The Daily Bluster

  The Pirate Queen Who Put Blackbeard to Shame If you think the baddest pirate in history was some rum-soaked dude with a peg leg and a parrot, you’ve been watching too many Disney movies. Enter Zheng Yi Sao . In 1801, she was a  working girl on a floating brothel in Canton . By 1805, she was the undisputed CEO of the " Red Flag Fleet ," commanding over 1,800 ships and an army of 80,000 pirates. To put that in perspective: the Spanish Armada—you know, the guys who tried to invade England—only had about 130 ships. Zheng Yi Sao didn't just have an "army"; she had a floating nation that made the Chinese, British, and Portuguese navies look like a group of kids in a bathtub with rubber ducks. From the "Flower Boats" to the Flagship Before she was the terror of the South China Sea, she was known as Shi Xianggu . She worked on the "flower boats"—essentially floating brothels in Canton. But Shi Xianggu wasn't just another face i...

Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are valued today at hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the world’s greatest painters, he is also one of the most influential figures in Post-Impressionism art. Ironic, because nobody wanted his paintings when he was alive.  He was a “weirdo” and nobody really understood him. Except for the few friends he had with other struggling, unsuccessful painters, one of whom he quarreled with, a quarrel that resulted in Van Gogh cutting off his ear with  a razor.  He also suffered from delusions and had psychotic breaks. He seldom ate and drank heavily. He was one of those tortured souls who had so much to give but was largely ignored. His genius and artistry nobody really got while he was alive. He was an idealist, a sensitive soul who had too much empathy. Imagine somebody like that living today.  At age 37, Vincent Van Gogh - struggling with depression, mental illness, and thinking that he was a failure - killed himself.  You...

Empathy means the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It’s the capacity to go inside the head of another being – be it human or animal – and experience what that other being experiences. If you lack this ability, it would be difficult for you to be compassionate to others. For example, if you see a person slaughtered like an animal in the streets and your first thought is, “ Pusher kasi e ” (even if you literally know nothing about that person) and feel something like unholy glee bubbling up your stomach, then you feel a sort of pride that you made the right choice in the last election, meanwhile not feeling anything about the person whose blood is staining the ground, and the sound of that person’s parents’/loved ones’ heartbreaking cries makes you think, “ Kung walang kasalanan yan di yan papatayin !” (If he’s innocent he wouldn’t have been killed!) And an image of your idol’s smug, smirking, and gloating face flash before your eyes and you feel a sort of thrill...

“The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.” So begins William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984). Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that features advanced technology vis-à-vis a dystopian society – a kind of high tech world juxtaposed with a broken-down social order. Or in other words, high tech/low life. Think Star Trek suffused with the despair and helplessness of “The Grapes of Wrath,” then throw in the gang wars and mob bosses of the “The Godfather,” and instead of governments, mega corporations rule the world, each fighting for supremacy. William Gibson is considered to be the founder of cyberpunk. However, many writers before him had written all sorts of proto-cyberpunk novels, most notably Philip K. Dick, he of the “ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?” fame, the novel that served as inspiration for the classic cyberpunk film (and one of my personal favorites), “Blade Runner.” (Read up on Philip ...

Yes it’s a very real possibility that he might win.  But you know, it would have been nice to have a leader that would make us proud. To have a statesman – a statesman who knows how to deal with world leaders and win us friends in other countries –  lead us. Someone who could make us want to shout out to the world, “Yes this person leads us. This person embodies our aspirations, our ideals as a people.” It would have been nice to have someone who could bring out the best in us, and teach us compassion and empathy. Someone who could be an inspiration to our youth. Someone who could balance the budget, who could straighten out our fucked up, labyrinthine tax and banking laws, and improve our abysmal educational system. Someone who could get to the root causes of criminality, to actually do something about them and not just slaughter petty criminals and call it justice. That would have been nice, you know? Instead we are saddled with a group of candidates that includes ...

Is “bayot” an insult? I’m wondering because last night I heard Rodrigo "Digong"  Duterte on TV saying this in reaction to Mar Roxas’ expression of disbelief to his (Duterte’s) incredible claim that he could eradicate criminality in the first six months of his presidency, if and when he gets elected. The way he said it, his body language, the tone, his facial expression – all convey his meaning, that bayot (gay) is something so hateful and disgusting that he reserves that judgment to those who dare question the pronouncements of Emperor Digong. Well, to be fair, that is probably his most benevolent method of answering his critics. I suspect he has far more “creative” methods of silencing them. I can just hear his followers saying, “ Buti nga bayot lang e. Dapat sa iyo pinapatay .” (You should be thankful you're just being called bayot . You should have been killed.) And they’re right. They will inform you this, with unholy glee and righteous anger, with blazing, fana...

Adjective Order is one of those obscure English grammar rules that nobody told us about in college. A summary on how it works: Look at these two squares. How would you describe the objects? The image on the left you’d probably describe as a big, red square, because that’s what it is, right? Now, what if you describe it as red, big square? Does that sound right to you? It sounds quite a bit off, doesn’t it? It’s because there is a specific order of describing things that for some reason English speakers have established as the proper way. When you are describing a noun using two or more adjectives, the adjectives are usually in a particular order. Opinions come first, e.g. gorgeous, ugly, etc., before factual ones.   There are several levels of order. The Cambridge Dictionaries Online lists ten: Order                relating to                 ...

