Friends of this Blog

My brother saved or downloaded two dictionaries in my tablet, and the applications have been making my writing and editing life more convenient, so it occurred to me to give a shout-out to the hardware and software without which this blog wouldn’t exist or would be arduous to maintain. I’m not nerdy enough to give nicknames to inanimate objects and virtual items, so here they are in the names their inventors gave them:

1. Toshiba Satellite C660-1GQ
There isn’t much to brag about my loyal companion. What I love most about it is its 14.6-inch screen. When I’m writing in Microsoft Word, the screen has enough space for the document at the center, the Search panel on the left-hand side, and the thesaurus on the right-hand side. When I’m copyediting and the Track Changes feature is on, the screen has enough space to display on the right side the corrections I’ve made, even when I zoom the document to 150 percent. However, because the laptop has been with me for quite a few years, its battery operating time has reduced from four hours to a little more than an hour, its webcam has gone pfft, and it hangs whenever connected to a wi-fi.

2. Microsoft Office Word 2013
It’s the latest and most advanced word processor in the market. Its Search feature, editing options, and thesaurus are superb, at least compared to similar programs. I, a broke guy, was only able to download a copy of this because I used to have a Microsoft 360 account that my former company was paying for. The account was closed when I left the company, so the interface of my Word now includes a distracting notification that my subscription has expired, written in a pink line half an inch wide across the screen and below the toolbar. Also, I no longer have an access to a huge online storage space. But other than those chinks, the software is working perfectly.

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica Concise Edition CD-ROM
My copy is the 2004 edition. Though the content is still useful, the interface is outdated. Every time I open the program, the screen of my computer blinks and I get a notification that the “color scheme has been changed to Windows 7 basic” because “a running program isn’t compatible with some visual elements of Windows.” This program also has a good dictionary and thesaurus.

4. Blogger
This should be at the number one spot, but it is an obvious placing, and obvious is uninteresting. I started blogging in Blogger, and I never changed platform since then. I don’t feel like trying other websites just for the sake of trying. I’ve been happy here for the past seven or eight years. Blogger’s service keeps on getting better, especially when Google took it under its wings. What I love most in Blogger is the prescheduling option; I get to create my posts in bulk and set them to come out one at a time weekly.

5. Canon PowerShot A2500
Aside from books, this digital camera is perhaps the only sensible thing that I bought from my salary when I was still in the city working as an editor of technical documents. I lived by the paycheck; I splurged on Friday-night beer and on meals in the fancier fast-food outlets. I bought the camera primarily for this blog. I wanted my posts to have accompanying photos. However, my text-over-visuals philosophy has remained. I consider myself a writer before anything else. Photos and videos will enhance but will never replace my words.

6. PhotoScape
This freeware has been quite helpful in my photo-editing needs. As much as possible, though, I refrain from manipulating my digital images for this blog. I use this software mostly to mark my photos with the name of this blog. I used to go to Pixlr.com for this, but because I’m offline now most of the time, PhotoScape became a reliable replacement.

7. Youtube
I don’t think I need to explain the use of this website. This site is cool because my videos can be easily embedded to my blog (and other websites, for that matter). And because Youtube, like Blogger, is also now connected to Google, I can use the same account and doesn’t have to perform the pesky task of logging in multiple times. I have two things to gripe about, though. First, the quality of my video lowers when uploaded on Youtube. The original, when played in my camera or laptop, are clear enough despite the moderate resolution. On Youtube, they look like they’re taken by a 2-megapixel camera phone. My second complain is that my videos, each of which runs for just a minute or less, take a long time to upload. Each one takes thirty minutes to an hour. (But this may be due to the speed of my Internet connection.)

8. Windows Movie Maker
This software comes handy whenever I need to edit videos. Its features are limited, but it’s got all I need. Usually, all I want to do is cut the video so that it would not be longer than sixty minutes.

9. Samsung T210
This device is useful to me because of the two dictionaries installed in it recently, as mentioned above. I no longer have to endure the glitchy Encyclopaedia Britannica on my computer. For several months, I had no good use of the tablet because I had bought it for its capability to be connected to a wi-fi, something that you can’t expect to find in a remote plateau. (As you can see, I’m pretty much a one-gadget-one-use person.)

