Tanaka and Shelly, Both Catching Birds

I knew something was up when I heard Shelly shrieking in the hallway. Sorry to use that word, Shell, but that's a sound that I know is reserved for the discovery of things like roaches and other nasty surprises.

I was still sleeping, it being early and all, when she flung the bedroom door open and said, "Tanaka caught a bird. It was in the hallway. It was in the hallway. You have to get up now and make sure it's gone. I think it flew out the door, but I'm not sure."

In fairness to my wife, no, she wasn't scared by the bird, but I think the situation unnerved her, seeing Mister Tanaka waiting patiently for someone to come by and praise him for catching his first live prey. He was, apparently, holding the bird in his mouth very gently. The only evidence I saw that a bird was even in the house was the three gray feathers I picked up off the floor.

Yes, we promote catch-and-release birding here. Good job, Boy!

***

It was just as well that I was up, as I had to drive to Paranaque today to pick up a loaner cell phone for Shelly, who is catching a bird of a different sort, as she's off to Los Angeles via Hong Kong this evening. We were going to pick up the phone, which will temporarily replace her malfunctioning BlackBerry, on our way to the airport, where I would drop her off for her flight this evening, until Bobby and I realized that, due to Manila's pollution- and traffic-reduction scheme, I couldn't drive the car into the city during rush hour, which is when I needed to be there to drop her off. One day a week, based on the last digit of your license plate, you're forbidden from driving in the city. On Monday, you can't drive in the city if your tag ends in 1 or 2, on Tuesday if it ends in 3 or 4, on Wednesday if it ends in 5 or 6, etc. Ours ends in 5, so she'll get a ride to the airport, and I'll pick up the phone during non-rush hours.

Her trip will be short -- she'll be back on Monday after a one day meeting and a couple of days with her mom, who is flying in to see her for the weekend.

I'll be at home with the bird catcher.

Macs Are For Everybody

I've been saying this since becoming a Mac Evangelist in 1994, buying my first one just before moving to Japan. Now, a billboard on the South Luzon Expressway confirms it:

Saturday afternoon at the park

Here are those long-promised photos of our Saturday afternoon in Rizal Park, in downtown Manila.

Armed with parking advice from Bobby, we somehow managed to find free parking directly next to the park. (Of course, this led to, at the end of the day, an enterprising young man "helping" me back the car out of the spot and telling me it was "pay parking.")

Rizal Park, named for turn-of-the-20th-century Filipino revolutionary Jose Rizal, is a favorite spot for families to spend a lazy weekend day. The centerpiece of the park is a monument honoring Rizal.

On a trip past Rizal Park earlier in the week, Bobby and I were talking about the monument's specifics.

"There are three gold stars at the top of the monument," Bobby told me. "And two guards at the base."

"They're there to honor Rizal? Like an honor guard?" I asked.

"No, I think they're there to protect the gold," Bobby said. "So it doesn't get stolen."

The gold stars, hard to see, are marked with the black arrow, and one of the guards is marked with the white arrow. You can see a larger version of this (or any photo on this blog) by clicking on the photo.

After strolling around the monument, we stopped by the Chinese and Japanese parks, established by the China-Philippines and Japan-Philippines Friendship Associations. Admission: 5 pesos, or about 10 cents. Can't beat that! None of my photos came out particularly well, but I think that's more a reflection on the general unphotoworthiness of the two parks than on my photography skills. After all, with a 5 peso admission charge, there's not much money to spend on beautification...

Which left us to wander over to the "Orchidarium" which, complete with a 100 peso admission charge and corporate sponsorship, was a far better place to take photos. For example, do you know what young bananas look like?

The banana flowers are gorgeous. I tried to get a shot with flower, bees and bananas, but settled for two different pictures, either one of which is better than the flower-bees-bananas shots I took.

Another great shot came in the Orchidarium's butterfly pavillion. I posted that photo last week.

After our strenous touring, we stopped at a small refreshment stand to fortify ourselves before moving on to the National Museum, which is full of history -- including a ton of Philippine headhunter regalia -- that was all off-limits to photography. (Although, photography could, perhaps, be arranged for the payment of a "photography fee.") Shelly decided to cool off with a cup of nice, natural, from-the-Philippines coconut juice, while I decided that a cold bottle of man-made, full-0f-chemicals Pepsi would be a better choice.

