Liwanag asin Diklom Susog Ki Rudy Alano

Sa banggi an kadaihan nin ribok

minapatarom sa bagting nin oras

kan simong pagturog.

An simong daing pundong pagngalas

sa kadikloman nin langit minapasabong

na ika palan matakton

pag an dating mararambong

na liwanag nin mga bituon

natatambunan nin mahibog na ambon.         

          Kagurangnan kong Diyos! Pumondo ka

na nganing kahihiling sa diklom.

Pabayae an saimong aldaw

maging ribayan nin saldang asin uran

ugma asin kulog sa simong kalamnan

verso asin pangadyi nin saimong kalag.

Baka igwa diyan nin anghel sa kadikloman

na nagtao nin kasimbagan paramientras

na ika nakaluhod, takot na minatubod.

Ngonyan an simong puso buminilang logod--

mga tiket, mga sinurat, mga ritrato,

mga subang nginisihan, mga kinantang lahos

miski ngani mga serbesang nainom--mamate lang

kun ano man yan senyal nin Diyos.

Na sa kadikloman an Diyos. Sa buhay.

Pero hilinga--an langit minaliwanag giraray

pag minahulog an uran, ini minasalak

sa daing-pundong hinangos nin dagat; an burak

minahalat sa saldang asin an saldang minataong buhay

sa daga asin sa tubo nin kakahoyan

asin an banggi minagayon pag simong nakakaptan

an nagbabados na tulak kan simong namomotan

na padagos minahangos sa kasulok-suloki

kan saimong kalag.

                         Asin duman sa dai ta aram

na istaran may sarong anghel sa kadikloman na dai

makatubod sa nadadangog niyang daing-pundong

bagting nin simong puso.

"Sabihi Daw Ko, Padi Kun Ano Man Ning Sinasabi Tang Buhay"

ni Rudy Alano. 

Sinusog hali sa Haliya: Anthology of Bikol Poets and Poems 

ni Ma. Lilia F. Realubit, NCCA, mayong petsa.

Extension work

You have been doing extension work for quite a while. 

As time passes, you see the difficulty of researchers and extension workers in expressing themselves and taking pride in their output, which some of them even fondly call their labor of love. 

Consider the regional symposium you are now tasked to cover.  You listen to the researcher who sounds awkward presenting the project on the production of this crop. During the panel evaluation, you pity her because the evaluator loudly scores points off the study because it lacks the right methodology. The national crops expert tells in her face that the study being reported presents only commonsensical information that needs neither explanation nor further study. You realize from among the crowd she turns out to just fill in to report for the said study. She virtually “extended” her services for her absentee fellow researcher.

While the other researchers may be articulate in the technology they must have studied, er, mastered in all their 20 years or something of government service, you find it revolting that they do not sound good in their English. They sound funny speaking in their borrowed language. In the presentations conferences and contests, what you will appreciate are those who are well versed in their studies as they are fluent in speaking the technical terms in English.

You wonder whether there have been efforts through the years in the academic world to allow for researches to be written in the Filipinos’ native language, if the purpose is to advance the technologies and not how the English-speaking world understands or wants to receive them.

Why does the presenter who is fluent in English impress you more? The mussel community researcher sounds fishy to you because he has this twang, an accent probably spoken in one northern town of this province.

Sadly, because you were taught English this way and not that way, you yourself are isolated from what you see and hear. The Filipino tongue that makes the most correct English inflections sound more pleasing and seem to merit your attention. You rather notice the researcher who could not fully express his efs and vees. To you he sounds less persuasive. His wrong enunciations distract you that you don’t want to reconsider what he has to say while he is being aided by his PowerPoint slides.

Further in the presentation sessions, you notice the presenter on biogas digester did not use parallel structures in his objectives. You wonder if he cares about these at all. He even sounds like a military general who cannot distinguish his e’s from his i’s. He reminds you of the military chief over the television who munches English as if it were peanuts.

You ask when you can start to admire.

Here, you realize that everyone presenting the study for scrutiny might as well have the heart to extend to what other people have to say about their labors of love; extend further to see whether they are valid judgments so they can improve the study. Extend further to understand, if the said judgments are rather prejudiced and therefore should only be ignored.

This presenter on site-specific nutrient management very well understands her figures as she reports her rice research. Asking her questions now, the panel evaluator sounds like she speaks the same language. It seems she is going to win because they sound alike when they begin the discussion. Perhaps she will win the top prize in this summit because the presenter’s words slide into your ears and your sensibility.  Other extension workers seem to mince words. But she doesn’t. Does this study prove to have more social impact than those presented by less articulate ones? While there are criteria set for all this research business, you start to wonder who deserves the prize.

