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We are not figuratively, but literally stardust. - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

As if I hadn’t had enough, here’s another Community linkspam! (And if you actually care, I finally got myself a high-definition copy of Comedy Central Presents Donald Glover! Man, it was a great 20 minutes, for sure.)

Donald Glover and Ken Jeong at the Paley Center

Alison Brie and Danny Pudi on The Soup Awards

Cold Open Table Read with the Community Cast

Downtime with the Cast

Donald Glover on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

Donald Glover doing stand-up on Collegehumor Live

Behind the Scenes on the Halloween episode

On an unrelated note, here are random clips featuring Aziz Ansari! (Yeah, while I don’t watch Parks and Recreation YET, I think this guy is the money maker—aside from Amy Poehler obviously.)

With Donald Glover at the 2011 NY Fashion Week

Craigslist Ad

Roommates

Smart Type

The Best Concert Ever!

Aziz Ansari Googles his own name

MTV’s Next

To end (with some more links!), here’s Chevy Chase, Yvonne Strahovski, Alison Brie, and Zachary Levi reminiscing their first jobs, and here’s the Community cast beaming with the reason foreign television is awesome.

Let me expound on that a bit: these guys have this genuine reaction about getting picked up for another season, because after all the hard work they put in and the long hours on set, they can still get cancelled. Once your ratings aren’t satisfactory, in terms of the network’s expectations or something, the powers-that-be axe the show. I have the Mark Valley-Chi McBride-Jackie Earle Haley Human Target as an example. I honestly loved the show and is still lost, up to now, as to why it got cancelled (and why no other network is picking it up). I didn’t even think that Janet Montgomery and Indira Varma decreased the quality of the show. They might have been added through the network’s request, but point being, I would still watch the show.

Same—more so—goes for Community. I came to terms with Human Target (or at least got other amazing thriller shows to replace it, like BBC!Sherlock, Luther, and Homeland), but Community is, for me, the only one of its kind. It’s different than How I Met Your Mother and Friends, obviously, and I just can’t pinpoint another show like it. With this, they have still been on the brink of cancellation. There was this chart on one of the YouTube videos I watched (I don’t know if I linked it here) that had the number of viewers of the show, and after the pilot (which had 7 million viewers), the numbers plummeted by about 2 million, and that’s probably enough to put this show on the bubble since.

The relation of that to local television is that there are no awesome TV shows that its viewers would want it renewed. I don’t know, but if 100 Days to Heaven is part of the category that you give as a counter-example, then we really don’t have much awesome shows. Awesome, at least one that appeals to a wide audience with a captivating script, an engaging cast, and a brilliant connection with the viewers. I don’t think we have that, I’m sorry.

Yeah, I kinda ranted a bit, sorry ‘bout that. But in time with the season, happy holidays! You know what they say about -ber months.

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Crazy

I just loved the Community cast more today! I did videospam on Donald Glover, and I was slow enough to just recognize that the “Childish Gambino” on his Twitter account description is actually his “stage name” of sorts, ‘cause he also raps (I did watch one of his performances of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, but I’m not a big rap fan so yeah). Also, the guy does stand-up! So I found YouTube links on that, here’s a few if you haven’t watched any:

Fighting a Midget - shoving off a “little person” in a subway

Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock - DG makes his impression of these comics

Mr. Brown - something about “schoolchildren” and “panicking”

I Didn’t Know What That Word Meant - one of the “trademarks”, if you will, of this video, is DG’s unusually large head (angles aren’t working wonders for this vid)

Crazy Women Stories - self-explanatory

Cheating on your girlfriend’s dreams - this is my favorite among these vids—real awesome

I deemed it kinda crazy, you know, that this guy is very talented and is pursuing a lot of stuff—acting, rapping, making music, DJing, doing stand-up, and probably some other stuff—and still gives off impressive acting chops in Community.

So much about that, here are some random Community links you might want to watch:

The Troy/Abed handshake at the 2011 Comic Con

Danny Pudi plays Abed Nadir plays “Chad” the extra in an episode of Cougar Town

Alison Brie used to have a tongue piercing—and gets wacky with Mr Pudi as they host Attack of the Show

I don’t usually listen to podcasts (I don’t know why, don’t ask me), but since I really love Community I tuned in to this (direct link here). And yeah, vote for Community!

