life's simple pleasures

One of the many things I am thankful for is the strong influence the French Culinary Institute has had on my wife. Her take on gastronomy has decidedly veered towards Old-World flavour and presentation since coming back from culinary education abroad. This is what we had for dinner at home yesterday. Leg of lamb encrusted with a parsley accented rub of breadcrumb & mediterranean sea salt, served with seasonal green salad with seedless grapes, blue cheese, and walnuts over a lemon tarragon dressing. The wine of choice for the dinner was a new world cabernet sauvignon. being a relatively young wine, the tannins competed quite well with the gamey flavour of the lamb. Dessert was a single 10-gram block of Nama dark chocolate infused with Henessy, which was hand-carried by the people of Royce from Japan. No, we were not celebrating any special occasion. It was just a regular Sunday dinner at home. My wife often says "who else among your friends regularly have fine-dine dinners at home?" And to this I now reply, "who among your friends have their husbands import Nama chocolate by Royce?" oh, life's simple pleasures... again.

Music From the Summer Palace

Music has always had a refreshing and beneficial quality to it.

Especially for a medium such as the internet, which is multi-media enabled, music is becoming an essential partner for more and more browsing activities.

so, just to challenge the mind, let's see if a good photograph can actually get you to think of a song...

incidentally, the image is from my series "unseen details in a once-forbidden city".

My finger-lickin' moments...

If there is anything I really live for, it is food. Good food. Exceptional flavours. Exotic ingredients. Blissful aromas. Funny when you realize that some of the best meals I have had were the ones I had at home. Funny, because one of the reasons why my wife and I travel is to sample regional cuisine in their own exotic locale. Funny also, because our home-cooked meals have often been gourmet delights in their own little way, but which just goes unnoticed mainly because for us it is just another private meal. And if i were to list some of the most memorable ones, this would probably land in the top ten. In terms of breakfasts, one of the best I have ever had was a home-cooked one with a couple of seriously exotic (and expensive) food items. I remember it was some time in december, about a week after i was invited by Avida Land to give a speech on the beauty of Manila, during a commemoration of their topping off activity at the San Lazaro towers, when i woke up to a blissful aroma of fried meat... Following the hugely inviting smell, I walked into the kitchen where my wife was just about to flash-sear foie gras as topping to a wagyu beef salisbury steak! So, how else do you ever top that for breakfast? (well, you top it with lots of fragrant steamed rice! hahaha)

The Impertinence of Youth

Yes, we all went through it. Yes, we were once young. And yes, I never, never remember ever behaving that way. No sense of courtesy. They don't even bother to return your messages or calls. even emails. No sense of time, other than their own. No sense of responsibility. They just ignore you. Filipinos have a colloquial term for this behavior. They call it "DeadMa". Who raised you to be that way anyway? I hope it comes back at you when you are at your weakest. Let's see how you grasp at straws. To hell with you.

December moonrise, San Juan.

Another Intermission.

Feel free to scroll through the details of this photograph i took in December 2007.

One of the chief causes of eye fatigue is a reduction in the number of blinks we take once we are on the computer.

Although I am sure you will be trying to figure out which buildings are featured, please try to count to five, and then blink once. then count again and blink. To help you out, the buildings are Tiffany, Jafer, LPL Goldland, Eisenhower, and Swire Elan. now, blink again.

CD-R King, the hardware version of the internet

CD-R King is the hardware version of what the internet is, to the internet believers..

In relation to an earlier post about people treating the internet as a treasure-trove of all that is factual, I have met people who will actually swear by the invention or non-invention of something depending on whether they have actually seen the product in the shelves of CD-R King. actually, even I have occasionally fallen into that mold. a recent case in point. Somebody told me that there already is a 16G flash drive now. Scanning my head for my last CD-R King visit, I validated his statement. "Pero di pa tinitinda sa Pilipinas" because it still wasn't on their store shelves. hahaha.

People, myself included, may fall into this maxim. "if we do not see it being sold in CD-R King, then it has not yet been manufactured!" hahaha. personal benchmarking. a very significant pitfall from a consumer marketing point of view.

But now that we are in the thick of discussions on CD-R King, let me just say for the record that I have found most of my cheap and useless electronic clutter from that store. You know, the USB Lans, USB cellphone data cables, USB bluetooth dongles, USB soda drink coolers (yes!!!), USB coffee mug warmers, PCI this and PCI that, as well as a host of USEFULL and (dirt)CHEAP stuff I normally would not have been able to buy at the god-awful prices of those other electronics consumables stores. Let me run them by you. a Kingston 1G USB flash drive then selling at P500 just 6 months after I got mine for P4,350. (now, a 1G kingston sells for P250!) USB wifi dongles at P580 versus P1,880 at another store. LAN WIFI Routers at P1,400. Philips Litescribe DVD-R discs at P25. cellphone LCD protectors at P60. laptop LCD protectors at P250.

Oh, one other thing. Bluetooth stereo receiver headphones integrated into a pair of sunglasses for just over a thousand bucks... but then the sunglasses resemble a style I call "the Terminator Look..."

and they have finally put the 16G Compact Flash drive on their shelves for a ridiculously low price of P3,380. you wouldn't believe that we paid over 15k for our very first 1G CF microdrive...

if it's not on the internet...

Ever bump into one of those shmucks who won't believe that something is for real unless they read in on the internet?? Ever since grade school my favorite pastime was reading about the biggest this, the fattest that, and the longest freaks of the animal world. way back then, the only resource I could tap for such materials was the school library. I would read all the different publications that I could get my hands on. And there was one particular book that was the ultimate authority, on print, on such subjects: the guinness book of world records. of course, I knew about it's ommissions as well, printing only what people have taken the time to report to them that they have personally verified; but I am already digressing outside my chosen topic. so, while going through it's pages, I learned about pythons, anacondas and some other monstrosities found in the deep recesses of jungles. The capybara, an 80lb. cousin of the rat, is one of the bigger meals of anacondas while pythons, who choose to live mostly at the fringes of human settlements, more often prefer chickens and the occasional dog. With the fast-diminishing rain forest, encounters between snakes and humans in the wild, although not an everyday occurence, still happen. And if it were a single human and a single large snake in the snake's territory, the snake usually will be the winning party. Now fasttrack into the internet age. I received a link sometime ago regarding a picture of a python with a huge bulge in it's body; when it was captured, the python was split open and it revealed a newly ingested human. now, the post had another link to a message board of a european car club in the Philippines, and that was what blew me away. they were arguing on how unbelievable the photographs were, and in such a rabid manner that you knew they weren't rocket scientists! among the arguments they raised was that no snake could open it's mouth big enough to swallow a human, while several very strongly insisted that they already did an internet search on it and COULDN'T FIND ANYTHING, about it; therefore it had to be FALSE. No snake could possibly do that. Nothing on the internet said so. the sad thing about it was that these were the priviledged people speaking. you would really wonder whether these guys: 1) dropped out of school earlier than their older cousins, 2) never read anything other than their eurocar manuals, 3) never understood the concept of critical thinking.

But when i discussed it one time with my fraternity brother from the University of the Philippines, Ron Taccad, he said he had already noticed that it was beginning to be a characteristic of the youth; to refer to the internet as the only credible authority. He summed up the situation like this. "People today will believe something, so long as they read it on the internet. But what is scarier, is that they will NOT believe something if they cannot find it on the internet."

His statement reminded me about something Tony Te said to me about 5 years ago. he said "the sad thing about kids today is that despite having easy access to information, they have no idea about what to do with it." he adds, "today, they have all the knowledge at their fingertips, all the intelligence, BUT NONE OF THE WISDOM."

And that is so so sad.