Carma

Life would be great if everything fell into place. For my car, however, everything seems to be falling apart.

Consider this.

At the back of my mind, I've been wanting to have my power steering fixed because it had become noisy and hard to handle. It's a fairly minor thing that I could afford to put off week in and week out. By this afternoon, I also had a wrecked front at the driver side, paint scratches on the passenger side and a non-functioning aircon.

It's like a page taken from the Twilight Zone if you ask me. Why my life can't steal a scene from Coupling instead, I don't know. ;-)

Dream On

If you check one of the first entries in this blog, you will see how I mourned the demise of City Lite 88.3. It was, after all, one of my teenage stations along with NU 107.5.

Since that time, I struggled to complete my six radio presets in the car.

It was such a pleasant surprise when I accidentally switched to 106.7. I think it was one of the 'jologs' stations just a couple of years ago. I can't remember for sure though.

I heard jazz.

The programming was like City Lite of the late 80s and early 90s, or at least I thought so. I figured that it might have been one of those this-afternoon-only things. So I tried again and again, day after day.

Now, I am glad to say, it is authentic. There are three jazz stations again. An equilibrium has been established.

Blogging About Norah Jones

I've been planning to write about Norah Jones for weeks. It's not as if I have anything important to say about her. There are just three points really: that I watched her concert, that I planned it for three months, and that I want to lay claim to Norah Jones.

I heard her first.

I'm peculiar that way. In fact, I don't want the artists that I really admire to be famous. I just want to be part of that nice, cozy fan base.

Villar from Behind

A couple of weeks ago, I sighed to myself after I heard that the 2003 National Budget might be reenacted again. That would be a disaster of course. But then I figured that we have nothing more to expect given the quality of our legislators.

Thus, imagine my surprise when the Senate approved the Congressional Budget in toto. Since I was not fully educated in the manner of political horse trading, I wasn't aware that the bicameral sessions were the ones that mattered. That's where things got done.

By approving the Congressional proposal, the Senate effectively negated the need for a bicameral committee. By doing so, the Senate managed to pull a fast one on congressmen who were keen on making certain additions during the bicam.

The engineer I heard, was Manny Villar. Apparently, Villar has become quite adept at pulling fast ones. Remember the prayer during Erap's impeachment?

Immature

Have you noticed how immature our public officials are?

Using my same example, imagine a congressman calling for the abolition of the Senate. Why? Kasi...naisahan sila. It just seems to me that public officials are all reactive and vindictive. For instance, one official labels someone else as an illegal logger. The other party then retaliates and calls the former a corrupt official.

Now let us study that sequence for a moment. If the retaliating official already knew from the start that the other one was corrupt, why didn't he do anything to stop the other?

What's disturbing is that this is a very common scenario. Everyone seems to know about the improprieties of everyone else. And yet, nothing is being done about it.