This business of peddling yellow stuff

This is just a lazy and rambling Sunday piece about yellow in general, and nothing in particular. No earth-shaking stuff here about DAP or PDAF.

This morning, after having my once-in-a-blue-moon military haircut, I decided to take a relaxed stroll around the Kamuning neighborhood. It was partly to satisfy my curiosity about what typhoon Glenda had wrought, and partly to look for a near tire vulcanizing shop, since I needed to patch up my bike’s front tire that took a flat (probably from all that post-Glenda street debris).

The electric posts, as usual, were full of “Tubero” ads. No yellow ribbons were being tied to the old acacia, duhat, kaimito, kamias, atis, and sampalok trees — at least those that survived the storm. But, in fairness, I saw no peach-colored ribbons either. Continue reading “This business of peddling yellow stuff”

Internet love and nerdy thoughts on a rainy night

Sometimes, like a youth wistfully pining for a lost teenage love on a rainy night like this, I’m stricken by an irrational wish for the online world to revert back to 1992-1994.

Twenty years ago, the BBS community was earthy and robust, and the Internet was young and full of promise. Back then, I was a wide-eyed online newbie fumbling with a 2400-bps modem and AT commands. My computer was a clunky Toshiba laptop running on DOS, with an RJ-11 jack, an RS-232 serial port, and two 3.5″ floppy drives with a total 2.8 Mb active storage space.

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War veteran, vicariously

At twelve, I was a World War II veteran and D-Day survivor in Normandy. Vicariously of course, only vicariously.

Blame it, first, on the weekly episodes of Combat!, which at six I began to watch with my brothers and cousins at Auntie Maura’s house along nearby South-9 (now Scout Fuentebella) Street, which had television. Blame it, second, on our family driver and most cheerful lifetime friend Manong Natoy, who brought us kids to watch the film The Longest Day, a cinematic retelling of the June 1944 Allied landings in Nazi-occupied France, when I was seven. Both the TV show and the movie made a huge impression on me.

The frenzy of a Normandy beach in 1944
The frenzy of a Normandy beach in 1944, by the famous war photographer Robert Capa.

Continue reading “War veteran, vicariously”