Category: ephemera

Rappler and oblivion

I’ve tried to make sense of its business plan. Now and then they produce good work. The problem is in the in-between.

Click-bait for ads won’t work. Advertisers can monitor effectiveness.

Leading thoughts and brilliant conversation won’t either. They just leave you dangling, if you ask Simon and G.

Wannabe journalism cum political correctness is too a dead end. That would be too much on feelership. And also trying hard to mimic Huffington.

Can Rappler be a kinda FB for the in crowd? Not if it has to hang on FB to skate. The in-crowds can exist within FB as it is.

Could it be a pay-for-play version of Linked-In? For the PH market? Who will pay? Too thin.

Maybe some b-school type a la McKinsey is giving its investors advice. Only they’re not talking. If you had an undiscovered gold mine, would you?

I don’t know and know that I don’t. Maybe if they know, then they’d know. And I wouldn’t have to ask.

If only it could go to IPO, at least the early birds could do a ponzi dance. Good luck.

The shrinks might say cycling between bargaining and acceptance can take forever. But sooner not later the potato chips run out.

It is a puzzle.

Recovery of the Soul

The theory seems plausible.

The idea is that consciousness consists of certain “perturbations” extant in our brains not contained in time/space that “migrate” to some other universe when humans die (what about plants and animals?).  This is a theory that the soul lives on, and by extension, can be infused into another body of matter that can hold consciousness.

But why can’t we remember our past incarnations? And if we can’t remember, isn’t it the same as having “died” in the sense of the consciousness going elsewhere that we can’t recover? Or is the secret to immortality the discovery of how we can recover that consciousness, the way we move “trash” in a Mac back to regular memory?

Scientists Claim That Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death

How you are my friend

by Kermit Kefafel, April 1, 2013

So, okay, no man is an island.  And when the bell tolls, it tolls for all of us.

But do we all have to be friends? Of course not.

For one, friendship is not a choice.  It just happens.  It is quite possible that two people are friends but don’t know that they are.  They may see each other in some other relationship, like father-son or politician-voter, etc., but when friendship happens, the two friends simply are.

So, exactly, if it were definable, what is a friend?  I think friends are those who enjoy each other’s ‘alive-ness.’  You can enjoy Buddy Holly, but if he didn’t know you when he was still alive, you can’t be friends.  But this just pushes the definition question to outer space: What is enjoyment?  There I stop.  That’s the primitive in the friendship definition.

Here are a few random ‘facts’ about friendship:

Only peers can be friends.  Inequality kills friendship. A person in need is usually not a friend; he’s just needy.   But a rich man can friend a poor man if they were equal on some other footing, like skill at eight ball. This means, intellectually, I can’t be friends with the folks at rappler.com.  They think they’re thought leaders, so I must be a follower.  Tough beans.

You can’t have too many friends.  Any one who says he has lots of friends lies.  Why is this?  This is so because, as I said earlier, friendship just happens.  And somehow the gods of friendship require that you be able to count your friends easily. How can you ‘enjoy’ someone you can’t even remember? This is also so because equality is a precarious balance, an uneasy equilibrium.  That also means an enemy can be a friend.

Friends respect each other’s relationships with others.  This follows from the selective (though not by choice) but peer nature of friendship. Peers let peers do their thing. And pears let apples be.

Even more importantly, friends value each other’s privacy. Every act of friendship that involves an ‘opening up’ is only through mutual consent.  You can’t even ‘confess’ a secret to a friend who doesn’t want to listen (because that’s the way he/she might be at that time). And of course, one who feels entitled to crash in on you at any time is not a friend but one who abuses the idea of friendship.  Bottom-line neologism: Friends, more than others, understand and maintain fences and boundaries.

An especially good kind of friendship is the low-maintenance plug-in plug-out kind.  You haven’t seen this friend in years.  And yet, you meet and it was as though it was yesterday that you last saw each other.  This has a down side.  When such a friend dies, sometimes it takes a while before you can grieve because you may not know about it for a while. This happened to me, so I know how tough that is.

Love and friendship are not the same.  Can they mix? Only if lovers understand boundaries, and usually they don’t.

Very few of even your ‘close friends’ on Facebook are your friends.  Some of your friends on Facebook are your enemies.  Beware.  I wrote this note on April 1, 2013 (that’s a double-whammy in the superstition derby).

Why, why, why

Why did Manny P lose?

A wag gave three reasons the night before today’s champagne split.

One, he has tax problems and perhaps will make more from a rematch.

Two, his camp wasn’t really so sure about the hype about clean living and bible reading.

Three: God’s will.

UPDATE:  Wag no. 2 wanted ten reasons, so he gave seven more after the fight was over:

Two of the judges have cataracts. And Ronnie Nathanielsz thinks it’s a high crime to have cataracts.

Manny and Jinky didn’t have a fight the night before; they had too much Moet et Chandon.

Vegas didn’t recruit judges from the International Criminal Court, and MDS is still in PH.

More than a few politician ‘friends’ of Manny actually bet on Bradley.

Manny left the LP, which weakened his left hook.

Mommy D prayed too hard, even as Manny lost his rosary.

Manny read the latest divorce bill filed by Gabriela.

The Justin Bieber haircut is bad luck. Bald and bold is in.

FROM ELSEWHERE, the NY Times weighs in with ‘distractions.’

‘Circuses of the Surreal’

What is wrong with Patricia Evangelista? Many people consider her a brilliant writer. The brilliance shows in her latest op-ed.

Yet, still, somehow, I’m not a vendee. Evangelista concludes that a respondent in a court proceeding betrays the public trust by asking for presumption of innocence and seeking judicial review on the belief that the court has over-reached. I submit however that legal parries and the accompanying PR spin do not amount to betrayal of public trust. The man is simply trying to survive.

The respondent may well be guilty, but still the pro reo principle holds. You still have to give him his day in court – there is a due process requirement albeit limited because life, liberty, or property is not at stake.

And if he’s innocent, all the more does he deserve to ask for his constitutional rights.

What is probably more correct than Evangelista’s colorful pushes on English is simply this: That if you protest too much, you lose.

The real damage to Chief Justice Corona’s position is not from the ‘let-me-join-the-bandwagon’-while-being-cute style of Evangelista. Nor even from the more general sense that the impunity show should come to an end.

The damage comes from the abundant sneer emanating from his counsels. If a somewhat distracted observer can sense that they think the rest of us, including the judges, are hicks because we don’t know the basket-weaving of remedial law, then the political kick does kick in. The Senate may well convict if only because it has been insulted. That’s the tragedy of the case if the respondent deserves an acquittal; it’s karma otherwise.