10. SmartBro
This device is here only because I’ve run out of better things to enumerate. SmartBro has been such a disappointment since November last year. When Smart started to offer “free” Internet access to mobile phone users, my broadband stick became practically useless. I have tactfully reported the problem to the company’s Facebook page and to their call center, but I got either no or useless reply. One customer service representative even hung up in the middle of the call.

Burial Jars on Facebook

I’m glad that I don’t seem to be the only one interested in Kulaman Plateau limestone burial jars and in spreading the word about them. Before I was able to, someone else had created a Facebook page about the archaeological artifacts. I can no longer remember if I searched for the page on Facebook or its creator gave me the link. What I’m sure of is that the man had left a comment in one of my posts here, and then one thing led to another.

See the page for yourself; search for “Cotabato Limestone Burial Jars” on Facebook. The page has photos of burial jars that are in the possession of a family in the United States. The jars were originally bought in the seventies by an American woman named Sally, when she was staying here in the Philippines, and her son created the Facebook page in July last year. Through email, I learned a few personal things about the family and how they acquired the jars, but I am not in a position to reveal them, so you may peruse instead the information that Sally’s son opted to share on Facebook.

The photos on the page are quite valuable. Aside from black-and-white photos of burial jars, it has colored photos of Dulangan Manobos. You can see them in their traditional garbs, some of them showing off some interesting objects: an old man in a loincloth strumming a guitar-like musical instrument, ladies with brass loops dangling from their ears and stacked around their ankles, a chieftain-looking man sporting a conical hat and wielding a wooden staff adorned with strips of metal and intricate carvings, a huge family or a small band of neighbors lining up behind a wooden coffin. Nowadays, you can rarely see Dulangan Manobos in such garments and jewelry.

There’s already a Facebook page for limestone burial jars. I wish there would be someone out there who would create Wikipedia entries for the jars, the Dulangan Manobos, and the caves of Kulaman Plateau. Additional Youtube channels and Blogger blogs could also be thrown in.

The Kulaman Plateau Mystery II

(Continued from yesterday’s post, this is the last of two parts.)

The person who spoke for CAAP on television said, “We completely deny [that a plane crashed in the area.]” He added that a “registered” plane has a “flight plan” and the radars of the agency would have detected it if a crash really happened. I don’t know if the rest of the statement was edited out, but what came out on television was rather curt. It irked me. There are simply a lot of loopholes in the statement. But before I go to those loopholes, let me state that I agree that the object could not have been a passenger plane. Had it been an aircraft of Cebu Pacific, Philippine Air Lines, or a similar company, the news would have spread like wildfire. Apparently, only CNN Philippines and none of the major television networks got wind of the news.

The plane, if the object was really a plane, could very well be a private one, despite CAAP’s denial of the same. It’s possible that the owner or pilot of the plane did not have the flight registered with CAAP. We’re in the Philippines, and if there’s an individual or company that doesn’t comply with government requirements, it shouldn’t be shocking. Also, regardless of whether the flight was registered with CAAP or not, I highly doubt that the agency could properly monitor all the activities in our aerial territory. I’ve seen quite a few reports on television about outdated or completely inoperative essential equipment at the country’s main airport. It won’t be surprising if CAAP’s radars are less than serviceable. And of course, there’s plain old indolence and incompetence of government employees. You see that everywhere—in your municipal or city hall, the Department of Health, the Department of Education, the Department of Social Welfare and Development, even in the “elite” Special Action Forces of the Philippine National Police. It won’t be shocking to find out that workers in CAAP, the Department of Transportation and Communication, and related agencies have been sleeping on their desks.

I heard from some people that eyewitnesses claim they saw a plane. Could they be mistaken? While we live in the boondocks, I believe that the people of Kulaman Plateau are civilized enough to be able to identify a plane from a kite, a weather balloon, a flying garbage truck, a manananggal, or a saucer-shaped spaceship. Airplanes to and from General Santos City can be seen in the sky regularly, and scenes with airplanes are fairly common in movies, so they know what a plane looks like near or far even if they have not been on one. If they say it was a plane or something that looked like a plane, then it could only be a plane or something that looked like a plane.