An Dakulang Natad

Suddenly, last summer

Iyo Po, Isinisikwal Ko

Enchanted in Iligan

Thinkers and Theorists

Mother and Child

An Samong Kakanon sa Aroaldaw

Bikoliana

O My Boracay

Ibalong Gallery

The Predictables

Rating:	★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

Do not watch Sylvester Stallone’s "The Expendables."

The film features perhaps all the biggest action stars who came and went in your lifetime: Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwazenegger (most probably in cameo roles); British Jason Statham, Asian Jet Li, Russian Dolph Lundgren, American wrestler Steve Austin, et.al., but it hugely, hugely fails to deliver the right punches.

Putting too many action stars in one movie is the stupidest thing to do because each of them is a master(piece) in his own right that he needs ample airtime to deliver sensible action entertainment, and because the action star is no less than himself.

It is a sorry movie with a highly worn-out storyline. Like any action flick, the film’s main characters are called to mission to save the world before the day ends. So what else can we expect?

Here it is as if Sly’s character Barney Ross leads a band of "elite mercenaries" [read: tambay or jobless bystanders] named The Expendables sporting in their Harley-Davidsons a Guns&Roses logo, but who were only made to appear they just needed money from working in the movie and in the story in the movie. It’s funny the actors’ characters’ themselves belabor the issue of paychecks for quite a while in the film.

Stallone then contracts Bruce Willis’s Mr. Church to give him and his men a project, very much like a regional research proposal in dire need of funding from the national office. Barney Ross's rival, Schwazenegger’s character Trench, refuses any involvement as he goes out of the church with Stallone saying maybe he wants to be president. Cameo.

The men then go to the island of Vilena where Eric Roberts' Monroe terrorizes and blackmails a despotic general ruling a Latin-American village a la Castro. The once-idyllic Vilena is where the action starts and ends.

End of story.

While the movie is hackneyed it doesn’t offer anything new but a reworking of cassava (read: staple) roles, it also rendered interesting insights on the action stars themselves. Hahaha.

First, the movie made Stallone’s face look like a great waxwork that one more Vicky Belo job would make his face legendary as Michael Jackson [and his face]. Second, Willis and Schwazenegger’s less than two-minute exposure will not win them any Oscars like Judy Dench’s Queen Elizabeth did in "Shakespeare in Love" as it does not do anything to save the movie. At best, they’re reduced to phantoms and additional utility workers in the movie’s line-item budget. In the Philippine film glossary, they will surely be top-billed as "with the special participation of." Such waste of talent, or more aptly, such wasted talents.

It is as if Stallone only assembled the stars in one barangay meeting so as to make the sensible Mickey Rourke a tattoo beautician tinkering with paints and needles in the Expendables’ talyer [a neighborhood machine shop], waste the precious time of Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren to stage an awfully funny mismatch. Another one: it also made Steve Austin’s brawny physique dumber than dumb as the worst alalay [sidekick] for the aging Eric Roberts.

Saving grace? Here it is. While the Asian success named Jet Li is given a limited role he virtually wasted his time waiting for action to happen, and it did not, and while his shortness is berated in the entire script, he used it to his advantage when he fights the gigantic Dolph Lundgren in a restaging of the David and Goliath story. Wuhuhu. More interestingly enough, his character’s constant desire to earn more money so he could provide for his family saves [and very well speaks for] this Asian sensibility.

On the whole, watching this movie is like buying fresh oranges from the sidewalk vendor. The fruit looks too tangy as it is very, very orange. But when you then remove the fresh-looking rind, the rind covers a dried-up membrane inside.

Nowadays, imported movies are like imported fruits. It’s the same experience. These days, it’s only appearances [that are made to] matter. [You don’t even know where the ponkan fruit came from. Reading further information on these cheap imports, you may learn that the fruit is a genetically modified treat stuffed with all chemicals needed to grow it.] Substance is secondary, relegated to the side. You are conned however you’d like to see it.

Watching the movie in the mall is worth more than a hundred pesos, but its real value should even be cheaper than a 20-peso DVD which you can perhaps haggle in the Delgado sidewalk.

Not only that it is not worth your money, it will also make you puke in the movie house because of the dizzying action scenes which are virtually a hodgepodge of computer generated images (CGIs). Here you cannot ignore the gore just because it reminds you of Counterstrike matches your nephew loves to play some six years ago. But you would not see real (meaning: simulated) action in the movie.

You will be forced to watch, but you will not be entertained. Because movies today are only computer generated stuff, you need not fret to catch its last run in the next three days. Better watch your son kill his character’s enemies with finesse and genius in DotA (Defense of the Ancients) on your PC at home. That, for sure, is a real-time live action at best.

