Pictures of Costa Rica

http://dal.facebook.com/album.php?aid=17362&l=4928c&id=637701722
http://dal.facebook.com/album.php?aid=17989&l=c6ea1&id=637701722

More to come later.

I find your lack of faith disturbing

Someone in the White House thought this was a good picture of Dick Cheney making a speech.



Triumph of the Will: Death Star III

Presenting a paper in Toronto

My proposal was accepted so I will be presenting a paper at the Canadian Anthropology Society's conference at the University of Toronto in May. I'm going to be in Hogtown (a.k.a. Toronto) from May 7-13, with my presentation scheduled for the first session on the first day of the conference, 9 AM on May 9 . You can see the full schedule here, while the conference website is here.

On the one hand it's annoying to have to be fully awake at 9 AM, but on the other hand it's good to have it all over with immediately. This will be the first time I've ever presented at a national conference, though I did attend the one last year which was set in Montreal. It was cruel of the organizers to schedule Toronto immediately after Montreal since it will just make it obvious how much Toronto is a pile of crap compared to Montreal.

Let's see, what else is new with me? Oh yes, I'm half-heartedly tooling around with a paper about media globalization in regards to Bioman in the Philippines. I might try to have it published sometime. However, I plan to finish it if and when I end up in the Philippines this September, should I get hired to do the overseas development internship I think I've mentioned before. Did you know you can watch old episodes of Bioman on Youtube? I finally saw the last episode because someone had uploaded it. I never realized how heavy the Tagalog accents were on the English dubbing. Also, I now know the guy in the opening was saying "Chodenshi Bioman" (Super-electric Bioman), whereas it was just Japanese gibberish to me before.

Joker Arroyo's senatorial campaign stuff

20 March 2007

Hello everyone!

The circus has come to town and I am riding one of the elephants! I have been drafted into the Joker Arroyo Senatorial Campaign as Deputy Campaign Director. The experience so far has been full of excitement because Philippine politics is, shall we say, a product of "interesting times." Anyway, a lot of things have changed from the old school days when our beloved politicians regaled us with their mudslinging sorties and cheap tricks. Today, the campaign is mostly a media event. I glad though that my candidate is an elder statesman who consistently fought against Marcos when the dictator was in his prime. Here's his campaign logo.

Richie got engaged

I just finished chatting with him. He said it happened a month ago, so way to keep us informed, cuz. Congrats, and remember I will drop in unannounced wherever you buy your house. I do hope you do get a nice one in Queens, even though it's easy to get lost there.

Uncle can blog again!

05 February 2007

Gentlemen and fellow Armacenites:

This is just to let you guys know that it looks like the cables near Taiwan that were damaged during their fairly recent quake are functional already because my DSL connection is now running as fast - or as slowly - as it ever has. As you can see from this post, I can blog again. I couldn't do so these past weeks as the armacen blog took forever to open, if at all. Everything seems ok now.

Sometimes, you should just let it go

Here's a little something to get people in the mood for the movie - a brief retrospective on Megatron's finer moments.

Work in progress

I thought I'd share the outline for my thesis.  I've finished the data collection and research and all I have to do now is mostly write with a little bit of data analysis on the side.  I've got most of a chapter finished and am chugging quietly along.  The following are the titles I'm considering plus the abstract for the thesis:

Filipino Bloggers and the Contingency of Identification Online

Filipino Bloggers and the Contingency of Filipino Identity Online

My research focuses on Filipino bloggers and their expression of their Filipino identity on their blogs. Following from the data I gathered from bloggers both in the Philippines and overseas in a content analysis of Filipino-written blogs and from several interviews, my thesis begins from Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of identity as contingent and arising from difference. I explore the complexities behind the expression of Filipino identity on blogs and the numerous factors that such expression is contingent on. I answer three basic questions in my exploration of this contingent identity: Why is Filipino identity expressed on blogs? How is it expressed? And why is there no single or main Filipino blogging community?

