Headline: “KILLED FOR BEING HANDSOME!”

“Handsome people have to be reduced in the Philippines!” cried out a murderous group of ugly men who killed Mohammad Ali Shariff in Sampaloc, Manila.

MURDERED...

Mohamamad, single, vendor, from 1004 Pasahe St., Del Carmen, Quiapo, was gunned down from behind by unknown suspects on 7pm Friday in front of Camp Atienza Commercial Building at Don Quijote corner, Dimasalang Streets, Sampaloc.

Mohammad was with his cousin Jay-R Delzo and friend Jovinto Guray when he was murdered due to his handsomeness.

They were waiting for friends to go to a birthday party, when they were approached by the suspects for no apparent reason.

"The victim was indeed, handsome", said Detective Jonathan Bautista of Manila Police District Homicide Section.

Chemistry Nobel goes to ribosomes, the protein manufacturer

This is the best thing I've found on Youtube in ages, and I guarantee it'll be the best thing you'll see all day. Kseniya Simonova performs live animation using a table of sand for Ukraine's Got Talent.

Not as good, but funny and a little bit awkward, is this cover of Lily Allen's "It's Not Fair":

Here's a quick little painting I made based on a frame from Wong-kar Wai's "Ashes of Time" (click to embiggen)

Wale and 9th Wonder's new mixtape is absolutely amazing. Best of all, it's free! Here's a few choice tracks:




Download link (102mb)

Also, just for kicks... some acoustic Incubus:


Other Stuff
Drew McWeeny remembers Michael Jackson
Doctors baffled, intrigued by girl who doesn't age

Say what you will about xanga, but this was the last place I expected to find spam:

Few things are as polarising as topics pertaining to faith and religion. It's one of the biggest no-no's to bring up during a first date. Challenging or poking fun of organised religions is also the surest way to incite controversy, whether through caricatures of Muhammad or comics depicting seven-cocked devils sodomising a young boy who thinks he's the second coming of Christ (literally). If you're brought up as a Roman Catholic, like me and millions of other Filipinos, your entire culture and upbringing is steeped in its traditions. Easter, in many ways, is the biggest religious event of any given year (aside from World Youth Days or anytime the Pope visits my motherland).

As a kid, I used to fear Jesus. Not in that religious "Fear God" kinda way, but literally. He scared the shit out of me. Every iconographic depiction of him gets under my skin worse than any ghost stories or monsters or whatever else you're supposed to have an irrational fear of as a child, as a human being. Maybe it was the crown of thorns. The pained "Why God Why?" expression on his face whenever he's looking up. The bloody wounds all over his limbs and on his side. It didn't help that life-sized statues of Jesus in various states of distress during his final hours were all over the Philippines. The most terrifying Jesus I've seen was a life-sized depiction of his corpse, lying down inside a little room into which you have to peak into, his nails laid down beside him. Or was it the Black Jesus, who kneels eternally on one knee with a cross over his shoulder, draped in elaborate gold-threaded fabric, with a shock of curly black hair, his dark wooden skin glistening and his dead eyes staring straight ahead into infinity? There was one room in my childhood home that I particularly feared, due to the fact that ALL of the religious icon statues and figures were kept in there. Also kept there were my toys, so of course, I spent a lot of time trying to grab my toys and getting the F out before the statues come alive and scare me to death.


The amazing (yet kinda creepy) Black Jesus of Antipolo.

One of the most disturbing recurring nightmares I used to have was presented in a 60s documentary style, complete with that snappy American monotone that everyone back then used to have. In this documentary, there would be reports of religious statues coming to life and moving around in the school I went to in the Philippines. Every segment of the show would be interspersed with a chorus of Santo Nino, the Virgin Mary, and various other saints chanting "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" in some indecipherable, fucked-up sounding language while signaling the sign of the cross in a jerking, marionette-like motion. As the nightmare bears on, these chorus segments would get more frequent until the entire dream is just a loop of this.


Yep... not scary at all.