I wonder if the object was a drone. A drone is unmanned, and it could be the reason why no one seems to have publicly sought help from the authorities to rescue any victim or recover any debris. I doubt, though, if a drone would produce the kind of sound that I heard. For the nth time, it was very loud. It was heard all over the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino and beyond. That’s an area of at least 40,000 hectares. If it’s true that the sound was heard in as far as the municipalities of Lebak and Esperanza, then the area can be as wide as 150,000 hectares. It must be a huge drone and quite low-tech, considering the kuliglig-like sound it made, and that doesn’t make sense. A conspicuous and cranky drone doesn’t make sense. I must admit, though, that the only drone I’m familiar with was the one that Jeremy Renner shot down in The Bourne Legacy. So it might really be a drone. But the question is, What would a drone be doing in Kulaman Plateau? My best conjecture is that it was a U.S. drone looking for the other two terrorists that the PNP-SAF failed to neutralize in Mamasapano. Usman and Amin Baco might have sought shelter in the camp of Moro rebels in the municipality of Palimbang, southwest of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I’m not saying of course that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is coddling the terrorists. I’m just saying that, just like what happened in Mamasapano, the terrorists might be hiding in an MILF territory without the knowledge or consent of the MILF leadership. Again, let me emphasize that this is merely a conjecture. I think it’s the fictionist in me who wrote the preceding couple of sentences. I’m merely exploring—and hopefully eliminating—the rumored but unlikely explanations for the bizarre incident. I still have more reasons to believe that the object was a private plane.

So if it was a private plane, why has there been no explanation or public call for help from the family or associates of the possible victim or victims? One possible reason is that the plane was doing or carrying something not legal, and the people who arranged the flight didn’t want the authorities to get wind of their activities. (Many people in the plateau have the suspicion that the plane was carrying Yamashita gold bars, and they’re wishing to stumble on the wreckage.) Another possible reason—and the religious may pray that this is really it—is that the plane was able to land safely despite the engine trouble. This isn’t impossible. As I’ve narrated earlier, the last sound coming from the sky was almost similar to that of a normal airplane. The rumbling became faint, but it didn’t end with an explosion, at least as what my ears caught. So if it was a private plane, what could it be doing in Kulaman Plateau? Maybe it was just supposed to pass and it had another destination. Maybe it was carrying an official or owner of the powerful logging company that operates in the area; the plane might have just been hired or might be owned by the company or the owner of the company. Investigators should ask a statement from the company. (And while they’re at it, they may ask the company why it doesn’t seem to have had any corporate social responsibility projects in the decades that it has been operating, stripping Kulaman Plateau of its virgin forests.)

Some people thought that the sound was caused by a bomb or bombs. It wasn’t. It didn’t sound like any of the bombs or missiles that I’ve seen explode in movies and documentaries. It didn’t sound like the improvised explosive device that went off some seventy meters away from our house in Isulan, several years ago. I don’t want to go into so much details about this. It wasn’t a bomb or any form of ordnance. Some people suggested that it might be the debris of the satellite that was expected to fall, but the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration has denied this. The agency said that the satellite was still in orbit when the strange sound was heard. I don’t see any reason why NASA would lie, and as far as I know, a metallic object or a meteor falling from the sky—in the remote chance that it’s not yet burned up—wouldn’t sound like a truck engine.

To sum up, here are the things that I’m sure of about the source of the sound: (1) It was traveling in the sky. (2) It had an engine. (3) Its engine malfunctioned. Here are the things that I heard from other people and that might be true: (1) It looked like a plane. (2) A part of it was burning. I’m also sure that: (1) It was not a passenger plane. (2) It was not a bomb.

