Here, finally, I’m back.  This is probably the safest way to revive my main goal of enlightening the painfully idiotic.  Why?

1.) You can’t attack me anymore.  Attack me and attack the hundreds of thousands of blogs hosted on WordPress.com.  The most fatal blow I could receive from monkey-lovers is the impedance of my sacred word.  I used to worry about that.  Not anymore.  Not independently hosted anymore.  Who f*cking cares about personal domains, right?

2.) Read number one.

So there, stay tuned for updates.  I just wanted to get this off my chest.  I’m not dead.  Sorry to dampen your spirits.  I’m so brilliantly evil that I can say I’m not dying anytime soon.  The war begins.

No, I haven’t died of herpetic (herpes) encephalitis or systemic lupus erythematosus or any disease frequently mentioned on House, M.D. I’ve just been really really busy.

I will be back soon.

Judging from your response on my previous post, I deduced that you cannot come up with a decent intellectual argument to make me stop writing and seeming like an angry, misanthropic son of a bitch, and shut me up.

Either that or you enjoy every word you read on this site. For that, I wish you all a Happy Christmas and a Wonderful New Year. I know I’m having a lousy one. Wishing for the opposite doesn’t make it happen. So maybe you guys will have better luck. It’s all about you (in the event, such as this one, that I can’t make it work for me). After all, I’m a people person.

So why am I so certain that I’m going to have a such a lousy lousy Christmas? Because I already am.

If you have nothing good to say, shut up.

Why should I? I say what I want to say. I don’t believe in censorship. So if I don’t want to gatekeep my mouth, why should I listen to people telling me so? It’s not like I give a shit.

They say that if I have nothing good to say, I should just keep it to myself. Hype up the good, precious, overwhelming things. Broadcast it nationwide even when it’s not big enough to warrant such a hype. It’s like coffee, after all. Picks us all up and makes us forget about the real things that we have to face. It’s all escapist crap. I don’t like it.

What are we going to do about those really really nasty things, then? We can’t just forget them. They won’t go anywhere anyway, not unless we face them and tackle them and kick them hard in the nuts. But we can’t just shut up about them, either. They’re not going to rot in hell like everyone would hope. They’re just going to lurk around, staring at us in our faces and laughing at us for being all human and polite and conservative and stupid.

And I’m not stupid. Not to let that happen where I’m concerned. Not that stupid. So I challenge you all.

So I was out for like a week. And it wasn’t my fault. I was actually on the verge of writing my next post that would discuss the Filipino perspective of the global language that is English when I realized I couldn’t even access my own site to write a new article. Nobody but a handful of people (me not included) could access my wonderful content to make their somewhat miserable lives just a wee bit better. You can’t blame me for not giving you your weekly (or bi-weekly, I really don’t know how my blogging schedule works) dose of The Critic’s original. It’s funny how I sometimes refer to myself in the third person. Not good funny. It’s like weird funny. Which, essentially, is not good.

Any road, point is, it’s not my idea of a vacation from blogging. I wasn’t even planning on it. My blog was attacked. Or so my web host said. And I’m sure they’re not going to lie to me because I give them a hefty sum of money every freakin’ month, damn it. According to their email:

This is to inform you that your server is currently facing SYN attack and that’s the reason why the server is slowed down and unable to respond to every request. For more information about SYN attack, refer the url: – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYN_attack

So either you’re guilty or you had nothing to do it. Pacquiao fans, I know it’s your doing. And you can’t stop me. In fact, I have prepared the strongest comeback ever. The meanest in the history of the world. Or the blogosphere. It doesn’t matter. I’m brilliant and I rock like that.

I am one of the 10 finalists at the 2006 Weblog Awards in the Asian Blog Category. Love me or hate me, you have to vote for me and my blog and for Filipino stupidity evangelization.  Click the banner, go to the 2006 Weblog Awards Website, and go vote for yours truly.  You really will be doing me, yourself, your country, and of course, the world, a favor.

The day I woke up and decided I wanted to go back to royal path of blogging, I told myself I wanted to write about something interesting, something that would engage people and make them think. And so I did. I wrote something that interested me and an awful lot of others. I engaged them. I received more comments than I imagined myself ever receiving. However , I failed in the final aspect of my whole point of blogging.

I failed to make them think.

I failed to make them weigh my statements and investigate for any evidence of truth.

And I know perfectly that it’s not my fault. Some people are just really not used to thinking. Besides, this is not even my target audience. These are just fanatics who feel compelled to get back at me for saying something true about this boxer they worship. No matter, I have proven something I have taken for granted for the longest time.

We all have a purpose in life.

We always hear this from Christians and New Age nature worshippers. Christians say God (LOL) assigns us our own little task to fulfill while we walk the Earth, one which we cannot hope to die, rot six feet under, and enter his hippity-hop happy kingdom without ever accomplishing; New Agers believe it is the mother of us all, Mother Nature, who gives us this purpose to live. We have a purpose to serve in this world, ours albeit the Third World. While I have never believed in this statement because I find my definition of purpose and theirs to be rather contradictory (their purpose could be as little as giving someone a good hard slap on the head to wake him up from his madness – I see that as a mere coincidence and enough reason to kill themselves), I realized that Manny Pacquiao has a purpose on Earth, a duty to the people. And he has served it well.

