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Blame it on the Mee Grob. I wanted something different from my usual lunch so I ordered the mee grob. Didn’t realize there was so much tofu in it and I hate tofu. There I was trying to avoid the tofu in the noodles when there was a sudden blast of noise.

Someone was playing Air Supply in my presence.

I would rather hear an orchestra of flatulent trolls farting the complete discography of Paula Abdul than hear anything by Air Supply. That noise polluter had to be eradicated. I looked around to see the source of the horror—it was emanating from one of the cars displayed in the hallway. A salesperson had gotten into the car, turned up the radio, and was headbanging to an Air Supply song. How it is possible to headbang to Air Supply I have no idea, but this person was doing it and he seemed extremely pleased with himself.

I sat there chewing crispy noodles, thinking, Maybe it’ll stop. It didn’t. Do I live and let live? Do I sit idly by while this creature vaporizes all unprotected brains within a 1-km radius? Will I allow this troglodyte to unleash this atrocity on the entire populace? Hell no!

I went up to the sales staff and said, “Could you turn that down. Nakakairita.” It was couched as a request, but it clearly did not end in a question mark or offer the possibility of a negative answer. Use The Voice.

Instantly, silence.

In employing The Voice I took inspiration from Armida Siguion Reyna, whom I’d run into a half-hour earlier. She must be pushing 80 and she looks terrific. She was wearing an ornate metallic headband low on her forehead. “Tita Midz,” I said, “What a lovely headband.” She said, “Masakit lang minsan kung mali ang kapit.” (It hurts sometimes when it’s put on the wrong way.)

We all have our favorite Armida stories. If you type her name using predictive spelling, the program tries to change the spelling to “Armada”, which is also correct. I once saw her on a talk show where the host said, “Tita Midz, you look so young! What’s your secret?” She quickly replied, “Nagpa-facelift ako.”

Tita Midz is the master at not taking guff from anyone. There’s the story of the immigration official who asked her, “Why do you come to New York every six months?” Her riposte: “Because I’m rich.”

GMA medical checkup OK
By JONATHAN M. HICAP, CHARISSA M. LUCI
July 2, 2009, 6:03pm

The informant, who requested anonymity since the source was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the President was scheduled to undergo augmentation mammoplasty at the Asian Hospital and Medical Center in Alabang, Muntinlupa. . .

Read it before it disappears.

Has to be a hoax. You naughty, naughty hackers.

Thanks to Fabia for the alert.

Update, 1311. It appears I have given hackers too much credit. According to the Bulletin it is a legitimate news story. However, they changed the first paragraph. The story also appears in the print version. So there.

Jarius Bondoc has details in the Star.

Why did I assume it was a hoax/hack attack? Geek fantasy? (Saw Jonny Lee Miller in the audience at Wimbledon and immediately thought, Hackers!) Did I expect Malacanang spin control to plug up all information leaks? Or do I simply not think of the president as being a woman?

Their front page: Three Women.

First time I clapped a pair of Sony Walkman headphones onto my ears I thought, ‘This is the greatest invention ever!’ Ah, the Eighties. For the next decade I was never without my beloved Walkman. And extra batteries, and two cassettes.

Now that I think about it, my beloved Walkman was not the same unit my parents bought me in senior year high school. That one was stolen from the office of the school paper at Pisay. We all had a good idea who did it, but the perp never confessed nor did he return it. Whatever ill luck has befallen that perp since high school may be traced to this nefarious crime. The Walkman had been left in Clomski’s charge so he accepted responsibility and replaced it with the exact same model, the first edition from Sony. That is why he’s now the CFO of a giant multinational.

My ancient, heavy, metal Walkman is still alive. It has played countless hours of music and eaten up miles of tape. It just needs to have a couple of parts replaced but I’m sure it’ll still work.

Dorski sent me this hilarious review of the 30-year-old Walkman by a 13-year old kid. It took him three days to figure out that a cassette has two sides. Love his manual random shuffle method.

Sportswriters have criticized Roger Federer’s Wimbledon outfit as “dandyish”, “foppish”, “ridiculous”, harking to tradition ergo backward-looking, and promoting an image of tennis as elitist. One urged him to “man up.”

I myself do not like the jacket: the collar and shoulders are too big, it looks like an hommage to Michael Jackson. I half-expected Roger to moonwalk across the lawn in tribute until it occurred to me that when Thriller came out, Roger was one year old. (Maybe he’s psychic too. We can jointly set up a carnival booth.)

In matters of fashion everyone is entitled to their own opinion. However, the sneering says more about the authors’ personal prejudices, perceptions of masculinity, and class baggage than it does about the outfit in question.

They can’t find fault with his game, so they attack his clothes. They cannot conceive of a great champion with a sense of style so they cast aspersions on his masculinity—just stopping short of calling him gay. And charging him with elitism? That’s disingenuous.

Obviously this is a subject for a column-length rant (Blast, I already submitted this Friday’s), but for now I will say that if Roger Federer wants to play on Center Court in a white sundress, let him. As long as he plays like Roger Federer, I don’t care. Man it must really cause one’s balls to shrivel, seeing a player so well-dressed, with perfect hair and lovely manners, gracefully destroy opponents who are running around grunting, sweating, and “manfully” working. Of course it brings up class issues.

As for the “elitism” part, it is best answered in Tagalog. Magkano ang tennis racquet? Dose mil. (How much is a racquet? Twelve thousand pesos.) And that’s the mid-priced type.

The rent for a public court: 100 pesos per hour. The trainer: P250 an hour. The ballboy: P100 an hour. The shoes: at least P3,000. Never mind the shirts and shorts. You don’t want to play on public courts? Club membership costs around half a million pesos. Ssssh, we can’t let the audience know that tennis is an expensive sport. Well they already know.

Over the years it has been my mission to persuade people to read Frank Herbert’s Dune. By force if necessary. Because how can you go through life not knowing of the Missionaria Protectiva? How can you look for the Kwisatz Haderach if you don’t know what it is?

Recently I discovered that Scrat has not read Dune, exposing a gaping hole in his over-education. I’d given away my paperback copies and I’m not about to hand over my beautiful hardcover copy that was personally wrapped in plastic by Teddyboy Locsin. (So much for his arcane theories on book covering: in this climate the plastic sticks to the cover, and years later when you try to take off the plastic the cover art gets peeled off. The obvious solution is to stash your books in London, Bratislava, someplace temperate and less humid than Manila.)

So I went to three bookstores in search of the first Dune. There were rows of Dune books—the sequels by Herbert himself, and the later books by his son, but not the original Dune.

There was a single volume containing Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune, but in truth I do not love the sequels.

Anyone want to trade in their copy of Dune?

* * * * *

Found the paperback! In the first place I should’ve looked: National Bookstore.

On my way to the supermarket at Power Plant I saw an exhibit in the hallway of published work by the Filipino illustrator Alfredo Alcala.

His work ranges from Tagalog komiks to the Star Wars comics in the L.A. Times to Swamp Thing.

We have a lot of great comic book artists, as Budjette frequently reminds us, but most of them are familiar only to serious comic book enthusiasts.

Alcala’s oeuvre includes work on Batman, Hellblazer, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

You know what we need? An anthology of the best of Liwayway komiks. Full color, good paper (Please not disintegrating newsprint), with essays on comics and society.