The Carver's House

Sinigang Shampoo I like the taste of tamarind. Sinigang is by far one of my fave dishes, that trademark Filipino stew whose distinct sour tang could only be had by tamarind. Mom used to cook it the old way, by boiling the fruit and mashing it through a strainer. But food manufacturers saw the marketing opportunity and came up with the powdered form. An okay development, but it's come to the point when I forget what the original tastes like. (Mom would sometimes use kamias , but that taste creates a different sour delight altogether.) As a kid, I'd go to the cornerstore with one peso in hand to buy four pieces of processed tamarind dipped in iodized salt. There would also be times when I'd get those in 'sets' wrapped in cellophane. Once home, I'd dip that in rock salt. Such simple gastronomic pleasures are hard to find today. To me, tamarind is ingested, flavor or pulp, period. So you can imagine my hesitation at finding a bottle of tamarind shampoo in ...

Thought stream on exercise and true love One of the worst parts about hanging around my gay friends in the gay enclaves of Malate is seeing all the dressed-to-the-nines gay men strutting their stuff. Tight tees, tight pants, buffed bodies... some of them might as well put a "Shag Me" sign across their bulging pectorals (or gluteals). While the sight of well-developed bodies (male or female) is quite pleasing, especially for an illustrator like me who strives for a bit of anatomical accuracy in his works, I can't help but ask for reasons. Why exactly do people work out? There's the most popular reasoning connected to health. It is said that if you strengthen your abdominals, back problems borne from old age are minimized. Regular aerobic activity is good for the heart, and sweating purges one of most accumulated toxins. This is all good. But one doesn't have to stuff in all that muscle to achieve improved health, right? I will say here that I work out to ...

2nd Update Here's another update on Zsazsa Part 2. The draft is with my sooper-editor Reby, who's done a great job doing the little fixes on my Filipino. While I have a bit of confidence scribbling in the vernacular, I get all mixed up sometimes on the verb forms. In Part 1, no more than 15% was approximately edited, which is a good thing in my book. So when I get that draft on Wednesday, I hope to do the corrections and package the whole thingie for presswork on Saturday. Whoopee!! Zsazsa Part 1 is still selling, thanks to you guys, and quite rapidly. My first book One Night In Purgatory has been hitching on Zsazsa's T-back. That's been moving, too, albeit slowly. If you've read Dean's blog , you already know that I have a concept for a new book, a one-shot modern fantasy story that'll be around 64-pages. This is different from the ones I've blogged about earlier. Them ideas just keep a-comin'; that's what I get from watching The...

Update For those who've been wondering what's up with Zsazsa #2, here's a status report. Lettering is almost done. Less than 10 pages to go. Mostly sound effects. Afterwhich the whole kaboodle goes to my editor. It should make it to press by late next week. When that happens, I'll be posting the ispeysyal preview for y'all to see. Thank you for your patience.

Everyone's been commenting about the war in their blogs. I'm not going there. Anxiety levels are high enough as they are. I believe in the Collective Intelligence, and I don't want to add to its burden. It's tough.

Feeling Stoopid Last night, I dropped by Comic Quest - Megamall to deliver more copies of Zsazsa #1 (something that has become a bi-weekly habit) and, surprisingly, more copies of One NIght In Purgatory. Thanks to Zsazsa, interest in my first book has upped a bit. So there I was with Vinnie, Dean , and Jason . Alex arrived later. Vinnie had this book called "What Do You Know" or something like that, one of 'em brain-mashing quiz books that only seeks to make you realize 1) how much useless information you know; or 2) how stupid you are compared to your friends who know a lot of useless information. I use the term 'useless' loosely, of course. For some folks, knowing who wrote Pinocchio or that Zambia and Zimbabwe were once known as Abyssinia could actually spell the difference between life and death. Dean and Alex, being the bibliophiles that they are, knew a lot.. They answered a whole bunch'a obscure questions which made me think, "Boy, you mu...

The Diva Drug Caught the opening performance of Dreamgirls last night with Dean and Gig at Onstage Greenbelt, one of the premiere concert venues in the metropolis. I was told that the musical was a Diana Ross semi-autobiography, relating to her experience while still in the Supremes. In Dreamgirls, Ross is represented by Effie White (played by Bituin Escalante), and the Supremes are, well, the Dreamgirls. Every single cast member had the talent. Bituin and Tex Ordoñez were certainly standouts, though Jett Pangan looked like he was having a tough time with the highest-of-high notes. This musical seems to have been written for women actors, as the songs for men lacked a lot of the vocal acrobatics dished out by the diva-esque ditties. I went in not knowing spit about the Tony award-winning musical. It was in the middle of the first act where I realized "Oh! They're supposed to be black!" The accents were more Southern than black, IMHO. But Bituin's star ...