs-cbn.com, and you can follow and respond to me at twitter.com/adelgabot.

Ok. Let's get this show on the road.]

I was recently at an event all about wristwatches. The expensive kind.

I’ve always been appreciative of timepieces, and have been watching watches my whole life. I don’t ask much, I just hope to have something classy, reliable, respectable and vaguely ostentatious adorning my wrist someday. Aside from being able to tell the time, a good watch is a status symbol, a mark of success, and in the rarified air of boardrooms and high-end social events, practically a dress requirement. At this stratum, when meeting someone, you check out his business card first – and then his watch – before he passes muster.

I don’t come from a background where I would eventually inherit a Rolex or a Patek Phillippe if I lived long enough. Neither are my resources of late such that I could just pick an Omega or a Breitling up at the shop, say, this weekend. For now, I must content myself for now with a respectable-looking Swatch. But at least I can say with pride that in my life, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of gawking at the very best, and last week I was not to be denied.

IWC Shaffhausen organized an intimate, basic watchmaking course for members of the press last Friday at The Renaissance Hotel to promote their brand. We got to take apart an IWC watch and then try to put it back together. It’s a very gutsy move for them, mainly because we oafs could ruin a few million pesos worth of watches real easy.

The legendary watchmaker Kurt Klaus himself presided over our training. The guy is the equivalent of a rock star in watchmaking circles, Bono with a loupe instead of shades. Herr Klaus, an old man who looks not unlike Albert Einstein with his lab coat and mane of white hair, even talks like you imagine Einstein would. (Not an idle comparison in the least, because Herr Klaus in his field squarely matches Einstein’s level of genius, having invented among other things IWC’s revolutionary perpetual calendar module used in the famous Da Vinci model.)

But forget Kurt Klaus for the moment. The bigger thing is that this was IWC holding a watchmaking class! Rolex chronographs in their heart of hearts dream that in an alternate life they are IWC. No other company understands better what true luxury is. As one reviewer once wrote more eloquently than I ever could, “In this world where men eat their red meat dripping in robust sanguine glory, wear their Mark Powell suits like bespoke armor and exhale their Bolivars indoors, the International Watch Company reigns supreme.”

The display area by the door holds a rack of IWC wristwatches, and I saunter over and pick one up, a nice thin piece with so delicate a spiderweb of gears and springs that you could actually see through it. I look interested and casually ask, “…and how much would this one be?”

The guy goes, “Sir, with a generous discount, that one would come to just a little over five.”

I am a bit startled, immediately nervous that I was holding in my grubby hands a watch worth half a million pesos. I look at it, and get an even more chilling thought. Could it be?

I croak, “Five – ?”

” – million, sir,” he says, helpfully.

I hand it back quickly and walk into the function room, chastened. And they trusted me to take one of these apart?

In retrospect, it wasn’t too hard. Herr Klaus is a good instructor, walking around and hovering over our work, an Albert Einstein looking concernedly over our shoulders. As we each took apart a watch, removing gears, mechanisms, jewels and tiny screws using special tools with a loupe over our eye, and then gingerly putting the precious metal parts back together, I understood how these babies could be ridiculously expensive. At the end, when I nervously wound it up and with relief saw the movement start up again, I came away with an appreciation for how intricate and delicate a profession this is (and the sinking realization that my eyes are too bad and my hands too shaky to ever be good at it).

More so, I wondered what place such treasures like IWC watches and similar shiny things have in a society like ours, where mere subsistence is a daily struggle for some. For me, getting to tinker with a device that dwells at the far end of the financial spectrum gave me perspective and grounding as to what the important things in life are. I can appreciate that for some of us it’s watches like these, or cars that go zero to 60 in four seconds. But for others, it’s still a major struggle trying not to judge the existence of an object whose intrinsic value can feed two thousand families for an entire month, just strapped to someone’s wrist and quietly and accurately counting down the hours and the minutes and the seconds for the next couple of centuries, long after those two thousand families and generations of their descendants would have long been gone.

But then again, I said to myself, if some people can afford it, then why the hell not, right?

Later that day, I thought longingly of IWC’s Grande Complication, which is made of 18 karat rose gold in a platinum case, of which only 50 are created a year, and costs almost P16 million. Yeah, who knows, right? Maybe someday even I might own one of those watches, I mused, as I stood on a street corner having a late merienda, biting into a fishball drenched with sweet-sour sauce and taking care not to let it drip on my old jeans.

This is how I’d like to remember her. Not the idealized Time Magazine covers, not the posed, public relations studio shoots or the Malacañang press releases. This way. Active, vibrant, working. My country is blessed to have had someone like her.