NOTE: This is a “compilation” post about some of my non-personal topical posts on social media sites forn this month, and I get to expand on them properly – one can only do so much “expanding” using a mobile phone. I include links, the original text I put in, then below it, additional things from me.
I have both Facebook and X/Twitter, I also sometimes do YouTube comments, but that’s pretty much it for my activity on socials.
November 1-8 2025
GMA News Online
NBA: Ja Morant suspended after lashing out at Grizzlies coaching staff
Methinks the coach will be fired in a few weeks or months by the ownership, unless they flip Ja Morant for another big superstar. Either of the two, really. The Grizzlies can’t afford a Butler situation, they currently have no team culture to hold things down.
Well, also methinks that the Grizzlies front office has to trade Morant as soon as possible. No question, he is a foot-on-the-gas talented player. But he’s also young, and the first mistake the Grizzlies leadership made was not surround Ja with strong culture-setting veterans in his first two years. He had JV, not that effective for him. Jae Crowder was traded away. The other vets were just journeymen benchwarmers that didn’t move the needle much in terms of a positive influence to Ja Morant. Second mistake was the Grizzlies letting the discontent fester between Morant and Tuomas Iisalo, the dude that replaced Taylor Jenkins. Worse is that they are seemingly letting this play out for a season.
They also cannot afford to keep a disgruntled player like Ja Morant. Like it or not, Ja is the most talented in that roster. He also earns a large salary. I think it will be better for the Grizzlies to just start over. Trade him for any decent package. For me, 1 is better than 0, and keeping Ja in a Grizzlies uniform is a 0.
NewsWatch Plus Philippines
EX-DPWH ENGINEERS, DISCAYA MAY SPEND CHRISTMAS IN SENATE DETENTION
Again, I reiterate my utmost disbelief that the Senate is allowed the power to “detain” certain people under investigation. Clear distinction of powers and responsibilities should be a core tenet of any government, but also clearly our own government sucks at that too. Legislators doing investigations instead of, you know, making actual laws, is a big joke.
For the life of me, the reasoning provenance as to why a legislative body, like the Senate, was allowed the power to “detain” people they deem the need to be held in the course of an investigation, is beyond me. They are supposed to make laws, that’s their primary task. How is the power of “detention” be of any useful or critical help in the course of legislation? Them erudite folks keep saying that it is due to the Senate’s “inherent power of contempt” that supposedly ensures “compliance and respect during official legislative investigations”. Basically “implied necessity” in the face of the need to have the Senate ably perform its tasks (by the SC decision on Arnault v. Nazareno).
But the investigation cannot remain in a standsill – presumably, it can still proceed without the recalcitrant person present, and the Senate could still recommend charges in the end. So what’s the useful point of physical detention in a legislator’s building? Can’t they just proceed with the investigation without the stubborn person in attendance and recommend for the executive department’s DOJ to file the necessary charges? Or just wait for regular warrants issued by a court to have them detained in an actual detention center? Meh.
In my opinion, the origin ruling should have not given the legislative branch that power, instead the ruling should’ve instead empowered the legislature to delegate and (temporarily) send the person to a detention facility ran by an appropriate government civilian agency. But hey, here we are, and it still sucks.
Also, what’s the point in emphasizing these allegedly corrupt people may be “spending Christmas in detention”? Christmas is a holiday season. What about if the detention timing happened in the middle of February to March instead? Would the media and the good senator have made statements about them maybe “spending Ramadan in detention”? Very likely they won’t even dare. In my opinion, they did not really mean the negative punishment-feeling implication of them possibly “spending Christmas in detention”, they just want a good aspirational soundbite. Same good-feel statement like “pogi bili ka na ng fishball, masarap” – the fishball vendor didn’t really mean saying you were handsome, they just want you to buy their food.
When I try out a new restaurant, hawker stall or eating house, I always either order a basic dish or one of their non-specialty dishes. To me, it’s a much better gauge of restaurant quality than ordering and judging their specialties. It means they care about everything they cook, and maybe a lower chance of food poisoning.
For example, last week I tried out a nasi kandar stall but I ordered something I found on their menu – steamed chicken rice. They didn’t nail it and the chicken is dry AF, so I decided never to patronize that place again..
That testing method never failed to work for me. Because in my opinion, a good restaurant, hawker stall, or eating house should have the basic self-respect to only put in the menu the food they are able to respectably manage to create. Some of them I see, they stuff things in their menu to look impressive, but that only works in a Chinese sit-down restaurant – here’s probably a Cantonese uncle in the kitchen banging out kick-ass food from a menu boasting about 30+ dish options plus variants. What I’m saying is, I’ll somewhat forgive menu bloat in a Chinese restaurant, not sure about the others.
I’ve always had better food in hawker stalls that specialize in just very narrow and very limited menu options, like some of the older noodle restaurants, because you know they are selling the good stuff, they care about what they cook and sell. One of the best char kway teow places I frequented in Holland Village was from a stall ran by an old uncle that had only 4-5 kinds of dishes to cook. Compared to another noodle hawker stall almost a kilometer away, where their menu has 12+ dishes and multiple variants each, their char kway teow was a sad glob of salty noodles.
