1. A great dough is the result of skill and patience combined.
2. Having the complete ingredients help but spreading everything evenly matters most.
3. An expensive pizza cutter does not guarantee equal slices.
4. If it is good, everyone will love it.
5. Sometimes it pays to be a bit cheesy.
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Mood: 3/10! (I blame last night’s pizza.)
Apple is not stopping and it seems to target the lower-end market this time. If the article from rappler.com is true, then people who currently can’t do anything but envy those who can afford to acquire (whatever it takes) an iPhone will soon be able to get one for themselves.
According to the report, this less pricey Apple smartphone will use cheaper materials for its housing but the rest of its features, hopefully most capabilities, will be retained. Rappler.com adds, however, the folks from Apple have neither denied nor confirmed that this is happening soon but I know that less privileged consumers can wait. At least, I can speak for myself and until then I might stay stuck to this my|Phone which I bought just yesterday to replace my Nokia 5800 phone. Ti abi. Life of a masa.
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I’m back to basics. The my|Phone B88+ Duo has made me deal with one that doesn’t have a touchscreen and with only an alphanumeric keypad. It is a far cry even from my 5800 — which has quit working — but anyway it gets me connected…through SMS.
Update: Apple has spoken and it’s bad news: the rumors aren’t true which means pricey iPhones stay. Conos — 1, Masa — 0.
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Mood: 3/10 Honks! (Kiddo demanding to go biking.)
I just woke up from my scheduled nap at work when the news at our pantry room made me feel nauseous — it’s déjà vu. The BBC breaking news was too familiar: another school shooting. And once again, in the US. Suddenly, Connecticut was like a mile away from the Philippines — the news rippled across. The sight of policemen and other authorities scrambling around the crime scene – a school campus –looks all too chilling.
The last time a school shooting happened, I was thinking that it’s just a matter of time when another one will take place again. And it did. But whatever the reasons are – bullying, bad parenting, bad community, TV influence, etc. – I cannot fully grasp. It is always hard to understand what would drive one from doing something evil especially to innocent children. It’s just sad day – 18 dead children, 18 grieving families. And to think that it will be Christmas soon.
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Mood: 5/10 Honks! (Why?)
Some friends are like garbage collectors — they know you from your trash.
We have all heard it and will likely continue to hear about it: “We Filipinos are bad drivers…no, we are the worst.” “If you have driven in the Philippines, you can drive anywhere in the world.” These and similar other statements about driving in the Philippines have made us stereotype ourselves and in effect made most of us think that the rest of the world drive in an orderly fashion than we do. But wait, this could not be entirely true at all.
If the author Tom Vanderbilt is to be believed, there a lot others out there who are worse than us and our perennial bad traffic flow – and yes, believe it or not, perceived by many as where traffic laws are fully enforced, the US is included. According to his book Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do, bad drivers can be found allover the globe and continue to contribute to road congestion, road rage, and accidents, not to mention stress, just to name a few ill effects of the growing volume of cars and other vehicles that are present at one time in one place.
I got my copy of Tom’s book only after two years since the day I learned about its release and it was only because it was on sale in National Bookstore by half its original price. But sooner I realized that the P300 plus I paid for it is a real steal because the 400-page paperback has a lot more to offer than expected. As I progress from one page to another, it stomps out that know-it-all and I-drive-a-lot-better-than-you premise I have had and which I am sure that other drivers possess as well.
Aside from rich facts about relationship (or lack thereof) of man, machine, and the road, almost each chapter of the book contains information never been made known to common drivers. For example, are you aware that car designers, other than complex mathematical algorithms, also have to deal with factors such human psychology and pop culture to cope up with the growing demand for mobility, thus the need for cars, and its effect to traffic?
“Traffic has become a way of life. The expanding cup holder, which became fully realized standard equipment only in the 1980s, is now the vital enabler of dashboard dining…Fast-food restaurants now clock as much as 70 percent of their sales at drive-through windows…” (page 16)
How would you feel if someone presents to you the idea that road signs invite people to violate it more and that by removing these will improve drivers’ behavior?
