I have acute gastritis again! What's more, I'm also experiencing excruciating stomach cramps! So far, I've been to the crapper three times already, each time muttering prayers and promising stuff to God. On my third visit I had even promised to give up porn if he would just let the pain go away....

Anyway, so I went to the doctor and he prescribed me some German-made Ultracarbon Charcoal tablets for the gas. When I was ready to take them, I realized that they're real charcoal! If you look at the picture carefully you might notice the charcoal smudges on my index finger.

I was contemplating if I should take them. Surely you can trust the Germans. Right?!! But it's charcoal... from the coal mines... handled by sweaty miners with their dirty hands.... Isn't it comparable to licking a stone? eating soil?

Then I felt the gas acting up and had no choice but to pop in two tablets followed by lots of water. I didn't get to taste them. But I plan to take a bite off one tomorrow and tell you what they taste like.

UPDATE: Pretty anticlimactic... it doesn't have any taste! I even bit it a couple of times it to confirm. Paper probably has more flavor. It tasted like very clean paper.

WARNING: Kids, don't try this at home.

I got home late Wednesday night to find my PC showing a blue screen of death instead of downloading porn the latest TV episodes. I pressed the reset button, and everything was fine... until I got another blue screen of death a few minutes later. I rebooted several more times, and got the lovely blue screen within a few minutes each time. I was seeing red, and when the PC died yet again, I lost my temper and gave it a hard kick.

I immediately felt remorse. I could have damaged my hard drives with that! What's wrong with me? I decided to give it one last try before I give up and cry myself to sleep. And guess what? It worked, and I haven't encountered another blue screen ever since. Huh. How did that happen? Maybe a tiny insect got fried on my motherboard, and my kick knocked it loose? I don't know. All I know is that violence works. Ha!

Once again, kids, don't try this at home.

* * *

My pattern of abusive behavior towards computers started back when I was in high school. One day, my old CRT monitor began to show an annoying purple tint. After fruitless minutes of adjusting hue and color temperature and whatnot, I got very frustrated. And what better way to deal with frustration than some violence? I whacked the left side of the monitor. The purple tint magically disappeared.

It came back the next day. I whacked the monitor again, and it worked. Eventually, the ghost of Barney would come back more and more often and would require harder and harder whacks to exorcise. I slapped and whacked the poor monitor constantly for months until it finally died.

* * *

I hadn't posted a new blog entry in the last 10 days. I think chickenmafia.com had never gone this long without updates before. Tsk tsk.

It's not as if I had nothing to write about. I went to a few blogger events recently, and I had the responsibility to announce that artsy fashion brand Volcom has a cool T-shirt design contest and that the California Pizza Kitchen has... pizzas. But I didn't. I was just lazy I guess.

I wonder if violence would work on me as well as it did on my PC. If someone threatens to kick me in the nuts every time I go two days without blogging, what would I do?

Hmm. I'd probably start wearing a protective cup.

On my birthday a few weeks ago, I forced myself to wake up much earlier than usual. No, it wasn't an attempted lifestyle change or anything like that. A travel agency was handling the renewal of my recently expired passport, and they helpfully scheduled for me, a night owl, to appear at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) at the ungodly hour of 9 AM... on my freaking birthday. (Thanks a lot, you guys. That was the best birthday gift ever. Now please die.)

I don't remember ever having to make a personal appearance at the DFA to get my passport renewed. Well, it's supposedly a new bureaucratic regulation imposed after 9/11 to ensure that the photos on terrorists' passports match their faces, because yeah, all local terrorists carry authentic Philippine passports.

And boy did the bureaucrats go overboard with the accurate photo thing. The DFA website has a three-page "guidelines on new photo requirements for machine-readable passport." I see that they have trimmed the PDF file down to a neat 850 KB. When I first downloaded the guidelines a few months ago, there were three separate files with a total size of 22.3 MB. Apparently, the morons who run the website have learned about the magic of JPEG compression since then... yay progress.

The document is a bureaucrat's wet dream. Some of the rules are somewhat reasonable, but others are just plain ridiculous. Take this one: "When having their photos taken, applicants may smile. The 'Mona Lisa' smile is recommended." Thank you, dear government, for giving us permission to smile like Mona Lisa. And this one: "Use of earrings for women is allowed, provided earrings are small. For men, the wearing of earrings is not allowed." Unfair! What happened to gender equality?

The rule I loath the most was "both ears of the applicant should be visible." I loath it because I have longish hair that covers both ears. If I were to change my hairstyle just for the passport picture, would I have to show my ears to pass airport inspection each time I travel? That's silly.

