THE BEST OF MANNY PACQUIAO VIDEO

OF BOXING, FISTICUFFS, AND BEATING PEOPLE UP INTO A PULP

My first experience with “boxing” came at a very young age, with my elder brother.   Two other older siblings would set us up for a fisticuff for their own amusement and we would oblige for it seemed a boy should learn how to fight as his first lesson in life, or he would grow up a sissy.  Two years older and bigger, my brother would always beat the pulp out of me and I would spend hours afterward grieving about the blatant injustice of a mismatch.   Once, I lost a tooth from a mean straight, I cried the whole day for the prospect of growing up bungi.   I was such a loser.  Perhaps, it explains my ambivalence as a grownup for boxing as a sport.  How could anyone bear the roaring applause that comes at the expense of one beaten black and blue, I often think to myself.

Yet, how could you not cheer for someone like Manny Pacquiao as with most of humanity?  The sheer artistry.   The gladiator dance.  The pure wizardry of a warrior inside the ring.  The brute force…  of a fist that come barreling down on the foe’s face and body that digs in through like a crow bar, or  a cannonball in slomo smashing on a jaw, followed by a twisting and  a shattering, you almost wish to hear a crackling sound of a skull exploding, brain tissues splattering all over and eyes popping out of their sockets, blood and saliva in delirious mix on a swirl.   Ummm, such primal ecstacy! it’s almost fucking orgasmic! Give it more, give some more, you yell on top of your lungs, until at last a body lay there convulsing on the canvass.

The savage beast and the gentle man in us: such a wonder how two diametrically opposed natures reside in one body.

Of course, in our own delirium, we forget, one day soon the hero will have his turn too on the low on the spinning wheel of fortune, when comes his turn as well to be smashed into smithereens by his better, when the wild, rapturous cheering switches on the other side and we take our turn at mourning.

One advice please:  slow down on using Pacquiao as model or inspiration for the children.  Young minds tend to pick up the wrong lesson from the rubble.   If one day your teenage kid, whom you want to become a doctor or engineer, tells you, “I’m quitting school, Dad.  I wanna be a boxer!”, do not be horrified.

YOUNG BEATLES

Before they changed the world: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney.  Where’s Ringo?

Original image from beatlesource.com

via Wired

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE: A DOCUMENTARY

Here’s a BBC documentary on the controversial subject Near-Death Experience or NDE.

part 2,   part 3,   part 4,    part 5,    part 6

MANNY PACQUIAO ON TIME MAGAZINE

BROWNOUT!!!

Portent of things to come in a Noynoy presidency?
I’m wicked!

SELLING NOYNOY

Conrado de Quiros, a favorite columnist, is telling his readers,  what you do not see in Noynoy Aquino, his choice for President,  is what you get.    If this is how one should endorse Noynoy to the voters, I wonder.   I do not see a lot of things and I shudder at the prospect.  You make your dead parents’ attributes your main selling point,  to compensate for what you do not have and what we do not see, what kind of presidency will you lead?

Any which way you cut or turn it around, de Quiros’ argument could be shortened to this:  that we can trust Noynoy to become our President as he is the son of Ninoy and Cory and he would not dare tarnish the image of his revered parents, and would endeavor to equal or surpass them.  How he came to that conclusion, I am amazed.   He need not go far for clues,  only take a cursory glance at Kris, Noynoy’s celebrity sister, because if we go by what passes for our amateur understanding of genetics, and the cultivated image of Cory the saint and Ninoy the martyr, Kris is somebody else’s daughter!  Indeed, they say that the fruit does not fall far from the tree.  I do not know, but of good children from bad parents  or mediocre kids from brilliant parents and vice versa, I know quite a few within my own shifting social circles over the years to put doubt to whatever wisdom there is in the saying. Still, if we go by that route of reasoning, that the parents reflect on the offspring, why, it should be equally true that the children reflect on the parents.   Yet how; if you did not know Kris to be the daughter of Cory and Ninoy, met her elsewhere in another dimension, and made to divine what sort of personalities her parents are by the traits you observe of her, you think you would make a close guess?

Same with Noynoy.

The first thing you think of when Cory and Ninoy are mentioned is that Noynoy cannot afford to tarnish their names by going wayward. The second thing you think of is that he cannot afford not to try to be as good as, if not better than, them. Either way, it cannot hurt his capacity to govern, or the public’s perception of it, that he falls under that shadow. It is not a burden, it is a gift.

Right now, one wonders aloud what the hell was his problem.  Blessed as he should be with all the opportunities in the world that was his for the taking, silver spoon on his mouth, for all of 49 years, and still not a hint he is his father’s and mother’s son, save for the faint physical resemblances and the inherited surname!   As a reflection, he puts them down.  See what’s wrong there?  An inferior standing for a superior exalts the former– always. But by so much contrast, it disparages the latter, if unwittingly, and, horrors! it reflects badly on the myth.

Speaking of inherited traits, one person comes to mind: Claudio Teehankee Jr, the convicted murderer.   Is he not the favorite son and namesake of  the revered Supreme Court Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee?  Want more? The list is long.

In any case, I go by what old and grizzled political combatants say, that the presidency is destiny.  If Noynoy should win, perhaps,  it is for one divine purpose: to unravel once and for all the so-called Aquino Legacy. To the eternal glory– or eternal shame– of the forces behind him.

GOOGLE EARTH NUMBERS AND ALPHABET

From the Flickr photostream of Thomas de Bruin.

Via boingoing.com

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