If it happens in Pinamungajan–or Timbuktu, or Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland–it happens everywhere.

The task force should be handled not by policemen or NBI agents but by musicians, particularly lyricists. You call the police or the NBI when it’s about drugs, or alcohol, or guns, or Joavan Fernandez. But when it’s about videoke violence, call the songwriter. Unless our law enforcement institutions include “Lyrics as Cause of Violence” in their training, drug raids and checkpoints will never solve videoke killings.

This is Google Research I’m talking about, the most reliable source of information for very serious researchers, like college freshmen and humor columnists. My comprehensive Google research told me video killings are intimately linked to the lyrics of the song that caused the fight. Take “My Way” for example.

A dozen articles dissecting the lyrics of “My Way” crop up when you google “videoke killings.” If you think I’m making this up, here’s an excerpt: “The number of killings connected to singing of the song (My Way) may simply reflect its popularity in a violent environment…The song’s ‘triumphalist’ theme might also be a factor.”

“The lyrics of ‘My Way’ increase the violence,” the study continues. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody…It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.” The typical Filipino irritates.

It makes sense. Remember the last time you went videoke-ing with your friends, and there’s this guy in the next table singing “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” with all the braggadocio he could muster and you were so damn annoyed by it? Of course you don’t blame the lyrics. “I know just how to whisper/ And I know just how to cry/ I know just where to find the answers/ And I know just how to lie” is down pat annoying but only because you hate Air Supply to begin with.

You want to blow Hitchcock and Russell and their legion of fans to smithereens, not that drunk in the next table. And we’re not talking about the Bee Gees yet.

Now, imagine that same guy screaming, “For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself–Then he has naught…The record shows I took the blows. And did it my way.” Man, that guy’s annoying!

In fairness to Sinatra, he didn’t write “My Way.” It was Paul Anka, who re-wrote it from the original French, which he described as “a bad record, but there was something in it.” That “something” is murdering videoke singers all over the country. Creepy.

The Pinamungajan incident offers an additional twist to the videoke rage phenomenon. The song is not “My Way,” thank God, but Fred Berame’s Cebuano classic “Samtang May Kinabuhi.” In the context of the videoke rage in the country, the song sounds equally creepy.

No, we won’t dissect Berame’s lyrics right now. We’re running out of space. Besides, I hear somebody singing “My Way” at the videoke bar outside, and I have a mission to fulfill. Give me that gun now.

By Insoy Niñal
Sun.Star Cebu, July 20, 2010

** oops. just a few minutes ago, the HK magazine pulled out the article of this man from the internet. the magazine might as well remove him from its pool of writers.  so i looked for that article somewhere else, found it and copy-pasted it here, just to be sure. read on…

____________

HK Magazine, Saturday, March 28, 2009

WAR AT HOME

The Russians sank a Hong Kong freighter last month, killing the seven Chinese seamen on board. We can live with that—Lenin and Stalin were once the ideological mentors of all Chinese people. The Japanese planted a flag on Diàoyú Island. That’s no big problem—we Hong Kong Chinese love Japanese cartoons, Hello Kitty, and shopping in Shinjuku, let alone our round-the-clock obsession with karaoke.

But hold on—even the Filipinos? Manila has just claimed sovereignty over the scattered rocks in the South China Sea called the Spratly Islands, complete with a blatant threat from its congress to send gunboats to the South China Sea to defend the islands from China if necessary. This is beyond reproach. The reason: there are more than 130,000 Filipina maids working as $3,580-a-month cheap labor in Hong Kong. As a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.

As a patriotic Chinese man, the news has made my blood boil. I summoned Louisa, my domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics from the University of Manila, hung a map on the wall, and gave her a harsh lecture. I sternly warned her that if she wants her wages increased next year, she had better tell every one of her compatriots in Statue Square on Sunday that the entirety of the Spratly Islands belongs to China.

Grimly, I told her that if war breaks out between the Philippines and China, I would have to end her employment and send her straight home, because I would not risk the crime of treason for sponsoring an enemy of the state by paying her to wash my toilet and clean my windows 16 hours a day. With that money, she would pay taxes to her government, and they would fund a navy to invade our motherland and deeply hurt my feelings.

Oh yes. The government of the Philippines would certainly be wrong if they think we Chinese are prepared to swallow their insult and sit back and lose a Falkland Islands War in the Far East. They may have Barack Obama and the hawkish American military behind them, but we have a hostage in each of our homes in the Mid-Levels or higher. Some of my friends told me they have already declared a state of emergency at home. Their maids have been made to shout “China, Madam/Sir” loudly whenever they hear the word “Spratly.” They say the indoctrination is working as wonderfully as when we used to shout, “Long live Chairman Mao!” at the sight of a portrait of our Great Leader during the Cultural Revolution. I’m not sure if that’s going a bit too far, at least for the time being.

** Chip Tsao is a best-selling author and columnist. A former reporter for the BBC, his columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.

IF you’re a fan of Charice Pempengco and Arnel Pineda, you might think I’m making fun of your heroes; so to be safe, skip this column and proceed to the Horoscope section.

If you’re still there, it’s nice to know we share the same irritation with anything that devours talents like it’s the Great Famine. It’s double the annoyance when you see the talents yielding like dumb sheep. It’s thrice the exasperation when you can’t change channel without seeing them being interviewed by Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, Boy and Kris, Sharon Cuneta, Korina Sanchez, and the President of the Philippines.

What’s next, Charice on Al Jazeera?

I don’t have a problem with the country shifting export products from bananas to domestic helpers, to caregivers, to Mexican executioners, and now to miniature divas. I cry genuine tears of Pinoy joy after every Pacquiao fight; and the sight of those rattan chairs providing rest to celebrity butts in Hollywood makes me want to break into a patriotic rendition of Lupang Hinirang.

