No. This is not meant to defend Cheap Tsao (Chip Tsao, I mean) and the mockery he made out of every Filipino not to mention, the Philippine government. Just like you, my blood boiled after hearing from a local news program about the things he wrote regarding the Philippines- both the nation and its people.

Did he discriminate us by saying that we are a nation of servants? Only a fool would say no. But aren’t we guilty of doing the same thing? Didn’t we call names and brand our Visayan brothers and sisters the same thing? Didn’t we stereotypically attribute the Ilocanos as “kuripot”? We give names to Kapampangans, Aetas, Muslims and almost every ethnicity. Sure, we are guilty of the same crime Chip Tsao has committed.

I condemn what he did. It slapped my sensitive ego as a patriotic Filipino. But after I read his full length article, my ego was dead beaten with the offensive use of satire. Mind you Mr Tsao, satire is only appealing and funny when it’s done tastefully. He claims to be a patriotic Chinese but he doesn’t mind that the Russians sank a Hong Kong freighter, okay now that’s funny.

Lesson: there are things need not be said to assert certain course of argument. More importantly, don’t try to be funny at the expense of others. Hmmm… all of you, please raise your hand if you’re guilty.

Last year it was ABC, now the BBC, who is getting the IRK of Filipinos.

The British Broadcasting Company’s comedy show “Harry and Paul” showed a woman in a traditional maid’s uniform gyrating in front of a man to coax him to have sex with her, under the orders of her employers.

The Harry Enfield character explains to a passing postman: “Our chums up the road wanted to see if we could mate their Filipina maid with our Northerner but he’s not having any of it.”

He orders the maid, “You, you, present your rear!’ She then shakes her behind at the man, who looked so uninterested. Finally Enfield gives up and orders her to return to the neighbour’s house where she works. “You, you – go home scram,” he says.

Filipinos did not see the funny side of this skit, as the Philippine Embassy in London sent a letter to the BBC and to the Secretary of State for Women and the Press Complaints Commission to protest “this slur on our domestic workers” in Britain, as well women activist groups demanding an apology from the broadcaster.

Last year, the same thing happened when an episode of the American Broadcasting Company’s “Desperate Housewives” used Filipino’s medical education as a punch line.

The BBC show was totally tasteless, insensitive and racist – not funny at all.  Yes, there are a lot of Filipino domestic workers in Britain. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, nor something to laugh at. These workers earn an honest living, and even help the country’s economy through the remittances they send home.

If the show’s writers had some decency, they would have showed more sensitivity and respect. They could have just written “maid”, omitting the word “Filipina”. Then maybe, just maybe, the show would have been a bit ‘funny’.

*Bastos – rude, vulgar, crude

An inspiration, a bottle of martini, an ubergeek… 10 crazy people, (and yes, an equally crazy boss) and this is what you get:-)

Presenting… my staff, the indomitable Creatives & New Media team in their wackiest moment yet… at the NBN Christmas party, Wednesday )

Been an intense week! The network is awash in activity over new programs being launched. Management is deeply moved and having goosebumps over our corporate campaign called “A TIME FOR HEROES”.

Manong is giving impassioned speeches about HEROES and galvanizing national pride. Mang Dong is driving us crazy over deadlines for the print ad and billboard layouts.

I keep listening to Mariah Carey hoping she’d awaken my inner HERO. Just when I thought it has come alive and the goosebumps are there too, something explodes. My temper! In direct line of fire: Manong and Mang Dong.

Jim took the day off, ‘to let off some steam’, he sez, or maybe to fight emotional demons on home ground. I had just come back from mine. Enard and Angie are coasting along fine. Margie and Leah haven’t lost their smile. Jasmine remains cool. Joanne is off in ola land. I know Bryan is stressing somehow.

Later today, we got talking about skills and learnings gained. When you’ve worked for TV a long time, you essentially pick up skills relative to effective communicating, but… why does it feel like we were mastering a different skill?

What is that skill ascribed to caregivers?? Patience? Forbearance? An ability to handle the quirks of the un-well and elderly?? That’s it ! Bingo !!

I liked the way Bryan put it: it was beginning to feel like we were working at Golden Acres, not at a TV network.  Life’s interesting… indeed.

