The Academic Oval

In the sprawling campus of the University of the Philippines, one can find the famous academic oval. This academic oval was witness to a lot of historical events in the country. The acacia trees that line it have been planted since the fifties, so you can say that the trees are probably as old as the campus itself.

The oval is used by different folks, for different purposes. Motorists use it for---what else---motoring. Athletes use it in running. Activists use it for their protest marches. And the colleges use it for the Lantern Parade.

For those who have been stuck in Diliman for ten years or more (like me), the Academic Oval is probably as familiar as the back of your hand. But the oval, ladies and gentlemen, is slowly changing, and not for the better.

Try walking around the oval now, while drinking a bottle of water, or munching on some junk food. When your bottle becomes empty, you of course search for a place to throw your trash in. You start looking for those maroon-and-green concrete trash bins that line the oval. But then you realize that the trash bins are not there anymore. The trash bins have disappeared.

The oval is changing. First, they changed the traffic flow to one-way. Then they took out the trash bins. Someone said that they might also take away those concrete maroon benches (the ones labelled "Luis D. Beltran"). And someone else mentioned that they might build a Starbucks somewhere in the Lagoon.

Centennial my ass. One hundred years of UP is not going the way it's supposed to be.

The Prophet Al Gore

Yesterday was the fourteenth of April.

If it were any other year, it would still be the height of summer in the Philippines. But this is 2008.

For the first time in my entire life, I have seen rainfall in the middle of April. This was totally unheard of before.

Today is the same. Fifteenth of April, and the scorching summer sun is hiding behind black rainclouds, which have arrived a month early.

Of course I already knew Al Gore was right about global warming. This here is proof.

Now the question is: will mushroom season arrive earlier this year too?

Vic Sotto's "Sing"

All Filipinos know Eat Bulaga. Not everyone may love it, but everybody knows it.

Eat Bulaga has a comedy sketch called "Bulagaan." The sketch goes something like this: One of them plays the teacher (usually it's Joey de Leon or Tito Sotto), while the rest of them play students. The teacher calls on the student and asks a question, like "What is the capital of Jamaica?" The answer is of course Kingston, and the student who answers it should also deliver a knock-knock joke with Kingston as the punchline.

Whereas the American knock-knock joke would only use Kingston in a sentence, the Pinoy knock-knock joke will deliver it in song.

On December 12, 2005, Vic Sotto delivered his knock-knock joke to the tune of The Carpenters's "Sing". He of course replaced the words "sing a song" with whatever the punchline was.

And he did this everyday for a little over a year. So even if the punchline had more than three syllables, he would still squeeze it in.

The longest word I ever heard him use was "Cagayan de Oro", which was six syllables. The more syllables the punchline has, the more it would sound stupid when sung. And that is where the humor lies. What makes it even funnier is that they blend their voices together when singing it. By "them," I mean Vic Sotto and his sidekick Jose.

Several people think I'm too shallow for buying this. Some call Vic Sotto the king of corny jokes. But I beg to disagree. I think this "Sing" phenomenon is a testament to Vic Sotto's comic genius. And he doesn't care if you find it funny or not. He doesn't give a damn at all. After all, he was able to snag Pia Guanio, wasn't he?

Anyway, the point of all this is that I would have posted a video of this here, but strangely, I can't find any video of it on the net. And I thought you could find everything on the net.

Therefore, if anyone of you knows Bossing personally, please ask him if he has any plans of releasing a DVD compilation of all the "Sing" gags. That's around three hundred sixty-five versions of "Sing". And if he has no plans, then he better start making plans, because if he doesn't, I'm heading off to the Eat Bulaga video archives and compiling them myself.


*Note: Joe Raposo, who was a staff songwriter for Sesame Street, was the one who actually wrote "Sing". It was only popularized by The Carpenters.