The rule has a loophole though: "It is all right if the ears of a Muslim applicant or an applicant who is a member of a Religious Order (nun) is not visible in the photograph." (Did you catch the wrong subject-verb agreement? "Ears is not visible," heh.) Unfortunately, I'm neither a Muslim nor a nun, so I had to pull my hair back behind my ears when I had my photo taken a few days before my DFA appointment. Doing so made me look like a dork... a gay dork. In retaliation, I refused to do a "Mona Lisa smile" for the camera. That in hindsight wasn't the best idea. I'm now doomed to look like an angry gay dork on my passport for the next few years. Yay me.

The third page of the document is full of sample photos that were rejected according to the guidelines (probably used without the consent of the poor rejected people in the pictures). Here are some of my favorites. See if you can guess why they were rejected.

Easy? Here are the answers.

Photo #1: hair across the eyebrow/eye area. Yeah, that strand of hair made her totally unrecognizable.

Photo #2: unnatural skin tone. Really? How do you know that's not his natural skin tone?

Photo #3: uneven skin color. Really? She looks fine to me.

Photo #4: yellowish skin tone. As an ethnic Chinese, I have this to say: Fuck you! I didn't choose to be born with yellowish skin! Racists pigs!

So would my photo be rejected? Judgment Day soon came along. I rushed my sleepy ass out the door at 8:30 AM on my freaking birthday to make the long drive to the DFA. Having never been there before, I promptly got lost. It was almost 10 when I finally found the shithole. No, it really was a shithole. The entrance to the passport renewal area was in a dark and stinky back alley, with a crowd of stinky people spilling out into the street.

Fortunately for me, my mother and my sister were there since 8, and they saved me a spot near the head of the queue. I usually have strong queuing ethics, but on this particularly day, I didn't care. I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the hateful stares. It was my birthday, and I deserved a break.

I stepped up to the window. The guy who was supposed to verify my identity barely glanced up at me and made me sign a form that I didn't bother to read. An angry old man behind a table then grabbed my hands, pushed my thumbs onto a dirty purple inkpad, then pressed them against boxes on the form. Um, I could have done that myself, but thanks for the hand holding.

The whole process took five minutes, and it only took that long because my mom kept peppering the bureaucrats with annoying questions about proper procedure for this and that. I briefly wondered if my mom has OCD and if it's hereditary.

Anyway, I'm glad that the whole thing is over with. As a reward for my efforts, I received a shiny new machine-readable passport with a horribly ugly picture a few days later. I know I should be ecstatic (oh thank you thank you, DFA), but I find myself dreading the day five years from now (I think... my passport is locked up in my drawer and I'm too lazy to check) when I'll have to do this shit all over again.

I came across this a few minutes ago and found it very amusing (I'm easily amused).

Want more? Here's another one.

I'll post a decent blog entry within the week, I promise.

Can anyone guess who this famous Filipino celebrity is?

I'm not referring to the one on the right of course--I know I'm sorta famous, but I don't mind sharing the spotlight with other stars sometimes.

I've shown the picture to some of my friends, and not many of them recognized him. Can you do better? The winner gets something from Joyfulchicken.

Update from Joyfulchicken: Slim Whale was the first one to identify Ely Buendia here, but I accidentally deleted his comment. Anyway, he gets 10,000 bonus points. (Bonus points don't do anything.)

Remember the Nintendo Family Computer? It was so much fun, especially when you had to redo a stage thirty times because there's no way to save your game.

One of my favorite Famicom games is Punch-Out!! And since I'm a wannabe casting director, here's my take on what the cast should look like if they ever make a Punch-Out!! movie.

Doc Louis and Little Mac = Stanley from The Office and David Archuleta

You may think that Archuleta is too girly to be believable as a boxing star, but a boxing movie with homesexual undertones could mean critical acclaim.

Glass Joe = Owen Wilson

Same nose.

Von Kaiser = Borat

Same mustache.

Piston Honda = Bolo Yeung

I’m sure you saw this one coming. Guess what? Bolo is 70 years old right now. No kidding.

Don Flamenco = Manu Ginobili

He looks like Adam Sandler too, but getting Manu would be a lot cheaper.

King Hippo = a white gorilla

We've got to have an animal in the cast. Kids like movies with animals.

Great Tiger = Apu and Hobbes

I patted myself on the back with this one.

Soda Popinski = Stone Cold

Although I think Stone Cold usually drinks something stronger than soda pop.

Bald Bull = Charles Barkley

Because they're both bald.

Mr. Sandman = Cedric the Entertainer

I think Cedric pulls off the fighting pose well enough.

Mr. Macho Man = some actor named Sam Elliot

Underneath that grizzled and wrinkled exterior is a grizzled and wrinkled body.

Mike Tyson = 50 Cent

Coincidentally, Mike Tyson's bank account has about 50 cents left in it.