Since I moved from Holland Village to Geylang, I’ve been on the food crawl around Geylang and Kallang to try out all possible eating houses and hawker centers, a new stall and a new dish every weekend. I just cross out the ones that don’t pass my criteria, and mentally bookmark the ones that do. Like that nasi kandar place I tried recently, they had steamed chicken rice on the menu so I ordered it as a test – but the chicken was slightly warm and very dry (a no-no for this dish), the rice was not even fragrant nor tasty, and I ordered a side of chopped chicken livers but instead I was served vegetables. Why they put that option up when they can’t even do it well? Fuck that, not coming back to that stall ever.
Hearing this from this cardinal sitting on a nice paneled office and on a nice boss chair is like getting lectured on physical health by an obese dude.
Referencing the post’s picture:
It’s not ideal. As I said in my original FB post, it’s like being lectured on physical health by an obese person. If we are to amass allies in the fight against corruption, the current CBCP is among the last we should consider. We can still consider them, but maybe we should find more agreeable allies, people that are much nearer our level that could truly understand the common man’s plights.
Priests, still OK. I still know some priests in the same diocese of my home barangay that practices what they preach, and live a simple, austere way. Even the old priest I grew up with was adamant on living simply – his housing near the church was devoid of anything one could call an “excessive luxury”. 100% of his furnishings were hand-me-downs donated by the local church devouts. He walks whenever he could, and he was loathe to flag a tricycle if he thought he could walk a certain distance. I never saw him in flashy coats or crisp attires. I admit I forgot if he was an order or a secular priest, nevertheless he lived an unquestionably simple life.
And then I see the bishops on their nice paneled offices on TV and social media… yeah, no. We’ll listen to others, please.
One of the greatest marketing tricks ever in modern history is the non-Apple phone makers making people think they dislike the iPhone by positioning themselves as “the alternative”, but in reality they are all just like Apple but wearing a different skin and Google is allowed Hole #2 privilege with them.
We all saw the Samsung ads mocking Apple or other manufacturers making iPhone look bad in their simulated benchmarks. But what they don’t tell people is that they keep a much closer eye on Apple than even the most clickbait-y journalist out there, and their phones end up generally following where Apple goes. The form factor of the Android phones evolved through the years, the iterations coming eerily close after the iPhone’s latest models release.
Basically they transformed product tribalism into a marketing plot they can mine for years.
Definitely it’s a marketing trick. Every single phone maker out there that is using Android wants you to think Apple sucks, they stink and all the usual insults you have heard before in the kids’ playground. But funny enough, their yapping ends when you turn to them and say, “OK, I want an Android phone”, then they all turn the same insults towards their Android competitors.
But Apple benefits from one massive, massive moat the other Android makers could not overcome – only one makes iPhones, and that’s Apple. Their phone OS is theirs. Their App Store is theirs. It smoothly works with any of their other products. They have their own product showcases in their seductively beautiful headquarters. They design their own big-boy chips. Their ads are slick, catchy and very attractive.
So what did the Android competitors do? At first I remember they tried to go in a different way, try to “out-different” Apple. They did stunts, for one. They tried to make their phones a lot different – I had a Samsung Galaxy Chat phone once with touchscreen and Android built in, plus a QWERTY keyboard. They made countermessaging social media posts mocking Apple’s style choices. And Apple’s ultimate slapback to them was making their stuff so efficient that their competitors have been forced, dragged kicking and screaming, to copy Apple as closely as possible just to keep themselves within their range of sight.
But they never lost sight of keeping their intent of presenting Apple in a negative light. So in a grotesque turn of events, Android phones are trying to outdo Apple by making their phones look and feel like iPhones more and more, and their commercials keep looking more and more Apple-y, while trying to mock Apple whenever they can.
Time to move out for the final time today (after a good long cleanup, we’re decent tenants). New place in Geylang is still messy with boxes though, I have a busy night ahead unpacking.
Whew, that day was tiring.
My other co-tenants had already moved out for weeks, and by the time November 1st came, I was the only one left in the units. I myself had already secured my place in Geylang since October 20, and the agent was kind enough to let me in by October 30 to start putting in my things. By November 1, I was still staying at the Holland Village unit with around 30% of my belongings – bed stuff, laptop, screen, smaller clothes, and a pack of cider in the fridge.
But as we three are good and decent tenants, we ensured we left the place as clean as possible. So we all came in the 8th to do cleanup in the morning. It was very quick triaging of what to clean, what to keep, which furnishings to leave for the next users. Thankfully our main tenant has a set of pictures from the agent of what the unit looked like upon handover 5 years ago, and we were able to reset everything pretty much to what they were in. Done by 3pm, and I left by cab with several bagful of belongings back to my new lodgings.
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