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Saturday, December 28, 2019

Tra Vinh (Ayala Cloverleaf) 07272019

This year, I played chaperone to my mom while she attends unofficial reunions with her highschool friends. Our arrangement was that I go to some other place to eat while she spends time with her friends. It is a weird arrangement and a friend even remarked that it doesn't seem proper but I am okay with it because:

1. They'd be more comfortable among themselves since they've known each other for years.
2. I can go explore restos on my own and wouldn't need to think about different preferences.
3. My me time is sacred and I need to also read for my thesis.

In one of their reunions, they agreed to meet up at Ayala Cloverleaf. It proved to be a good opportunity for me to visit TRA VINH, a restaurant I first came to know years back in Banawe. It serves Vietnamese food and some Southeast Asian ones. My first impression then was so-so, nothing special. I still liked Pho Hoa or Pho Bac. But the Cloverleaf branch is different. The food here is more flavorful and I just couldn't believe how awesome everything I ate was.

Duck soup with rice noodles. I could have opted for the usual yellow egg noodles but this one is light and balances the intense flavors of the duck soup.


My taste buds had  fun chasing and savoring the mix of spicy and salty seasonings of these grilled treats. YUM! 
Just the right dessert to cap off an awesome meal. Not too sweet (I made sure to ask for no added sugar) and it's creamy. 




Friday, August 2, 2019

Quote from FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES

“I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In a reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things.. Couples name their pets and children, Madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit’Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control. Or maybe not.”
- Switters, page 211

This book kept me company while I was in Spain and I savored every word and every moment in the book. Tom Robbins is one heck of a writer with an outrageously funny and witty and super playful mind whose command of language is so hilariously realistic although a bit vulgar. I especially love the way he conjures images in his readers minds with his silly similes and humorous metaphors, thrown alongside a long list of ironies in the novel. 

Much to my regret, I had to leave the book behind as part of my detachment exercises. I miss it from time to time but I find comfort in that whoever picks up that book might also experience the same enjoyment I did.

Saturday, May 25, 2019

The Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

So I guess I am back to watching movies about the military by accident. Back in 2014 when The Edge of Tomorrow was showing in the theaters, an officemate invited me together with our common buddies to see it. That didn't materialize however, and I could still remember how they laughed at me when I heard "The Age of Tomorrow" which incidentally is also another 2014 movie. 

Yesterday while rummaging through my files, I found a copy of this film in my HD and decided again to watch as many movies as I can to delete files and give way to new ones since I am about to start another project to hopefully add another milestone in my life. There will be no stopping me now as I have lost everything and so I don't really care much about making mistakes and regrets coz okay, you just move forward because there is no other way. As I have posted a few days prior to my Spain trip, it's too bad life is not like in video games wherein you can save the game before you face big bosses and reload from that save point if ever you get killed fighting a boss. 

So anyway, The Edge of Tomorrow is pretty much like what I have thought at that time. William Cage was sent to the battlefield in the midst of war between humans and aliens known as mimics. There he acquired the unusual power of resetting time if he gets killed when he was exposed to an Alpha Mimic's blood and died. He woke up to find that time has been looping and then comes a point wherein he meets Rita Vrataski who's known as the Full Metal Bitch (a reference perhaps to the hit animé Full Metal Alchemist) or the Angel of Verdun. It turns out that Rita also had the same power before until she underwent blood transfusion and lost the ability to reset time. Rita trained Cage over and over for combat and eventually they searched for the location of the Omega, considered to be the cerebrum of the alien species. So in short they only need to destroy Omega and the mimics will be destroyed and humanity will be saved. But the two were able to do this with the J-Squad, a group of misfits but who eventually sacrificed their lives so Rita and Cage can finish the mission. Rita lures the alpha mimic away so Cage can blast the underwater Omega with an explosive and he did so successfully. The explosion that succeeded killed off all mimics and suddenly Cage woke up inside a helicopter. News about the Louvre explosion was being broadcast and Cage saw the J-squad members doing drills. He paid Rita a visit who seemed to have no recollection of everything that happened.

My comment: So whenever time resets, is this absolute time? What happens if two or more humans get the power and one of them dies? Will time reset? This is pretty weird since the other persons may have distorted notions of time. I just happened to think that when Cage dies in every loop, of course life goes on for other people as well, unless with every reset a new dimension is created that will accommodate the reset. Anyway, I am not too knowledgeable about physics and time warps but this is just a basic question I ask. It is unlike Source Code although the loops are similar in that these were key to resolving a problem. At least in Source Code, the reset duration is only 8 minutes except in the end when Colter Stevens was able to enter a whole new reality past the 8 minutes.

Another comment: This film is a film of the underdogs and the misfits who do all the dirty work but do not get recognized. It's pretty much in real life wherein those in position of power and authority are so detached from what's happening on the ground and so we get a world that's getting fucked up all the more by the day. I'm talking not just about government officials but also about "intellectuals" who can only sit in forums and conferences to discuss ideas when in fact these ideas are just theories and not even grounded in reality. And these people all talk high and mighty when they cannot even do simple tasks. I still hope that I will meet a real intellectual in this lifetime. I already met one but he passed away too soon.