He is here to tell us that Filipinos are fatally insecure.

Everytime a Filipino wins something, even something that is entirely irrelevant and about which no one knows shit, it is broadcast all over the Philippines as something to be proud of. Then the broadcast ends with something like, Kaya ng Pinoy! (The Filipino can) Filipino talent is world-class and we can beat the crap out of everyone else who doesn’t have a green passport! We are TEH WINNARS! Die, you overweight Americans, you Japanese fatheads, you sux0rzZz LOL!

I mean, this is just silly.

As easily understandable as it may seem, I do not really know what Red Shirt Day means. Of course I know when they say RED SHIRT DAY, they ask students to be in red when they go to school on the said day. But why red? Maybe because it’s the color of violence. Or opposition. Or love. (Eeek.) EDIT: This just in. I’ve just read Bikoy’s current post on his blog and saw the embedded video of tonight’s local newcast on the issue. Supposedly, they were in red shirts as a sign of protest.

As I walked to one of the buildings to attend my class yesterday, I saw a huge banner in front of the building inviting students to wear a red shirt on Thursday, 23 November, and to boycott their classes. They were inviting their fellow students to join them in what I can only assume is a sort of demonstration. They are against the system-wide Tuition Fee Increase (TFI) to hit the premier state university in the Philippines next academic year. It’s an increase from the roughly 20-year rate of $6 per unit (or $18 per class) to $20 per unit (or $60 per class) and many say there’s no way on earth that they could possibly afford such a “STEEP” price. Note how I wrote steep. Oh, you noticed? Thank you.

Normally, I’d be fine with whatever they want to do with their lives. I mean, they are activists, and I do not confess myself to be an expert on the subject of [insert politically correct, intelligent-sounding adjective here] activism. But I still think what they were inviting their fellow students to is something so ironically stupid, I want to cry.

Many Filipino pedestrians are suicidal. I guess we’ve established that, haven’t we? And sometimes, just sometimes, I want to be the one to fulfill their dreams of getting butchered and having their bits and pieces scattered on the highway.

One of my dear, I-don’t-know-they-could-stand-me friends talked to me after reading my first post on the Filipino jaywalking trend and she agreed that I had some points. However, she, being someone who isn’t fortunate enough to have a car to drive herself around, asked me to listen to her points.

[INSERT HEATED SLAP-HAPPY ARGUMENT HERE]

So for about a half an hour there, we debated, slapping faces here and there. We finished our verbal combat still as friends, our faces all red and bearing marks of each other’s palm. I argued how stupid and uneducated some Filipinos were to go jaywalk when they could perfectly understand that there were signs saying it was illegal and that there was often times a pedestrian overpass right above them or just a few meters away. Then she started defending them lazy jaywalkers. She said some pedestrians are under the impression that it saves them time and effort to just cross the street where they want to instead of walking towards and climbing up the overpass. They might also be in a hurry or running late and find having to go to the pedestrian crossing time-consuming.

[LEFT SLAP RIGHT SLAP HERE]

There is no point in being punctual if they’re going to end up butchered. I mean, if they die, they won’t be able to speak of getting there right on time to begin with. Better late but alive and intact than on-the-dot punctual but skinned-to-the-bone dead.

Okay maybe not all Filipinos. People are gonna go ballistic again with all my generalizing cr*p. I’m not avoiding lawsuits. I’m avoiding idiots in aliases in my comment box as though trying to achieve some form of anonymity.

WALANG TAWIRAN
NAKAMAMATAY

In English, that oh so eloquently translates to “NO PEDESTRIAN CROSSING. POTENTIALLY LETHAL.” Funny, I’ve never seen a No Jaywalking sign of the sort in any other country I’ve been to in my entire life. I’ll bet not even in my past life (wherein I was a filthy rich problogger advocating the interdict of the anti-Christ). I only see that completely harmless yet tremendously easily comprehensible No Jaywalking sign. Some had text, others had symbols. Pardon the text signs, for a significant chunk of the Filipino population cannot understand simple English words, let alone jaywalking.

So the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) had to resort to putting up signs in Tagalog to ensure full comprehension of the signs’ message. Not only that, they also had to put in a little bit of that scary don’t-do-it-unless-you-wanna-die-you-b*tch-LOL factor in them. This is what they came up with:

Crossing the street is potentially lethal in the Third World. Photo courtesy of Alterselves.

See, some Filipinos are very stubborn and hard-headed and are just plain asking for it. By it, I mean getting run over by a motorcycle first, a car second, and finally a 24-wheeler truck and getting pretty chopped up and skinned alive a bit in the process. And by a bit, I mean a lot. (I wonder why I have to use other words to kind of conceal part of my message and then explain the entire thing in the following sentence. This writing style is killing me. And I guess you, too.)

They have this very weird, totally confounding I-wanna-do-it-and-I-couldn’t-care-less-if-I-die-doing-it-you-sl*t kind of mentality and that baffles me to neverland.

How stubborn are they, really? Here are four of the things that they do.