And, as it turned out, it was a better choice, because it led to this photo:

I'd never had Pepsi from a bag before. Many of the bottled softdrinks here are in reusable glass bottles, much like we had in Iowa when I was growing up. And, just like we had when I was growing up, there's a hefty deposit on those bottles. The refreshment stand's owner opened my Pepsi, poured it into the plastic bag, offered me a straw and sent us on our way. (This photo also shows off my thinning hair quite nicely, I think.)

After the National Museum, we headed to Intramuros to an apparently non-existent restaurant that Shelly remembers visiting once-upon-a-time, before finally ending up eating lunch at the Manila Hotel. I like to think that I ate lunch in the very seat that Gen. Douglas MacArthur ate his lunch in. Shelly points out this isn't possibly true, that the hotel must have been much more of the dark wood interior decorating style than the chairs-upholstered-with-bright-green-fabric style present in the Cafe Ilang-Ilang today. However, you could rent the MacArthur suite -- which comes complete with 24-hour butler service -- for about $275. Surprisingly, this is actually one of the cheapest suites the hotel offers.

(MacArthur, it should be noted, made the Manila Hotel his home in Manila before and during World War II. Apparently, the MacArthur suite has been re-created to look much like it did while he lived there, but I have not been able to find any photos of the suite to link to.)

Steven Spielberg, Your Job is Safe

It's Friday the 13th, and that means bad luck ... for Shelly.

Why bad luck? In my trolling of other blogs, I found a post mentioning that video can now be uploaded to Google, then put on your blog or other Web site.

And, it just so happens that I had some raw video footage of Shelly just waiting to go online.

While the subject matter is fascinating -- it *is* Shelly, after all -- I should warn you that production values are poor, and that you will never get these 53 seconds of your life back. If you decide to go ahead and watch, you should look for Shelly's annoyance with my little video project. It starts to show itself at 24 seconds, and then again at 36 seconds.




The coolest part of this whole thing is that video was taken with cell phone. It should be stated here that my cell phone is far too complicated for me to fully understand how to use it. My phone in the States could store phone number and then call them. My phone here has all sorts of multimedia options, most of which go sadly unused, which is apparently a sign that technology has moved on and left me behind. *sigh*

But, I have figured out the camera function and, even better, how to use Bluetooth to move the photos and videos wirelessly to my Bluetooth-equipped Mac.

I made the video of Shelly using Apple's iMovie software. The following masterpiece, I made using my Nokia cell phone's movie templates, in this case stitching together two supermarket photos into a rather catchy themed 9-second movie. These photos were taken for two different purposes at two different times. I realized their co-starring potential while stuck in traffic, browsing through my phone's photo gallery.





It's safe to say that directing big budget feature films is not in my future.

I Keep Missing Out...

As if missing out on the Arrovo bill wasn't enough, I'm now left wondering how I didn't come up with a brilliant idea I read about in The Washington Post today.

A 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England, made a million bucks on the Internet in just five months, with an amazingly simple idea, says the Post:

Worried about paying his college tuition last August, Tew chanced upon one of those rare original money-making ideas. How about creating an Internet Web page out of 1 million blank pixels? And then selling those pinhead-size digital picture elements that make up a computer screen for a dollar apiece, or $100 per 10-by-10-pixel block, to advertisers who turn them into colorful tiny billboards and micro logos linked to their own Web sites?

And why not call this new marketing monstrosity "The Million Dollar Homepage" -- since Tew stood to make a million bucks?

At exactly 1:42:28 p.m. EST [Tuesday, I think -- gg], Tew can post a "sold out" sign on the Million Dollar Homepage. The spiky-haired Brit put the last thousand pixels up for auction on eBay 10 days ago with a $1 starting bid for the lot. With 24 hours to go, yesterday's bidding reached $152,300, putting him over the million-dollar mark.

The Post story says Tew's initial investment was less than $100. In addition to his million bucks, he's now sorting through a variety of job offers and business propositions.

You can visit his site here, and read the Post story here. The Post requires you to register, but it's free, and I don't think it goes much beyond a few demographics questions.

Butterflies at the "Orchidarium"

We did make it to downtown Manila on Sunday, but I don't have the photos quite sorted out. Here's a photo of a butterfly at the "Orchidarium," in Rizal Park.

More photos and a few details about our trip should be online in a day or two.

"I Blew It," says Jim

The New Year brought an e-mail from Jim, Shelly's colleague who has recently returned to North Carolina.
Remember those 100 peso notes with the President's last name spelled Arrovo rather than Arroyo? Well, Jim had managed to snag a couple of those bills from the front desk of his hotel, though he didn't realize they were anything special until the story made the news.

