As someone from a fairly sedate country with fairly sedate diseases, I have long felt that the tropics have a near-monopoly on the nastiest, most horrifying infections, including the ones that lay eggs in your brain.
That said, during my nine years in this part of the world I’ve managed to only be afflicted with fairly prosaic infections: a good number of bacteria have crawled their way inside my respiratory tract; I’ve had to receive enough rabies and tetantus shots to inoculate an accident-prone elephant; and perhaps I’ve had a horrifying mini-stroke or two, give or take. But as far as I know, nothing has ever laid its eggs inside my brain.
However, last week I received a bit of a crash course in tropical diseases. It started off innocently enough: at my work Christmas party on December 21, while entertaining my colleagues with my karaoke renditions of The Little Drummer Boy, The Christmas Waltz and other seasonal classics, I started feeling a bit weak. By the time I made it home a few hours later, I felt certifiably gross, and wasquite feverish. I slept until late the next morning, thinking it was one of those quick-to-come, quick-to-go flu infections – the kind where the primary symptom, extreme tiredness, leads elegant into the best treatment, bed rest. After about twelve hours in bed I did feel better, but later that day the fever attacked me with renewed vengeance. Read More
After two very busy months during which I simply couldn’t find the time to blog, I have been pulled back into the blogging world by some exciting news: I just drowned my first rat!
You’ll have to forgive my gallows humour, as my mind is, in fact, heavily burdened with the great significance of what I have done. For the first time ever, I have intentionally killed an animal that I could imagine having a mind – that is, something that exists as a separate entity beyond a series of instinctual reactions to nervous stimuli. I have just drowned, with ruthless efficiency, something that is much closer to my beloved dogs than it is to bacteria, plankton or protozoa. And not only that, but I have already murdered four of them, perhaps with plenty more to come.
As you can imagine (if you don’t already know), Metro Manila is positively overrun with rats and roaches. The roaches create no ethical quagmire for me – they are as vile as they are stupid, even if nature has endowed them with a remarkable set of skills for invading human living space and exploiting it in the most disgusting ways possible. I have murdered hundreds of roaches in every way imaginable: squashing, spraying, and – the least messy and most satisfying option for those encountered in the bathroom – incapacitating them by spraying them with the bidet hose, picking them up by one antenna with a piece of tissue, and then flushing them down the toilet. Out of sight, out of mind!
Unfortunately, the rats create a more prickly conundrum for the animal-loving ethicist. For years I never had to deal with this veritable Sophie’s choice because I lived in condos, and apparently rats are far less intrepid than roaches when it comes to climbing up to the 34th floor. But since I transitioned to suburban bliss in Muntinlupa City, I’ve had to deal with all the pitfalls of having your own house and yard: leaky roofs, constant fear of burglary, nosy neighbours, and yes, rats. Read More
One morning last week, I woke up, washed my usual backlog of dirty dishes from the day before, and happened to glance at my hand. There on my right thumb were two small holes – one had broken skin with the red showing through, and the other was only flaking. As I tried to figure out any way that a pair of tiny round holes could be caused by anything other than two small teeth, I realized that it was time to get a rabies shot. Did my dogs get a little overzealous welcoming me home from my late-night drinking the night before? Did a rat sneak into my bedroom and bite me in my sleep? Either way, it was off to the Animal Bite Clinic for me, or there was a small but meaningful chance that I could die in one of the worst ways imaginable.
As a child growing up in Austria, or wherever, I was dimly aware of rabies as something cartoonishly scary but pretty much non-existent, like the Black Death or the Zombie Doom Virus. In the West, rabies is presented as a hilariously implausible threat in cartoons and comics, where frothy-mouthed dogs are offered to us in the spirit of animated whimsy.
Rabies is also treated as a punchline in live-action media like Fun Run, an episode of the American version of The Office. In that episode, a lot of mileage is derived from bumbling office head Michael Scott trying to organize a fundraiser for something that presents no threat to anyone, and has in any case already been cured.
After spending some time in the Philippines, it belatedly dawned on me that things aren’t so simple in much of the world. For example, such is my naivete about the state of global health that I only recently discovered that Polio is still very much a thing here and in many other countries – something that would’ve never occurred to me with all the back-patting done over its elimination in the West; ditto for leprosy. But the slowest and scarest awakening involved my realization that rabies is not a joke.