“Do traffic signs work, and are they really needed at all? This question has been raised by Hans Monderman…How foolish are we in always telling people how to behave. When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like that.” (page 190)
And did you know that our balikbayan relatives could be actually lying every time they smirk in the backseat and follow it up with that famous cliché “walang ganito sa states….”? Why? Because Tom Vanderbilt also exposes the US as having its own share of jaywalkers (Why New Yorkers Jaywalk (and Why they Don’t in Copenhagen: Traffic as Culture); traffic light-beating drivers; and motorcycle riders who shun helmet laws.
Released in 2008, Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do, contains vast insights, supported by references and citations, about traffic and therefore makes it a must read book for all of us who continue to wonder what causes bad traffic and if there are indeed solutions to it or if there is none, at least change our own perspective of how we and others drive so that we co-exist better than we do today.
***
Mood: 3/10 Honks! (We’ll be in Nuvali later. Driving with or without the low beam.)
We will know that we are really old when the songs we enjoy every Friday have been moved to Sundays.
There are times when talking is good; when whistling and humming is appreciated; and there are times when closed lips are much preferred.
Some people are like Halloween pumpkins — bright, empty, and scary.
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This is my first Light Bulbs category entry (also my first Quote format post). This is where you’ll find short stuffs and I will post some of my Tweets here as I still haven’t figured out how to archive my own hash tags.
Are you one of those people who got panicky when the year 2012 started because you know that this is the year when the dreaded doomsday is set to happen? Well, I hate to break this to you but the world has ended already – at least it is what should have happened had some genius did not correct the calendar about 400 years ago and with the assumption that the popular ancient Mayan December 21, 2012 doomsday prediction is correct.
Let’s all rejoice now, however, and accept that 2013 and all the annual routines are coming, like it or not, because like damage control done by some analysts the moment they see that what they once have strongly forecasted are starting to go the opposite directions, I am now starting to see more articles about why the Mayan doomsday might not actually take place this 2012. One good reference I have is from one of my old textbooks which I brought with me to kill time inside a bank whose tag line is ‘We Find Ways’ but so far haven’t found the way to fix its ever long queue (but it is another long and sad story). Pages 58-59 of the book Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney, has this very interesting information — which I read while standing in line for about an hour:
…By the sixteenth century, Easter Sunday was slowly but inexorably migrating toward Christmas.
Pope Gregory XIII asked Clavius to head a commission investigating the increasingly embarrassing problem. What was going wrong with the calendar? As it turned out, the actual solar year was shorter – 674 seconds shorter…What’s 674 seconds? Not much in a year, but problematic once compounded over centuries…
…In order to undo more than a millennium of compounded damage…Clavius’s commission had Pope Gregory XIII proclaim that in the year of 1582 the day after October 4 would be October 15. Even loyal Catholics had cause to grumble: their lives have been shorted by nearly two weeks.
I have actually underlined these while reading the book back in 2009 just because it tells about the origin why we now have the leap year and that’s it. Besides, during that time when I was still studying TSLEADER subject (under Prof. Lino Rivera who is currently DepEd Undersecretary) I haven’t even heard about any doomsday movie nor news about the end of the world other than what is written in the Revelation. But blame the movie 2012 and the hype surrounding it, December 21, 2012 became the dreaded D-day. Thankfully, as the abovementioned excerpt presents — if (and only if) the ancient Mayans indeed state the date December 21, 2012 in their prediction but failed to factor in the flaw that Clavius eventually corrected — the most feared December 21 has already past.
Yes, I know the feeling. No more modern Noah’s Ark, no more earthquakes of catastrophic proportion that will cause us to jump across gaping cracks on the ground, and the show Doomsday Preppers suddenly turns funny if not totally ridiculous. But who knows?
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Mood: 2/10 Honks! (Friday afternoon. Watching TV with Marcus. Wifey still on her long siesta.)
Marcus Can Blog 