ACT I – SCENE 1 : Creative Dept. 11am. Winona and Bryan talking

BRYAN : “Ms. Win, you wanna see my title card for the new program?”

WW : “Sure! What program is that?”

BRYAN : “Peoples Government Mobile Action
a.k.a. PGMA
a.k.a. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
a.k.a. program where the President links up with the people.”

WINONA LOOKS AT PHOTOSHOP DESIGN

WW : “Cool! Bry, I love the design! It looks like PGMA but not blatantly PGMA, you know what I mean? Now THIS is what I call talent!”

BRYAN : “Thanks!”

WW : “BTW, what font did you use in this?”

BRYAN : “Humm… font… uh, it’s called ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENCY.”

WW : (Grins…) “Now, THAT is what I call talent!” (Grins some more )

BRYAN : “But it’s not as dynamic as the one I really wanted to use.”

WW : “It’s ok, let’s go for the humour of it.”

EXCHANGE HI-5s…. EXIT BOTH.

I’m due for a powerpoint presentation of my Creative CommPlan tomorrow.  In reality, some components of the plan have been set in motion in the last 4 weeks.  On paper, it needs a few more slides to make it look coherent.

Monday of my second week at work.  My O2 blinks as I enter the NBN lobby, a sign that it is detecting a wi-fi signal. Oh joy!  The building is now a hot spot!  Work won’t be robbing me of virtual life after all.

On the third floor, a spacious cubicle awaits me… an L-shaped table neatly arranged over an area rug. Behind me, a picture of the President hangs on the wall. I felt like hanging myself.

Neatly sitting atop the table… a yellow pad and a panda ballpen :-/

How long has it been since I last used a Panda ballpen? I haven’t scribbled anything on yellow pad since the advent of computers.

Alice comes asking if I wanted a cup of coffee. She must have regretted asking, realizing later that when I said “yes” to a cup of coffee, I meant “bottomless”!

Still… everything felt good; I kept smiling all day; the back-to-the-basics episode served as fodder for my humor and imagination.

So… in celebration of my graduation from computers to yellow pads, I’m changing the look of my blog to… Rrrright! A Yellow Pad!

This evening, I finally accepted an invitation to switch from my old Blogger account to the new Google-owned Blogger. Pretty easy… fast… free… the way Google does everything for you fuss-free.

Everything went well. All my blog entries & template settings were “migrated” to my Google Account… as is.  Or so I thought, till I viewed my profile and saw my age displayed as 250, and that I was born in the Year of the Rat!
They had reset my birthday to February 24, 1756!

This week, I made another big switch: I finally accepted an offer to join Channel-4 as Creative Consultant, giving up the life of a freelance journalist with an inexplicable & unforgivable attachment to my ex-mother station Channel-2. The switch was pretty easy… fuss-free… the way life sometimes delivers a done-deal on your lap even before you could dwell on the whys and wherefores.

Everything should go well.  Or so I hoped, till I realized there were only 2 desktop PCs with a thousand viruses in my new office, and that there are only 3 computers with internet access inside the whole building: one at the GM’s office, one at Engineering, and one at the newsroom.
My life had been reset to January 22, 1986!

And so I had to spend my first day of work at home, and my second day at work, but only for a couple hours, then off to Figaro to breathe in cyberspace again.

I’m back at my favorite Figaro spot, bravely resisting the temptation for yet another cup of fresh brew. Enough!!! I need to level with myself.

I had spent years marveling at a pie chart that explained the relationship between gainful employment and unhappiness! I had signed a waiver that deleted my managerial job and vowed to live happily ever after.

I have unleashed my inner jokester. My life this past year resembles a blooper reel —filled with awkward pratfalls, random encounters and yes, canned laughter.

I have dreamed dreams, big and weird. Last night I dreamed about holding a newborn baby that was about to die in my arms. We were at a hospital bed # 360.  Later in my email, there was a link to Jake-M on Yahoo 360, talking about his heart attack and brush with death :0)  He’s not my baby; he’s my friend and former boss, but he does look like an oversized baby with all the fat! And yes, we did ‘conceive’ and give birth to a lot of programs and projects at ABS. If they died somewhere, it was not in our arms.