And the million-dollar question: Was it a spaceship? Many of the people in the plateau are thinking so, and that’s primarily because the authorities cannot give any reasonable explanation, and if the authorities don’t do anything further, the spaceship theory will surely become the best explanation for it. The Kulaman Plateau Mystery will tickle for sure the balls of UFOlogists, conspiracy theorists, and similar weirdoes. Imagine having at least 50,000 people as witnesses. All of them heard the sound, and dozens of them saw the object, and their descriptions are the same! This must be the biggest verifiable UFO sighting in the history of the world. I don’t mind if the rumor about aliens will spread. It might be the best way for people outside Kulaman Plateau to be interested in the matter. It might be the only way to persuade authorities or concerned organizations to conduct a thorough investigation. Let’s spread the lies and ignorant opinions so that we can solve the real mystery and find the truth.

The Kulaman Plateau Mystery I

(This is the first of two parts.)

While I was inside the house the previous Sunday, June 14, I heard an extremely loud rumbling from the sky. The sound made me so scared that I decided to go out of the house and glance around, expecting something enormous, metallic, and on fire to appear out of the clouds and come crashing down on me. The strange sound went on for about thirty seconds to a minute, and then the air became silent again, as it usually is in most part of Kulaman Plateau. It took me I guess a minute more to calm myself. When I went back inside the house, I forgot rather promptly what had happened. It didn’t occur to me again until lunchtime the next day, when CNN Philippines reported about unconfirmed “reports” about a “plane crash” here in Sultan Kudarat Province.

That could have been the end of it for me. News about plane crashes generally don’t pique my interest. I can’t give a definite reason for it; perhaps it’s because plane crashes get almost everyone excited, and the popularity turns me off, as what I normally feel about things popular. Even if the crash happened in Kulaman Plateau, I wouldn’t give it much attention, much less write about it. I decided to create this post, however, when I found out that the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines denied the occurrence of such an incident, or accident, as though hundreds of people in the plateau merely smoked hemp together and hallucinated the same thing.

The thing did happen, whatever it was. I heard the sound myself, and reportedly there were some people who saw something, specifically an object in the sky that exploded or was on fire. The claims are true, and the appropriate government agencies should investigate them. It is frustrating to think that this incident will likely remain a mystery forever, as what happened to the unsolved medical enigma that struck Sitio Parreño, Barangay Tinalon, last year. The residents of the hamlet butchered and ate a couple of horses that had fallen ill or died within hours of one another, and the meat made the people sick. More than a hundred suffered from headache, diarrhea, and vomiting, and seven people died. I heard that the Department of Health conducted an investigation. The doctors suspected that the affliction was caused by a virus, and this is both interesting and worrisome because horse-to-human viral transmission is very rare. (And I would like to call it SNAV or Senator Ninoy Aquino virus, after the name of our municipality). The results of the tests, however, were inconclusive, probably due to the difficulty of going to the remote area and sheer lack of willpower and incompetence on the part of responsible government workers.

Some people in my village estimate the sound to have lasted five minutes. Some say ten minutes. My own estimate, as mentioned earlier, is merely thirty seconds to a minute. I’m fairly sure of my calculation, even if I didn’t look at any watch or clock during or after the incident. Time seems to stretch ten-fold whenever all you are doing is observe something. This is what I often feel every time I cook instant mami or instant pancit canton and closely observe the boiling time. I don’t like the noodles to be soggy, and there are still remnants in me of my old obsessive-compulsive self, so I always make sure that the time that elapses from putting the noodles into the boiling water to removing the pot from the fire is no more than three minutes, as suggested in most packaging. During such waiting time, I often feel that a minute is as long as five minutes. Furthermore, when the 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit Bohol and Cebu about two years ago, I was in Cebu then on the fifth floor of an eight-story building, crouched between the upper and lower bunks of a double-deck bed, waiting for the whole world to collapse on me. The shaking and rumbling of my dormitory seemed to me to go on forever, but I learned later from the news that the temblor lasted for about forty seconds only. I knew since then that time could indeed be relative or our sense of time may not be synchronized with a mechanical device.