Misnomers

Passing Molo plaza, you see a billboard bearing the city officials’ names and faces and flaunting a title given by a national entity that Iloilo is one of the “highly urbanized cities” across the country. Upon reading this claim, which rather only looks like a political poster of the officials simply because their names are spelled bigger than the citation itself, you begin to wonder.

You wonder whether the phrase isn’t too lofty a statement, especially because only a week ago, you were trapped inside the mall because the city’s main thoroughfares were flooded after only a few minutes of heavy rain. You wonder whether this speaks truth about a city whose streets reek of garbage and God-knows-what because of its clogged sewers.

Highly urbanized. Who said so? Shouldn’t the people from Iloilo themselves claim this? You wonder whether the phrase rather refers to the increased number of fast food outlets, BPO centers or BDO banks mushrooming every week everywhere. Seriously the phrase is given wrongly if it were to mean a progressive city. Your city cannot claim progress just because many establishments mushroom in and crowd the city and clog its sewers every single day. The clogged city sewers underground which could hardly be seen by an ordinary city dweller on an ordinary day only prove this claim very wrong.

You think twice, then. Maybe highly urbanized really means: Ati families lining the sidewalks or taong grasa living in the footbridges downtown because the city’s DSWD cannot offer them alternatives. Or perhaps highly urbanized means a new outlet of Andok’s or Mang Inasal whose daily garbage in front of their food tables smells like fart and rotting chickens.

Going further down the city on a Mohon Terminal-Villa jeepney, you try to seek some logic. Ah, yes, perhaps. Iloilo City is highly urbanized because recently it launched the new flyovers.

Passing the John B. Lacson maritime school, you wonder why your jeepney does not pass over the flyover. You wonder why you do not fly over. You are running late for an appointment because the jeepney is inching its way to get to the General Luna-Diversion Road intersection.

You assume the driver does not have to pass the flyover if he were to save for his family’s Passover. Why should he pass there when it obviously does not have any passengers for him to pick up? So now you are left only to look at the flyover, the towering structure above you where not so many cars and jeepneys pass.

So you go with the flow, joining a procession of cars slowing down into one direction, squeezing into whatever spaces are left by the blockade rendered by the flyover.

You think it is laughable that this small city has to build flyovers. Funny, everyone in their seats is rushing to get to their destination, while the flyover, which ought to facilitate traffic, is unmoving. It’s just too s[t]olid to care.

No, flyover; maybe it is an apt term for the structure.  Because below it, your mind now wanders; that it wants to “fly over” the reality that you’re running late to meet visitors from the national office in a city hostel.

But progress? No, flyovers do not mean progress. The structures rather block the progress for the people of the city. It delays students from their classes; it delays workers from their offices. The big structures that block wider passageways physically rob people of their spaces. Traffic congestion can never be removed by blocking the street itself with a prominent structure that rises and descends in less than 500 meters or so.

Aren’t flyovers supposed to redirect traffic in order to avoid bottlenecks and traffic glitches? But here you are, an ordinary city dweller, eternally trapped below the flyover. You realize that the structure is a farce for the city’s progress, because it does not bring you anywhere when you need it. It only delays you from going where you need to go.

Your mind has really just flown over. Your car has been unmoving for a long time. You think of explaining why you were late to meet your visitors. No wonder you now scram to alight from the jeepney at General Luna because your visitors from the national office must have been through eating their hotel breakfast and perhaps could not wait on you anymore. So you run, still bent on meeting them on time. At the hotel’s entrance, the big sign of the room rates again scream at you: “Economy P750.”

Economy, P750. Can this be another name applied in error? Perhaps the term applies to what ordinary Ilonggos can afford. Or does it mean to say it’s the reflection of the city’s economy? You ask again whether an ordinary Ilonggo can afford this economy. You wonder whether he or she can ever afford the city’s economy. Or are the city hotels only made for tourists like your visitors from the national office who could afford them because the travel papers you have arranged say they are on official business?

You now meet your visitors in earnest, complete with pleasantries and stuff. And after your cups of coffee which were paid for by your government agency’s office, you engage your visitors in a conversation about your good performance with your clients in the past quarter. You try to sound like you helped ordinary people a lot in their business which provides livelihood to many more.

You claim to them that these people have been helped by your intervention, but you can hardly cite the facts and figures that can attest to it. Have they been helped by what you did? How come they still depend on you on matters that concern their businesses? How come they would still ask for your lobbying to pay for their booth rental in the recent mall exhibit that they wanted to join?

When you report matters to the visitors from your national office, you speak as if you were able to help many marginalized and underprivileged people in your detail. You sound as if you have always improved people’s lives or helped them progress, so that these national people who think they know better could help you as if  they were messiahs sent to save the people in Iloilo from a sorry situation.

You don't wonder if you are a blabbering misnomer yourself.