Good Friday, and Holy Week in general then, was the scariest time of the year. I was a superstitious, somewhat stupid kid. Somehow, I had this notion that every Good Friday, Jesus goes through this entire ordeal all over again, somewhere out there. It disturbed me to think of someone going through all that unimaginable pain, every year. I think got this from the actual practice of live re-enactments of crucifixions in some rural towns back home, complete with the whippings, the crown of thorns, the long march, and the crucifixion itself with real nails going through hands - station by station. If I was a superstitious, somewhat stupid kid, it was because I was scared stupid by the fact that my superstitions actually seemed completely fucking real.



The following day, which is called "Black Saturday" there yet is not really acknowledged much here in Australia, was even scarier to me. There's a greater sense of community in the Philippines that I've never seen replicated in Western countries. Everyone seemed to know everyone in town, and couple that with the shorter life expectancy and general cheapness of life in the motherland, people just seemed to die more often. Death is a big part of life in the Philippines. I've been to many, many funerals, since I was a baby. You would think I would be more comfortable with it, but every time I had to go to a funeral, I dreaded it. Black Saturday was the day when Jesus was put into his tomb, so basically, that's like, the biggest funeral of them all. I literally could not sleep throughout this time period, knowing that Jesus' corpse is supposed to be, well... you know... dead. That is until Easter Sunday rolled in, aka when little kid Joe finally got some sleep.

So, Roman Catholicism. My religion. My culture. One I have long associated with death, fear, and lots of pain and not much sleep. I was absolutely terrified by Roman Catholicism and all its trappings, even the Pope (yes, even if it was the beloved Pope John Paul II), but then we moved to Australia when I was seven years old. In this new land full of White people and other sorts of Asians I was previously unaccustomed to, Church didn't seem quite as scary. Jesus was cuddly and depicted as the coolest and most chill dude in the world. God was loving and didn't want to constantly make me feel his wrath. Teachers never hit your palms with hard, wooden sticks (yes, I was on the receiving end of that back in my Catholic school in the Philippines). Moving away from a culture tinged with death and strict, old-school Catholicism (I don't wanna say fascist, it's not quite up to that level. Regimented, maybe?), I rediscovered my faith and started seeing the positive aspects of my faith. Talking to God was something I looked forward to every night. Church was actually sorta fun, in a boring kind of way (it was mostly a chance to gather up new friends to play videogames with afterwards).



But after a while, it did all just become boring to me. I stopped praying. I stopped going to Church. My faith became less and less relevant to me as my teen years set in.

Now as an adult, I do still identify myself as a Catholic. Long gone are the days of talking to God like he was my buddy, and even longer gone is my literal fear of Jesus' ravaged corpse. I don't go to Church much, if at all. I guess I'm a bit over the Church doctrine, having experienced two different ways of disenfranchisement - first through the fearful fatalism of "you sin, you go to hell!" of my earlier childhood to the "everything you do is okay as long as you pray for his forgiveness and repent your sins at the end" reading I got from the Church later on. I'm quite content to just discover my faith as best as I can while I'm in this mortal coil. God is real, but I sure as hell do not know whether he's a giant white man with a long-ass white beard who likes to wear sandals. I guess I've acquired another sort of fatalism - an absolute faith in what I can probably never begin to comprehend.

Mysterious ways, indeed. Have a great Easter break everyone.

--J0E.

 Lately I'm feeling like a compulsive scratcher missing the itch.

This was my favourite of the Oscar nominees for animated short:

UPDATED - December 25, 2008
Here's a new one I've just scanned in...

Shi

September 28, 2008

No Wacom tablet means I've been going back to the pen and paper basics. Anticipate more as I scan them...

From HOTnSOUR!!
Introducing one of Crimson City's resident maniacs... poet/jerk/murderer Smerk teh Jerk!!

UPDATE: MORE RANDOM DRAWINGS

The Statesman of Your Nightmares, Charlton McDeth, the horny King of Unfulfilled Lust.
"I have no prick to spur the behinds of my intent, only this desire to bone! No pun intended."

I decided to sketch one of the models from the excellently-shot Summer Catalogue of Kookai, home of the billowing crotch-flashing mannequins: