The Bangus Ultimatum

I’ve always been a fan of laws. Not the Revised Penal Code-kind, but statements of Universal (or near-universal) principles or statements of what ought to be, like Asimov’s Law of Robotics, or Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Edge.org has a wonderful collection of them here.

Some of my favorites:

Any iconoclast with a scientifically unorthodox view who reminds you that Galileo was persecuted too…ain’t Galileo.

Species do not occupy ecological niches; they define them.

Via kottke.org

I may start to get the hang of recitations, but exams still suck the joy out of life. Reviewing all the provisions can take days, the exams themselves are torturous , and the aftermath almost always involves regret for the answers you knew but failed to remember. And then there’s the nausea of having all those rules still floating in your head somehow, burned into memory by the experience. It’s kinda creepy—sometimes I begin to imagine myself a mere conduit, a router, an exchange system of facts and tests and provisions. Less or more human? We’ll see.

Comm silence in all frequencies and load the photon torpedoes! Midterm exams are up this week so I’d have to lay off blogging for a while…

Allow me to bolster myself and my classmates with this rousing war-speech:

I see in your eyes the same fear that would freeze the very heart of me. There may come a day, when the courage of men fail, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. Today is not that day!

A red day, a test-day, ere the sun rises! Ride, students of 1-C! To death! To ruin! To the end of the world!

Relationally speaking, I have a nice, compartmentalized life. If I have to speak in terms of Social Network Analysis (and I do this a lot), my cliques are isolated into locally-centralized clusters. No messy spannings, almost no overlaps, and everything points back to Kevin Bacon—me.

My classmates/friends in the college of law don’t know my office friends, my office friends don’t know the bulk of my college friends (EJ, Badj, Aisa and Marj have managed to transcend that boundary, but they’re exceptions), my college friends don’t know my geek friends, and my geek friends don’t know my…err, political friends. That’s the way I’ve always lived.

So imagine my utter shock when a law school friend spans all the way back to a college friend, who knows something about an episode concerning a political friend, who might end up in a geek friend event that will be attended by office friends. Oh, the unimaginable chaos!

But that’s how systems mature, I guess. Sooner or later, artificial boundaries must break down and *something* must emerge from the crisscrossing. That’s how TCP/IP manages to work it’s magic…that’s how a neural network grows. What will happen when everything is folded into one, and I have to confront my relations as a connected whole?

Still no Agent Smith costume for the Newworlds convention. If I don’t find a suit and nice shades to rent/borrow, the world would have to wait to hear these lines:

“You see hobbits…aren’t really mammals.”

“Mr. Kent! Still using all the muscles except the one that really matters.”

“Wait! I’ve seen this before. You were lying there and I was standing…right here! I was supposed to say something. I was supposed to say: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…—WHAT!?! WHAT DID I SAY!?!”

“Fremen…are a disease—a cancer on this planet and we—are the cure!”

I’m going with half a dozen classmates on Saturday or Sunday.

Finally, I got to see Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I can finally move on! That is, until Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 arrive.

I can’t give a review of ROTK. Suffice it to say that I loved it immensely and that it’s one of the best works of cinema *ever*.
I for one hope that its sheer force will obliterate whatever is left of the putrid corpse of the Panday franchise (you just know it’s in trouble the moment Jinggoy played the part). No politically-inspired vitriol here. Pinoy fantasy must move on or take its money somewhere else.

That said, I am going to see ROTK again. I’m sure I saw Peter Jackson in a cameo as a Rohirrim. I hope he does go ahead with The Hobbit. Or how about a Silmarillon mini-series? I want to see the elves awaken in Cuivinen, in the starlit darkness before the first rising of the sun. And I wouldn’t trust that moment to anyone but good ol’ Pete.

Hail to Elessar King! FRODO LIVES!

Turns out that the license holders to LOTR have given Mattel the rights to repackage Barbie and Ken as Arwen and Aragorn:

Ken as the High King of Gondor? The Wielder of the Flame of the West? Chieftain of the Dunedain and Heir of Isildur? I think not!