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About this time last week, I was nursing a headache over sleep and ingested two paracetamol tablets over at The Manor Hotel in Camp John Hay, in Baguio city.

Dessert after lunch at The Manor Hotel, in Camp John Hay, Baguio City

No, it wasn’t exactly a vacation.

I was invited as a delegate to the Carnation Family Food Trip Tour organized by Appetite Magazine. The invite was a starred email for sometime over my Gmail account, until I realized that the event will be held in Baguio, and that it starts on a Friday, ends on a Saturday, my official days of rest from work. I’ve been meaning to go back to Baguio for some time now, since my last memory of it was spending the night with the family in the car en route to Ilocos years ago.

The first stop was a the Lenox Hotel in Dagupan, where we had past-noon lunch. The Peppercorn Crablets were easy, delicious targets, and the Steamed Milkfish  in Cream Sauce was another highlight. Photos? Oh I’d refer you to the sites of the other bloggers who attended the event. I couldn’t find the mood then to go on photographer mode.

Entering Baguio was a welcome visual experience. The rain, the fog, and the odd fact that most of the commuter stops usually had two people seeking shelter: a man and a woman. Right then I dearly wished I just wouldn’t be spending one night in the city.

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Chris Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige) made a good movie with The Dark Knight, but I found it flawed, out-of-balance. As typical of films of this type, I cannot remember chair-grabbing moments, since I was too busy processing information, and wasn’t provided enough space and time for that. Sure there were impressive ka-boom scenes, motor vehicles thrown inventively whirring along Gotham’s streets and tunnels, and all that unpredictable psycho-play with the Joker as architect, but who the hell was the audience rooting for to save the day? Sure it wasn’t The Dark Knight: his character development in the story was slim, shoddy, forced-to-impress, and he was too busy being bitter over Rachel Dawes, who in this offering, was only a story-peg to lead to a point. Jim Gordon? The story twist involving him was expected, and everything else comic fodder. Maybe it was Harvey Dent, because it was established well that he was indeed the White Knight of Hope Gotham needed via the caped, oddly hoarse-voiced vigilante.

But I was rooting for the Joker, the scene-stealer, to save my time and moviepass money. I wanted him to be the force that skews the storytelling, the contraption to bend the pounded nail (nail = Batman and his now-tired drama). The viewer is provided with an overplayed and menacing comic villain, gloriously underplayed and easily scary. This was no page off of Tim Burton’s gothic reference manual: this was an amazing movie-persona we are sadly now grieving over because Heath Ledger is dead.

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It all started with this post on the Rangefinder Filipinas website. Most of the people there are history fanatics, we even once screened a rare, post-war footage (c/o Uro dela Cruz) during one of our slideshow viewings, where Manila was literally flat from the bombings.

As a habit, and as a way of archiving online content I like, I imported the video to my Multiply account. Comments trickled in, from a handful of Multiply friends, then other Multiply users. Then the onslaught of invitations started to arrive from people who saw the video, and opened up a Multiply account just to comment. After the initial post, I had 50 or so invitations after a week, and I wasn’t so sure if I would add these people to my network. I decided to follow sense: active Mutliply users with interesting-enough content uploaded are a yes, and everyone else would be a no.

The video was posted on June 16, and I still have to weed through the invitations to this day. I don’t comment back, unless the commenter makes the extra effort to send a private message.

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BLOG UPGRADE TIMELINE

10:00 AM - Removing my unused plugins before the upgrade.

10:08 - Stuck it out with about 20 plugins, with a few deactivated. Mental note: make an archives page! Blog upgrade music: The Innocence Mission’s Glow record. Now deactivating all plugins for upgrade.

10:50 - Upgrade DONE. Everything should be functional from hereon.

I’m counting my last weeks in the morning shift. ARGH.

So despite the fact that most of the people in my social networks in Twitter and Plurk went to gigs last Friday, I went on a Saturday. And I really think the only thing I missed is not seeing those people, and not the bands that night.

Duster

Anyhow, I went to Big Sky Mind to watch Ang Bandang Shirley, Duster, and a few other bands I don’t know. I only did get to shoot the aforementioned bands,

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