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A Filipino Text Book

Matatagpuan dito ang iba’t ibang uri ng panitikan kung saan ang mga mag-aaral ay makapupulot ng mga magagandang aral.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with this sentence at all, and if you do, then you’re wrong. The phrase kung saan is sensationalized by the media to be the equivalent of the English word “where”. “Here we are at the town plaza where protest rallies have been taking place since dawn.” How does the local media translate that? ” Nandito kami ngayon sa town plaza (barangay hall, perhaps?), kung saan mayroong mga rallyista nagpo-protesta mula pa kaninang umaga!” No, they are not equivalent. Kung saan, as far as I know, is used to refer to an uncertain place. That’s why the variation kung saan-saan is widely used. If you just told the people the place you are at that certain moment, I believe kung saan is unnecessary. (Mayroon in that faulty translation is wrong, too—may would have sufficed.)

What’s worse, that sentence I quoted at the start of this piece is from the preface of a Filipino text book for Grade 1 students. The fact that it contains even a single grammatical error, for a language text book, is astonishing, to say the least.

I’m wondering, too, why words such as kuwento and puwede are not spelled this way. The u’s are always omitted, because majority of the people (and the media, again) spell this without u’s. If those are correct simply because a lot of people do them, then I wonder why there aren’t scholarly books about jejenese, when it became such a fad.

Also, this certain book I got my hands on has particularly murky word construction. I don’t know how you call it, but I’ll just give you an example. There is an exercise in this book that asks the reader to determine whether a given scenario shows honesty or not. One of the scenarios read, and I copy verbatim, “Lumalaban nang patalikod sa magulang.” Now this is what happened: I got my brother to answer this particular exercise, and of the ten scenarios, this is the only one where he asked a variation of “What does that sentence even mean?” “Ah”, I reply, “backstab”. And how should 6-year-olds know what the hell backstabbing is? I assure you, “lumalaban nang patalikod” is not the right translation (much less a good one). To take the sentence literally (and this is how all 6-year-olds interpret these stuff), it is like “Fighting your parents with your back facing them.” In essence, it’s like you’re holding a knife behind your back, because your opponent is behind you. See? Doesn’t make any sense. So, backstabbing. If I’m the writer/editor, how do I translate that? Oh, probably “di masabi nang harap-harapan” or something. It’s difficult to do, yes, but “Nagrereklamo nang di ipinaparinig sa magulang” is a better sentence and inches closer to the “backstabbing” meaning, if you ask me.

My penultimate complaint about this book is found in yet another exercise. I’ll just enumerate the sentences now, again verbatim: “Handa ka ng pumasok pero naiwan ka ng iyong school service.” Right here, off the top of my head, two easy solutions for this awful sentence: “Handa ka nang pumasok pero naiwan ka ng iyong sundo.” I am torn with my use of “nang” there, please correct me if I’m wrong. 

Second sentence: “Mahusay ka sa pagdro-drowing. May Color Me Contest sa unang baitang. Sumali ka pero naiwan mo pala ang iyong krayola.” I’ll dissect this for you. The English words “drawing” and “contest” have appropriate Filipino translations: pagguhit and paligsahan. “Krayola” is derived from the brand Crayola, and isn’t used formally to denote a general connotation, i.e., crayons. While I know that Crayola is a widely-used brand of crayons, I don’t know if it’s as usable as the words “Xerox” and “Google”, which, as far as I know, can be used in modern parlance, i.e., “Xerox those papers!” or “Google it!” (They have been part of the OED, if I am not mistaken.)

Last, but certainly not the least, is the accomplishments of the author—decades of teaching, a couple of university degrees, and book credits. And the output is like this? I think it is a slap not to the author but to the system it lies in. Imagine, this bestselling Filipino text book is full of these stuff, made by apparently distinguished authors with years of experience with them. And these stuff are the ones teachers base on, and young students learn from. Once you teach little kids some stuff, it sometimes becomes hard to eradicate them, especially to a culture that caters to English-only campaigns and English legal documents. To those who are taking score at home: text book authors, teachers, and students (and publishers, probably) are the ones affected by this. Those are A LOT of people. For every multi-awarded Palanca-winning professor I have in the prestigious university I am lucky to be in, there are a lot more people who are versed with the wrong kind of Filipino.

Why can’t we teach these children, who pick up on lessons easily, the correct fundamentals of our gorgeous language? For example, who can accurately translate kilig or sayang? Or who doesn’t find the one-syllable “Bababa ba?” “Bababa” conversation humorous and at the same time, understandable? Yet, we are deluding ourselves with kaganapan and kung saan, abusing our use as such that they lost their meaning. 

Language is a reflection of culture, they say. Then what culture do we have!? In the end, of course, you can just call me a purist who rejects such aesthetically-displeasing yet fundamentally-sound words like weyter or, for the love of God, drowing.

