reason is the reason

Prayer: How to do nothing and still think you’re helping.

Big shout-out to Leinil Yu for grabbing the headlines tonight - his inclusion of Prez Gloria in a double-page spread for Marvel Comics’ Secret Invasion caught GMA-7 News’ attention:

Before you read too much into this, Leinil writes in his Deviantart blog to deny that this is a political statement.

“Tho I may share your views on our current government, this particular instance is quite innocent and is merely a shout out to Filipinos,” says Leinil. “The list [of famous people in the spread] contains people who I find despicable, who I merely view with indifference and ones who I admire. (feel free to guess which is which).”

I also noticed that Leinil includes Richard Dawkins in the extreme left of the spread, blink and you’ll miss him.

“If a significant number of lost classics are found at the Villa of the Papyri it would enlarge the cultural and intellectual tradition, and might even alter its course…. Of Sophocles’ 120 plays, only seven are known, and of these the Oedipus trilogy has embossed itself eternally on the Western imagination. The Kypria, a martial epic believed to have been Homer’s source material, disappeared some time in antiquity. All gone. Or perhaps only lost from view.”

Any of you ever murder a grade school student? Rape a German Shepherd? Invade South Ossetia? I got you all beat.

I wrote a radio script for Senator Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

It was the mid-to-late ‘90s, when Ate Glo was nowhere near the rampaging tyrant she is today. Let’s just say this was in the time of Glo-Wars Episode 1, the Phantom Midget. No Emperor yet, just Palpatine.

OK, the ad is crap. I implore you not to judge the entirety of my advertising career on this material. It was better, though, before Darth Dante Ang got in the way, rooting out all that was touching and funny in the original draft and replacing them with stilted talking points.

Hear it for yourself. My old boss found the tapes and posted it on his blog. Excuse me while I go plunge a drill through my eardrums.

I loved this article by Noralyn Mustafa. I know it’s disrespectful to try to draw any moral lesson from any writing that doesn’t have any such conclusion explicitly on display, but I’ll say this about the article: it’s silly to think that one can build a nation by fiat when a territory’s history and culture haven’t followed suit.

Reason #65,223 why religion is fucked up: this black woman uses her Christian faith to justify slavery.