An excess of sportsmanship

Sometimes it feels like there's just too much sportsmanship between Ateneo and La Salle, believe it or not. That is, there's too many people trying to take the high road and show how mature they can be.

Minutes after Ateneo crushed La Salle yesterday and won the UAAP basketball championship, I was reading some forum and La Salle people are all "good job guys, we lost to a great team!", and Ateneo people respond "kudos to those la sallites who know how to take a loss!". What a way to ruin a rumbling college rivalry with an undercurrent of goodwill. I want more trolling and rage! Bring out the big guns and fireworks guys-- you just won, it's time to rub it in their faces!

Ok ok, civility and respect is important in real life. But if we're gonna get along, there's gotta be a way to channel our natural human bloodlust into something meaningless. Sports is that outlet to let our raw human instincts run wild. Beating the crap out of someone in basketball is our modern metaphor for beating the crap out of them in real life.

That's what makes this picture so awesome. It's been sitting around on my hard drive(s) since 2002, the last time Ateneo won the championship over La Salle. At the close of Game 1 of the finals, after two potentially game-winning buzzer beaters by Mac Mac Cardona are blocked by Larry Fonacier, Wesley Gonzales comes along to complete the tableau:

Wahaha! That's right, take it, bitch!

Jeepney kid

The jeepney conductor on my ride home from work today was a young kid. Maybe he was 10.

Is conductor the right word? I'm talking about the guy that hangs off the back end of the jeepney and performs various redundant tasks that are just a small step up from useless. Sometimes he sits inside the jeepney instead, and you can usually tell him apart from the passengers because his clothes are ragged and his fingernails are caked with dirt.

He collects the jeepney fare and gives back change, a task often done by the driver himself.

He yells the jeepney route at pedestrians on the roadside, duplicating the function of the paint on the jeepney's front and side.

He also tells passengers to compress themselves when the jeepney gets filled to capacity, duplicating the role normally performed by common sense.

Back in Negros they don't even have these guys hanging off the back of the jeepneys, if I recall correctly. They're not necessary. And Dumaguete's people are far too gentle to employ people to shout at bystanders. In any case, they're all over the place in Cebu.

Anyway. I don't really mind these jeepney guys much... The job is a dead end, and the role they fulfill hardly registers a blip on the radar, but a blip is better than a bum on the sidewalk. But the kid hanging off the back of the jeep was probably around 10 years old, far too young an age for a kid to be working in any capacity. It's kind of interesting to watch, like a talking parrot or a dog standing on it's hind legs. But shouldn't he be in school or something? Is he going to have a future? Or is this his future?

It does put a dent into the belief in better days ahead.

Google's creeping ownership of my internet

I just realized how far-reaching Google's control over my internet is.

They handle my email, my feed reader, and my blog which you are reading this very moment (plus the ads I put on it and the service for tracking visitor statistics).

Thanks to YouTube they provide me with pretty much all the videos out there. With their search engine, of course, they're my portal to the rest of the internet. 

And now they have my browser.

I feel like a person that just looked into a mirror for the first time in a long time and realized how fat I've become. And I know I should go on a diet, change my lifestyle. But the strawberry milkshakes are so damn good.