Stories about what people here heard or witnessed that moment will surely be less accurate by the day. I assume I don’t have to explain how our own memory can deceive us. So I’m setting out here today my own account, and I’ll try to be as accurate as I can be.

When I heard the strange sound, I was seated in the couch in our living room, reading Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout. I don’t know what time it was exactly. It must be between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I’m sure that it was morning because electricity in our town runs for twelve hours only, from noon to midnight, and the lights were not yet on that time. The sound was like a thunder. Let me describe the volume. Imagine yourself inside your house while it is raining, and then you see a flash of lightning outside. I’m sure you’ve experienced that. When a lightning is that near, the thunder that accompanies it is usually so loud that it makes your chest vibrate. The strange sound was as loud as that. So I thought it was just a thunder. I expected it to die out within a few seconds. It went on, however, for a little too long for a thunder. After seven or eight seconds, I decided to check it out. I went out of the house through the backdoor.

The sound was obviously coming from the sky in the west, but I couldn’t see anything. The sky was almost filled with thick white clouds. I don’t believe in aliens, or in humanoid aliens that drive a saucer-like spaceship, but I thought that time that the sound was perfect for such a spaceship. It only seemed fitting for a spaceship to emerge out of the clouds and fly toward our house like a giant Frisbee. I guess I thought of a spaceship because the previous night, I caught on HBO some scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though the scenes I saw didn’t have a spaceship in them. I walked the length of our house toward the front yard. Because the noise was obviously not a thunder and sounded like a cranky engine of a large truck, I told myself that it must just be one of the very few six-wheeler trucks that ply our village. But there was no truck in sight; our house is far from the road. And a truck could only sound that loud if I was very near it, or my ears were pressed against its engine. It then occurred to me that the sound might be coming from a thresher; a harvest had been going on for a few days at the farm lot about fifty meters from our home lot. I looked at the farm and didn’t see any person or mobile machine. I also realized that threshers are for rice, and the crop in the farm is corn.

Twenty or thirty seconds since the sound erupted, it became fainter. It’s a plane, I thought. It’s just a plane, but it still sounds odd. I looked at the sky in the east, where I usually see passing planes to and from General Santos City, but clouds still kept me from seeing anything. After a few seconds more, the noise died down, and I became aware of another noise—a truck running in the road about a hundred meters downhill. I was sure it was a truck because it blew its horn. I was sure that that the earlier sound wasn’t a truck, but because the last thing I heard was something familiar and harmless, I didn’t dwell on the matter. I didn’t want my imagination to get away with me, because that happened a few months ago and I seriously hurt myself physically. (But this is another story.) I went back inside the house and continued reading my book.

(The second part will be posted tomorrow.)

Big Ants

If I’m not mistaken, I haven’t featured in this blog the types of animals Kulaman Plateau has. Let me start this week, and let me start small—literally. Let me show you my photos of a type of ant here in our place. The ants caught my attention because they’re big, seven or eight times bigger than the usual ants that bushwhack your cupcake crumbs. The color of the ants also fascinate me. The rearmost part of their body—that giant cleavage-less booty (sorry, I don’t feel like researching the scientifically accurate name for it)—is maroon, and the rest is black. While the skin of ordinary black or red ants seems transparent, the skin of my ants looks solid and reminds me of Iron-Man’s suit.

I saw the ants in a rarely used part of our house, and when I showed my photos to my mother, she told me that the ants were called hantik. She also said they were not really that rare. I had thought they were rare because I had never seen them before. I don’t know what happened, but it took me almost thirty years to find out that such ants were crawling, working, and propagating just around me. My mother added that the ants’ bite was very painful. I assumed that the pain, just like the size of the ants, was seven or eight times more intense than what ordinary ants could give. I took no chances. With a broom, I swept the ants away with their cobwebby camp. They’re no longer around.

The second time I saw such an ant was at the top of the Toro-toro. I was sitting on the ground with my fellow climbers when I noticed a huge ant crawling on my arm. I was delighted to see a hantik, but when I remembered my mother’s words about its painful bite, I immediately swept the tiny creature away. To see how large a hantik is compared to an ordinary ant, look at my third photo below.