We should grab all chances of gaining international respect. But damn if we don’t have enough of Charice and Arnel on TV already! The Pinoy can sing, yeah, yeah. Now on to the next guest please.

Charice discovered singing at age 4 and started joining competitions in her province of San Pedro, Laguna at 7. It’s not stated how she fared in these amateur endeavors. My guess is that she kept losing because at that time she was still undecided whom to sound like—Celine Dion, Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey. She ended up idolizing the three equally and went on to win third place in ABS-CBN’s Little Big Star.

This early we already see two omens. First, Little Big Star is patterned after American Idol. ’Nuff said. Second, the Dionne-Houston-Carey triumvirate is the musical equivalent of the meteoric cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs. It’s the Apocalypse happening if by some crazy turn of events these three uber-divas get together in one act.

In 2007, a fan ominously named FalseVoice posted Charice’s performances on YouTube, sending our little diva flying to Stockholm, Sweden for a recording contract, then to the US for DeGeneres and Oprah.

That something is not so right about Charice’s instant rise to fame can be gleaned from the Oprah, where she was featured in the show’s World’s Smartest Kids episode. Wait a minute, Charice a kid? She was 16 when she appeared in Oprah!

We can argue at length about the coverage of this unrestricting noun “kid” to even include vertically-challenged presidents in the category. But a quick run through the list of the “children” who were featured in that Oprah episode might help:

1. Guyland Leday, 10, accordionist

2. Nancy Yi, 13, youngest best-selling author in Harper Collins history

3. Abigail Breslin, 12, Oscar nominee who brought one of the most popular American Girl dolls to life on the big screen

4. Lilly Gaskin, 2, geography whiz who can identify more than 100 countries in the map

5. Quincy Eaton, 9, danced his way the Oscars, the Grammys and the Superbowl

6. India’s Kishan Shrikanth, 12, youngest film director in history

7. Julian Pavone, the “Little Drummer Boy” who’s so young he still sits on his mother’s lap when not performing

8. Seven-year-old Rickie Taylor and Erik Linder, ballroom dancers

9. Quinn Sullivan, 9, guitar hero

10. Ethan Bortnick, 7, piano prodigy

11. Charice Pempengco, (age not stated), diva in the making

In the US, 16-year-old “kids” are getting pregnant. (to be continued)

SUN.STAR. DEC. 30, 2008

A sidelight to typhoons, one that is fun but must not be taken as an insult to those who suffer in their wake, is how these destructive forces of nature got their names. For sure, they don’t come whiffing through Pagasa’s radar saying, “Hi, I’m Frank. Behind me is Gener; and that’s Helen over there.”

When we were younger, typhoons reinforced our image of women as wielding influence over both the household and the universe. We rarely questioned why typhoons back then exclusively took on female names, and why the names peculiarly ended with “ing” and “ang.” We took it as God’s will. And He was a God who knew onomatopoeia, for if you listen carefully to the sound of a storm, it has an “iiiinnnnng” or “aaaaannnng” ring to it.

Also, most women in our neighborhood seemed to have names that sounded like “Ruping” (1990, P11 billion in damages), “Uring” (1991, 5,000-8,000 dead), “Nitang” (1986, 1,363 dead), and “Dinang” (1981, 2,764 dead). Women were a scary lot.

I grew up fearing the day when a super strong typhoon, carrying my mother’s name, would come rumbling from the east to wipe our town out. “Tesing,” short for Teresita, evoked such an image of a gentle and loving mother that a killer typhoon with her name wouldn’t be fair. She’s more of a gentle breeze, or an air-conditioning unit set at low cool.

Claiming that they too are capable of wreaking havoc of biblical proportions, men now want typhoons to be named after them. So in 2000, an organization called “Men as Mean as Typhoons (MMT)” lobbied for the inclusion of men’s names in Pagasa’s list. They were so successful in their campaign that most of typhoon names now are masculine, alongside a few feminine ones that they allowed to stay to make their grandmas happy.

So, in 2001, Pagasa began using new sets of typhoon names, with some upholding the notorious “ing” and “ang” tradition. Four sets of 25 names will be rotated annually. Meaning, the set for this year will be re-used in 2012.

Remember Chedeng, Kabayan, Lando and Onyok last year? They will visit us again in 2011. (If you make a stupid decision in 2010, as you definitely will, Kabayan will wreak havoc earlier. But that’s a totally different storm, although no less destructive.) In case more than 25 typhoons decide to drop by in a year, an auxiliary set will be used.

But like most men, MMT members lacked the talent to be taken seriously. Why would you want your typhoons to be named Buchoy, Estong, Estoy or Tisoy? With respect to my friends with these names, they are more like characters in a Dolphy movie than names of tree-toppling, light-bending cyclones. Julio, Jerome and Jaime sound like triplets, probably sons of an MMT official. Good they are in the auxiliary list.

Although women allowed themselves to be laughed at with typhoon Jolina, they have the frightening Ursula, Zoraida, Violeta and Yolanda reserved for the end of each year. Women will always have the last laugh.

With funny names crowding Pagasa’s list, one wonders what happened to the really stormy-sounding ones. The answer can be found in the list of tropical cyclone names for the Northwest Pacific. Beginning in 2000, tropical cyclones in the Northwest Pacific basin took on Asian names contributed by nations and territories that are members of the World Meteorological Organization’s typhoon committee.

We have 10 contributions there: Malaksi, Danas, Hagupit, Lupit, Talas, Cimaron, Hagibis, Molave, Malakas and Talim. Now those are really cool typhoon names. No gender, no sex, just plain brute force.

( sun.star opinion, july 22, 2008 )

Some guys are putting their photoshop skills to good use. Thanks to icot for emailing these to me.