DISCLAIMER: Skip this part if you want to allow my post to develop organically, but I wanted to avoid causing any unintended offense. This post basically asks the question, “What if someone was pompous and stupid enough to believe that Jollibee is supposed to be a French fine dining restaurant?” No disrespect intended toward the Big Bee – I’ve probably eaten my weight in Chicken Joy at this point, and I really hope they’ll bring their Pastillas Sundae back one of these days. I love you Sabado, pati na rin Linggo! Hintay ka lang, Jollibee, nand’yan na ako! Anyway…
I was recently enjoying a stroll through Salcedo Village when a restaurant caught my eye: a simple-looking local establishment by the name of Jollibee. (Oops, I mean Jollibeé – when you are fluent in the language of food, as I am, diacritics are a must.) As an international gastronome (or, as coarser types would have it, a “foodie”), I am always looking for new restaurants around the world that successfully capture the immortal culinary spirit of Le Cordon Bleu, so I sauntered inside hoping for a fresh new take on foie gras.
When I entered, I admit I was a bit underwhelmed by the decor; but the logo, at least, suggested a serious culinary experience: the apian mascot is clad in a toque, or chef’s hat, presumably as a profession of unwavering devotion to the secular religion of fine French dégustation.
As I looked more closely at the menu, however, I was baffled by the lack of authentic French offerings: more hamburgers and hot dogs than bouillabaisse and rouille, as it were. I sampled their so-called “Chicken Joy”, but it proved to be typically lacking in authenticity. And in spite of its name, it certainly provided none of the joy of say, devouring an ortolan drowned alive in Armagnac.
Finally, I found a couple of dishes on the menu that had at least a whiff of the Continent about them. First up were the so-called “French” fries, or pommes frites. Of course, anyone who is not embarrassingly ignorant of culinary history knows that these are, in fact, a Belgian creation, and so I will not defile a serious review of a French restaurant by giving them any serious consideration. Next up was the Champ Burger, short for champignon, or mushroom. Perhaps I was about to experience an irreverent fusion-style take on parmentier de champignons? When the dish arrived, I bit into it with a mix of disappointment and befuddlement: on the one hand, it did not succeed in evoking even the merest hint of my earlier culinary pilgrimages in Provence; on the other hand, they seem to have found a way to make mushroom taste uncannily like ground beef – a triumph of food engineering, if not necessarily of gastronomie.
The wine selection also proved woefully inadequate: more Sprite than Syrah, so to speak. My requests to speak with their resident sommelier were met only with confusion. I left soon afterward, my stomach filled with mushroom, but my heart empty of jolliness and joy.
In the end, I must begrudgingly acknowledge Jollibeé’s efforts to make haute cuisine affordable to the masses. Unfortunately, it takes more than a French name, a toque-clad mascot, Belgian-fried potatoes and a French-in-name-only mushroom burger to embody the spirit of hundreds of years of Gallic culinary tradition. If anything, the Jollibeé dining experience ends up being more Filipino-style American fast food than French fine dining – which would be perfectly fine if that’s what they had actually been aiming for!
Of all the creatures that walk, trot, crawl, climb, slither, slink, fly or swim upon God’s greenish Earth, few can match the wicked-coolness of the pangolin. Native to Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, the eight species of pangolin are akin to eight flavours of awesomeness!
Perhaps the appeal of these little-known, little-understood creatures derives from their striking combination of cuteness and sheer weirdness: their sad little eyes and protruding snouts are offset by their monstrous claws and alien-looking scales – and in fact, they are the only mammals with scales. Wicked cool! Read More
By now, most of you are probably already big fans of Dog With A Blog, the hit Disney channel TV show about a dog… that blogs! Wow… crazy!
Whoa… What’ll they think of next?! Pretty weird, huh?! I didn’t even know dogs could type!!!
But then it got me thinking: Everyone loves dogs, but what if we took it to the next level? What if, instead of a dog, we had a human with a blog? I mean, think of all the adventures a human being could have. After all, human beings aren’t even required by law to be on leashes outside their homes. The possibilities are limitless – or at least less limited than they would be with dogs – and that’s what Bloggerbels is all about. Let’s go – It’s gonna be off the chain! Heh, heh, heh!