Lazy carefree evenings at Figaro are fine… But with news of Jake’s brush with death due to a misbehaving heart, and realizing how transient life is… I need to go.

I need to go find my cosmic groove and see through my heart’s mission before it starts misbehavin’ as well.

Every afternoon on my way to work, I used to stop by to give him something –anything, from used clothing, to biscuits, to 20 bucks. He’s the mendicant man by the churchyard who had lost both legs but not his cheerful smile.

Some nights back, as I walked to the bakeshop, I saw him on the same spot. I apologized for not having anything to give this time but for one of 5 pieces of ensaymada that I had bought. He gave me the same cheerful grateful smile.

I wondered as I made my way home, just how much he and I had in common these days… wondered what sort of dreams he had before he lost his legs, and what dreams I deemed lost after ABS.  I wondered some more if I could muster the same cheerful, grateful smile if I had to walk with my hands and butt as he did. The wondering had gone on all night I wondered if I would wake up as Wonder Woman the next day:-))

Eventually, my late-night wonderings turned to that Dream Butcher of a big boss that ABS hired in mid 2004… wondered what skills & talent he had that convinced the bigger boss that he would steer us to greater heights. Within months of steering our corporate course, he had led us to greater depths –forgivable, had they been depth of compassion, depth of reportorial perspective, etc, but despicable in that his pockets of intelligence only ran as deep as the pockmarks on his face, and thanks to that, our ratings, earnings and reputation as a news team plunged into erstwhile unimaginable depths!

I wonder what took me this long to say it. I should have said these words to his face in March 2005, when he called me at the Taguig Jail Compound to ask if I was there to negotiate the surrender of the rebelling inmates, when even the office goffer would have guessed what duties I was there for. I should have said it when he called one Black Saturday, just hours before the Pope died, while I and the rest of the pack had been on vigil for many nights, to say he heard on FOX news that the Pope was sick and we should get ready for a Live Special. Mercy! He was head of a news organization that was unbeatable locally when it came to breaking news (well, formerly!) and he just heard the pope was sick? Even the taxi drivers knew the Pope had been given his last rites!

Oh, he did have pockets of compassion and gratitude, to be sure. He would send congratulatory text messages after a successful coverage, followed by… uhmm, “Coordinate with EL-VEE about your next coverage. She’ll be on top of things.” Huh! Who? You know… the nincompoop of a factotum-cum-rah-rah girl who perennially fed his ego.

I wonder in which girlfriend’s closet he had left his pockets of intelligence when, in June 2005, he laid the axe on our finest journalists, declaring them as “redundant work force”… slaughtering their dreams, tarnishing the reputation they had built for years, killing the spirit and dynamics of the old newsroom.

Had our former News Operations VP, JingMag, known in the summer of 2004 that the Dream Butcher would go into such a rampage a year later, I wonder if he might have considered throwing him into the crater of Mount Pinatubo when he gathered the news management team to go bonding up the volcano slopes? (To this day, I remember that what came out of that supposed bonding session was a directive from the Dream Butcher for every participant to keep mum about the future plans of the News and Current Affairs Group. Dondi and I liked to call it… “The Pinatubo Gang and their Chamber of Secrets”)

Would Gen have hidden his trousers and hiking gear so he’d be left behind like a stray cat? You wish!

Then again, Gen and JingMag were part of the old principled news team. They… We… had our ideals, our dreams, the kapitan-inspired heritage. It wasn’t worth throwing all that away over one Dream Butcher, whose only “brains” were apparently confined to his knee-caps, making the amputee-beggar at church a lot more worth catering to; his brains and heart at least lay where they should be.

(PS: In November 2005, CNN’s new President Joe Klein decided to phase out veteran news anchor Aaron Brown —a.k.a. the face of CNN, known for his soulful, intelligent, ‘news-for-thinking-adults’ style of delivery and commentary –a.k.a. my journo heart throb

My heart bled, though we might have met only in some remote past life, as I had loved him since his ABC days with Lisa Mcgree!

So… who says we had a monopoly of corporate buttheads role-playing as presidents?)