It’s so strange to see someone watching herself dance 75 years ago. The image of a 102-year-old woman juxtaposed with her youthful, beautiful, and vital self is unsettling, and makes you think thoughts that you often ignore.     You could see through her eyes that she’s reliving it—she can hear the music and feel its rhythm, feel her feet as they strike the floor, feel the adrenaline rush of doing what she likes best and doing it good. Someone once said not to fear growing old, because it is a privilege denied to many. That’s true, of course, but there are moments when one feels that growing old is the saddest thing that happens to us. She’s remembering it all. It’s all in her head still. She was beautiful, she was lithe, and she was a really great dancer. I guess that’s what our most precious possessions are—our memories. We are still 12 or 16 or 21 inside. We’ll all grow old and die someday, but we pretend that we are immortal. We’ll see our lov...

“How do you say, in polite English, ‘ Punta muna ako sa kubeta; taeng-tae na ako! ’  (I have to go the toilet; I’m about to shit myself!)?” In a (Philippine) website that deals mostly in computer parts and peripherals, there was this thread about English grammar. Presumably, the thread starter (commonly referred to in internet forums as the TS ), who was one of the regulars of the aforementioned site, has trouble expressing himself in grammatically correct English. As the site is quite popular, and the site members come from diverse backgrounds, many contributed to that thread, and competently answered the TS’ and other posters’ questions regarding English grammar. The “English” thread, suffice it to say, was one of the site’s most active threads. Anyway, the question quoted above was just one of many. I stumbled across it one afternoon a few months ago. It appeared that the poster works for a firm run by Americans. During one particularly unforgettable meeting with his Ameri...

Misis Djyli is the username of a young housewife who, for the past few months, had been uploading her cross-stitching projects on YouTube. It’s her hobby, and clearly she loves it—you can hear the happiness in her voice as she presents her cross-stitches. I am not an expert on cross-stitching, but hers look beautiful, at least according to the few comments on her YouTube channel.   Here's one of her earliest uploads: Almost nobody watches her cross-stitching videos, but it didn’t seem to bother her—she just kept making and uploading them.   Her latest video, however, has currently over a million views, and it does not show her cross-stitching. It shows her town being bombed, and her normally happy voice is gone.  She is crying and sounds very afraid on the video, and you can hear a baby crying in the background. The woman, you see, lives in Ukraine. She lives in a town called Kramatorsk, and the town was recently attacked by Russians (or perhaps ethnic Rus...

I was watching that “I see dead people” movie years ago when this so-called friend called me up and asked me what I was doing. I said I’m watching this movie with Bruce Willis in it, and there's this kid who sees dead people. He said, “Oh yeah. Saw that. Bruce Willis is the ghost.” Then he laughed. I played it cool, but I was seething. I thought of Cthulhu and considered summoning him.  I don’t remember what he said afterwards, what he called me up for, or even what we talked about, but every time I see him (which is about once or twice a year, thank heavens) I imagine him being gnawed on by a good-sized rancor . I remembered this incident because I just finished reading “Fight Club,” Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. Nobody called me up to spoil anything for me, but I did see this shirt on some website: This shirt is diabolical I was only on the first few pages of the book when I saw this, so the whole time I was reading, this was flashing on my head...

The Philippines has more than its fair share of disasters, and not because the country is particularly cursed or anything, but because the entire archipelago—purportedly composed of 7,100 islands—lies on a region in the Pacific Ocean called the “Ring of Fire” (actually, the area is shaped more like a horseshoe, although to be fair, “The Horseshoe of Fire” doesn’t have the same impact as the “Ring of Fire”). About 40,000 kilometers long, the “ring” runs from the southern tip of South America, up along the coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia (the Ring of Fire’s western edge extends into the Indian Ocean), and to New Zealand.  The “Fire” part of the Ring of Fire is because a string of 452 volcanoes dot this line, like a malevolent game of connect-the-dots. The regions along this line experience volcanic eruptions and periodic earthquakes—majority of them small, hardly-felt tremors, and the few devastating ones that...

"If you want to do something evil, put it in something boring."- John Oliver John Oliver, host of the HBO comedy show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” made one of the most brilliant rants in the history of internet. Not only was it funny and made people laugh, but it also made them outraged about something a great majority are clueless and apathetic about: net neutrality .  The rant was directed against the US Federal Communications Commission’s proposed net neutrality regulations , which was deemed so egregious it forced activists and corporations to be on the same side. The FCC, however, invited the public to post their comments on their website. And this made Mr. Oliver appeal directly to the trolls and lurkers and other internet commenters out there to “seize their moment” and let their outrage show using their most potent weapon: the keyboard.     "For once in your life, we need you to channel that anger, that badly spelled bile that you n...

I was reading  this article  about a so-called “healing priest” and it struck me that even in the 21 st  century, people are still gullible enough to trust “faith healers.” There are a lot of reasons for this (poverty and miseducation among them), but  in this day and age ,  you’d think that people  would think twice about trusting those who claim to heal all kinds of diseases through prayers and faith alone. Mind you, the “healers” would make it clear that their healing powers did not come from them, but from a “higher power.” These mysterious power source would range from the Baby Jesus (or the adult one), “Mama Mary,” from a magical dwarf (I’m not kidding), a mysterious hermit, or even from an old lady who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus. Filipinos lap these up. Even today, there are many p eople in the country's rural areas that still believe in  anting-anting  (amulets). It’s not a coincidence that people in areas that are mired in...

Authors have different writing styles. To somebody who is halfway literate, Hemingway’s works are as different from Dan Brown’s as Mozart’s music is from Kenny G’s. It’s not surprising then that different authors have different writing advice. Compare the different advice given by these three great authors: Elmore Leonard Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s  Sweet ...