Notes on a Murder

It happened eight months ago. It’s nothing but a distant memory to me now, but it haunted me for weeks, months, after it happened. I tried to write about it. I expected to come up with a meditative, exhaustive prose work. But what I had in the end was a feeble attempt at poetry and a lengthy status message that I decided not to post, realizing that likes were not what I was seeking and comments of friends would not make any difference.

It happened eight months ago, and until now, the killer or killers are still at large. The investigators didn’t even have a suspect. That’s Philippine police work and justice system for you. The best solution is prayers. The text below, which incriminates someone, may or should not be taken as facts of the case.

October 12, 2014
To Carry a Dead Body

A nephew of a cousin-in-law, that’s what you are
to me, not too distant for me not to care,
not too close for me to not know what to do.
So I help carry your body.

You are lying on a blanket carried by six men
like a baby sleeping in a hammock
sung to sleep by your loving mother, except
you’re too big, too heavy, and dead.
Your legs dangle out of the blanket.
The blanket almost sags to the ground
even if the men give
all their strength. Or maybe they can’t give
all their strength, for they don’t want their legs
to brush against the blanket, they don’t want
their pants to be soiled by the blood
oozing from your head
and seeping through the cloth.

We pull you up to the dump truck. An impossible task
it seems to be. But somehow we’re able to do it.
As the truck runs to the funeral home,
we still have to hold on to you, to the blanket,
for you might roll on the floor.
We don’t want you to be hurt because you
have suffered enough from the bullet
that a man put into your head
the previous night.

Your shin presses against my ankle
from time to time as I sit on a spare tire
beside you. You’re not yet too cold or too stiff.
You can pass for someone alive.
Your legs are lean yet taut, darkened by the sun,
streaked with mud. Have you
been plowing the field? Dirt has resided
in your toes, and only the base of your nails
have remained white.

We reach the funeral home and lower you
from the dump truck. It does not seem
so impossible this time, but the blanket
has shifted, and your lower body dangles
out, so I have to hold your thigh.
You can pass for someone alive. Or
maybe not, for when the other blanket,
which covers you, slips down, I see
your grimy forehead and half-shut
yellowish eyes on the blood-soaked sheet.
No, your mother did not put you
on this hammock.

A neighbor did. He who got irked
when you parked yourself
on the road last night and recited the poems
of a drunk.


November 1, 2014
A Day for Souls

Here’s a Halloween story. Three weeks ago, a man was shot dead at midnight about a hundred meters away from our home. He was a relative of a relative, so in the morning, I helped carry his body up and down the dump truck that brought him to a funeral home. He had been shot twice in the head, and though he had been dead for ten hours when we were carrying him, his head was still bleeding, the blood seeping through the blanket where he was lain. At some point, the blanket slid, and I had to hold him by his leg. It was my first time to touch a dead person. It was a chilling experience. But the most chilling thing about this story is that it is true, and until now, the policemen are still clueless as to the identity of the killer.

This Halloween, as we get ourselves busy with party costumes, may we spend some time remembering the victims of gruesome killings. May we be aware that there’s still so much to be reformed in the justice system of the Philippines, and may we care, for if met with apathy, injustice will eventually creep into our doors. More than ghosts, dead men walking, and psychotic serial killers, what we should be afraid of are our ordinary neighbors, even our loved ones. If suddenly pushed to the edge, They can kill us even if they love us. They can kill us even if they don’t want to.

White Flowers

I created this post, which contains mostly photos, simply to offset my previous few posts, which are long and purely text. I also want to emphasize again how easily flowers thrive here in Kulaman Plateau, due to the temperature, quality of soil, and abundance of rainfall. While I am not particularly fond of flower cultivation and anything that requires tilling dirt, I seriously wish the municipal hall would see how flowers could boost the local economy. Individual farmers could grow flowering plants and sell the blooms in the plains, while the local government should build and maintain parks to attract tourists. Just like Baguio. I assume there’s enough public land in the poblacion for a large park or two, and if it doesn’t rain for a long time, Kulaman River has enough water to keep the plants alive and blossoming.