[If you own the book and absolutely despise the way I criticized it, I wouldn’t be so stubborn as to keep it in proverbial corners of the Web. If I have mistakes, grammatical or otherwise, I would be glad to correct them.]

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Fan Favorite

I feel like I have been quite productive today because I just hung out here the whole day. Just voting and voting the whole day. And I was probably motivated by this latest ratings. While I haven’t watched the episodes of season three (especially what have been making the rounds as the legendary “Remedial Chaos Theory”), I believe I am a staunch fan of Community, and have been voting on this TV Guide thing for the past few days. I still can’t believe that it doesn’t garner as much recognition ratings-wise (and is on the brink of cancellation!), because it certainly is a great show. It has a superb cast and a very genius creator with a hardworking team of writers. Their guest stars are impressive too (e.g., Jack Black), and the Troy/Abed moments at the end (their “donde esta la biblioteca” back in the first season sealed it for me) are similarly stuff of legend.

I am not really your stereotypical industrious, hardworking student—not by a stretch. I just found out one of the most basic “doing what I love” kind of thing and just voted and voted and voted… and voted… and voted. Until now, as I type this, actually.

Of the other shows, I am quite familiar with Chuck, Game of Thrones, Dexter, The Vampire Diaries, and The Walking Dead. Of them, I have watched some episodes but of The Vampire Diaries, and I have Community head and shoulders above every single series in that list. I mean, I’ll answer Community and How I Met Your Mother if you really ask for my top TV shows. They are just at a different level on everything: from the cast to the script. Even the ad libs (as we later learn through behind-the-scenes commentary) make for great scenes as we re-watch the actual episodes themselves.

While we’re at it, vote for Community! I, for one, don’t want this show to get cancelled.

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A Socially-Driven Greeting

I still don’t know what the sincerest birthday greeting is on Facebook. A 9gag strip is accurate enough, that one where, after thinking for several panels, you end up with “happy birthday bro!” and a closing panel with the fyeah guy and a red “close enough” caption on all-caps (hey, describing a 9gag comic is rather tedious! =))). Really, I end up doing that, sans the “bro”. Just a very simple “happy birthday!”. 

I used to type that with an emoticon at the end, my most-used one: :D. I ended up thinking (or over-thinking) about that emoticon. “Would I smile when saying that to the person’s profile I’m posting to right now?” “Does that make my greeting unique?” “Do I even like this guy?” “Will I greet this guy in real life?”

And so I scrapped that smiley, resulting in the simple expression above. 

I also think about how it’s gonna be received. When your greeting is in the middle of a throng of similarly typed expressions, will they even appreciate what you did? And no, I believe that typing out “thank you <insert name here>!” is as appreciative as the greeting. When you have a hundred people greeting you, you just go through them and do the “thank yous”, in similarly lame fashion. Just “thank you!”. No other comments necessary. When someone replies with “welcome!”, that guy is probably new.

While some greetings are obviously personal and sincere, like inside jokes and those who tease for a treat, there are those that give the “happy birthday!” expression a twist. They write “hapi bday!” or “HBD!”. Variations are with different kinds of emoticons, without the exclamation point, and some weirder misspelling of “happy”. I end up (over-)thinking again. “Why can’t these guys type the whole ‘happy birthday’ greeting?! They have the whole keyboard!” “What the fuckin’ hell is ‘HBD’?!”

Yeah, I particularly despise “HBD”. I mean, come on! The first time I saw that, I thought it was outrageous. Hell, it’s outrageous even now! Personally, even if I’m using my cellphone to greet, and even if I’m one of the laziest people I know, I’m going to type the whole thing. Besides, if you’re already using your phone, why not send a message personally? That solves the whole dilemma.

Which got me thinking again, why do these guys type their greetings like these? To be unique? Because it’s the culture (i.e., txtspk)? Is the latter even a valid excuse? Does this type of greeting mean they’re busy? I don’t think so. And yeah, busy Facebooking isn’t a valid reason in my book. All it takes is to type the whole thing! 

Also, somebody who greeted me the last time said that I can’t hide (because you can’t see my name on the “guys who have birthdays today” list). I agree, you can’t really hide on the Internet (of all places!). The thing that will uncover your birthday is none other than your other Facebook friends, of course. It only takes two people to remember your birthday and type those lame-ass greetings and everyone will ride the pine. And it’s especially easy to remember your birthday because a very specific number will give it away.

Though, yeah, in the end, Facebook is a very effective tool in reminding you that this friend’s birthday is today. Especially to guys like me—at least for me, memorizing is not my thing.

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