His e-mail also had a Reuters news story attached, noting that by the end of December, the bills were going for more than US$20 each on eBay.

"The girl that sold them to me had a whole stack of 50," Jim wrote. "They had doubled in value the next day."

They're still fetching more than US$12, which is pretty good when you consider their face value is little under two bucks. There's one optimistic eBay seller who says he's selling an Arrovo bill with the serial number AL999999. His opening bid was set at US$189.50.

Makes me wish I had one or two of those...

Fotos from the Falls

As promised, here are some photos of Pagsanjan Falls, courtesy of John on Saipan.

The water around the falls themselves was too deep for the banceros to wade through, so we stopped just a few meters shy of the falls. However, you could appreciate them from a nearby "rest area," or for a few pesos, walk under and behind the falls. Having been under waterfalls on Pohnpei, I elected to stay dry from the waist up. (Water in the boat had taken care of the waist down...)

Here's a shot just as we turned the bend from the calm, wide river to the narrow, rocky river. Yes, that's my bald spot. Yes, it's getting bigger. No, I didn't wear a hat, Mom.

And here we are at the "rest area" near the falls, complete with a life vest made for Filipino-sized tourists. I doubt it would have helped me float very much, but I paid the mandatory 50 pesos anyway.

We're heading to the Rizal Park neighborhood later today, so there will certainly be some photos up later in the week.

I'm Back. For Good This Time.

I'm back. It's been a busy couple of weeks, with Christmas and the new year, and this week has kept me busy with college football. That's not a good excuse, I realize, but all of that together adds to me not posting much. Today, I've put up a bunch of backdated posts to catch everyone up.

And from here on out, I promise to try to do a better job of posting.

Need a Ride?

Is the jeepney going your way full?
Don't want to wait for the next one?
Hop aboard!

She's Got Legs. Er, Make That Toes.

Shelly shows off her biweekly pedicure
and her oh-so-Filipina shoes.

Go Hawks!

I can't believe my luck...ESPN International will suspend its steady stream of snooker and cricket coverage for the next few days, giving me a chance to watch some college football. All of the Bowl Championship Series games will be on. More importantly, so will the Iowa-Florida Outback Bowl.

The BCS games will be great to watch: they'll be on live, at 9:00 in the morning. The Outback Bowl will be a little more of a challenge. That game kicks off at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time, which puts kick off here at midnight, Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. If it's a good game, I'll be up all night.

Who am I kidding? I'll be up all night, no matter what.

Happy New Year!

I went to bed early last night.

My wife has trouble staying up after ten or eleven p.m. We have exactly zero ringing-in-the-new-year stories, because at least one of us is always in bed long before midnight.

This year, I decided to join her.

This year, I made a big mistake.

When we arrived home from dinner around 9:00, our neighborhood was quiet. Sure, there was the neighbor behind us who was shooting off fireworks every 15 minutes, but the air conditioner, fan and white noise machine kept most of that sound out.

(Hiding from the noise was easier for our "brave" cat. When we got home, we found him cowering in a closet. When we went to bed, he immediately crawled under the bed.)

So we went to bed around 10:00. I must have fallen asleep around 11:00, only to be woken up abruptly at midnight, wondering if I were in a war zone.

Fireworks were, literally, everywhere. This is no doubt a hard concept for Americans to grasp, because when I say "fireworks were, literally, everywhere," most readers of this blog will think of firecrackers and bottle rockets.

But what I'm saying is this: Fireworks were everywhere. Fireworks, like the kind you drive to the park to see on the Fourth of July, were everywhere, shot from backyards and streets and rooftops. The acrid smell of gunpowder was in the whole house, including the air conditioned bedroom.

This incredible display of firepower -- including, I'm sure, more than a bit of gunfire -- went on for at least ten minutes. In the few oddly quiet moments in our neighborhood, I could hear, in the distance, fireworks across Manila. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe the sound. The best I can come up with, without trivializing the real gunfire of wartime, is this: Imagine a huge urban area where all the buildings have tin roofs. Then imagine giant hailstones, or frozen turkeys, or bowling balls, falling on those tin roofs, continually, for an extended period of time.

By 12:30, everything had pretty much settled down, and I wandered back to bed, where I found Shelly sound asleep. I wondered if my wife, who is at most times the lightest sleeper I've ever known, heard any of it.

Sugarcane

Our trip to Matabungkay took us through sugarcane country, right at the height of the sugarcane harvest. We saw dozens and dozens of these trucks, many of them piled much higher than this one.