Addendum and a list of lists

Just to clarify, I still haven't finished my thesis, right now I'm very close to finishing my first chapter (I have 19 pages of what looks to be a 23 page chapter).  It's taking more slowly than I thought, but having something concrete to look at makes me confident that the rest is just an accumulation of hours worked and will not require any great feats of analytical derring-do, particularly since I've already finished the part where I do all the hard thinking.  It's just a matter now of fleshing out the ideas in my rather detailed summary.  And since I estimate the finished thesis will be around 120 pages long, then I'm already one-sixth finished.

Oh, and things I will miss about Halifax, especially in comparison to Sudbury:

• Cheap seafood
• Being able to walk everywhere
• The bus pass that is part of my student fees
• Living down the street from the video store and the supermarket
• Having nearby cafes to work in
• The support of my Masters cohort
• The more bohemian outlook of the populace
• The fact that the working class are less visible
• Being able to pop into my supervisors' office when I need to talk to her about my work
• The large academic library at Dalhousie

The last is particularly important to me since I have to retun a giant bunch of library before I leave; I've actually been hoarding them since last year and have been exercising my privileges as a grad student.

But, Laurentian does have some of the books I need, and I can take them out since I have a Canada-wide library card.

The books I can get from Laurentian:

• Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. John Rutherford (ed.)
• Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler
• Culture, Globalization and the World System, Anthony D. King (ed.)
• Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (this one's a classic so I think I'll just buy it, I'll probably be referring to it a lot in the future anyway)
• Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic perspectives, Monica Heller (ed.)
• The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha
• Working Feminism, Geraldine Pratt
• The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells
• The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Stephen Castles & Mark J. Miller
• Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays, Joshua A. Fishman
• Language and Ethnicity: Focusschrift in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman, James R. Dow (ed.)
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman
• Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford & George Marcus
• Technologies of the Self, Michel Foucault

The new and the good stuff can't be found in Laurentian, so I'll have to do a lot of photocopying before I leave, but I'll have to buy a bunch more books too.  Oh well, maybe I can get some books from U of T if we're there over Christmas.

Leaving on a jet plane

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go (I'm leaving Halifax permanently for Sudbury on the 19th but I'm still not packed, I'm actually leaving a bunch of stuff to charity)

I'm standing here outside your door (Whose door? My roommates' door? My neighbours' door?)

I want to wake you up to say goodbye (I suppose I can bang around really loudly and wake up the roommate who kind of bugs me, but that means waking up the other ones too)

But the dawn is breakin', it's early morn (My flight leaves at 7 AM)

The taxi's waiting, he's blowin' his horn (Taxi my ass, there's a hotel down the street that's only a 10 minute walk away, so I'll just drag my bags there and take the airport shuttle that stops in front)

Already I'm so lonesome I could die (It's so true! And by true I mean not)

So kiss me and smile for me (I'm not kissing any of my roommates)

Tell me that you'll wait for me (I told you already)

Hold me like you'll never let me go (Stop it with your man-on-man fantasies)

'Cause I'm a' leavin' on a jet plane (The plane from Halifax to Toronto is a jet plane, but I think the one from TO to Sudbury is a prop plane)

Don't know when I'll be back again (This is true)

Leavin' on a jet plane (I said so already)

Don't know when I'll be back again (Convocation, maybe)

Oh babe I hate to go (Well "babe," I suppose so, but I won't hate how much more costly food is here, except for seafood)

I'm famous!

Check out this video of me in a soon-to-be-released major motion picture!



I'm (possibly) in that gaggle of morons on the far side of the street at the beginning of the video. This was during the first week of September; I was hanging out in downtown LA for a completely unrelated reason and wandered into a crowd of people gawking at the shooting. I was only there for a couple of takes so I don't know if I actually made it into this poorly shot video. For those who are wondering, the movie is that Transformers movie being directed by Michael Bay. The intern who kept trying to get us to move gave a different title when I asked him (I think he called it E13) but I could read the back of his shirt.