MANGKOKOLUM!

ONE bloke auctioned off his soul on e-Bay and got a niggardly $57 for it, paid for by a journalist who likely wanted to humor the soul-seller. A fetching virgo intacta from China plunked down her virginity on the electronic block. She wanted to raise money to pay her way through college. The last bid was at $100,000 before the auction was called off. Probably priggish netizens deemed such a market transaction unpalatable or a bit of hymen like that was way too steep. It would be within the bounds of good taste to sell a modest spread of real estate in Pasay City—a house and lot within a family compound wracked by squabble. Any anthropologist with more than modest means might be interested in a property like that—a patch of urban lot with a shoebox of a house that a workmate of mine calls home. Sadly, it has turned into a battleground. Maybe a combat zone of sorts that has strained familial ties and reared the ugly side of emerging systems of values in the megalopolis. The workmate ough...

SO someone’s on watch over me. Could be an Orwellian petty Big Brother with terminal brain dysfunction and a huge penis envy. Maybe an honest-to-goodness brother’s keeper. Barely a month after wading through the various sites plied on the intranet of a global firm, I began receiving via snail and electronic mails a gamut of reading materials-- trade journals, slim manuals, tracts, the works. Officemates wondered why I was getting such bulk of printed matter from the mails. Some reads were outright Greek—say, evaluation of geological strata that can point up presence or build-up of natural gas and crude oil. A few were too technicalese to chew through—uh, prevailing wind directions and other climatic factors in ambient air quality, long-term impact of tetra-ethyl lead on groundwater purity, recommended fuels to generate higher kiln temperatures for firing stoneware pottery… Who’d stew his neurons on that? I sure also feasted on vital statistics— sabi nga’y ang hindi lumingon sa butas na...