Went to Manila to Look at a Jar

BEING a history buff, I'm a huge fan of Philippine history and pre-history.  It is for this reason that last Sunday's trip to the National Museum was something I earnestly looked forward to around three weeks previously.

Imagine this: a couple walks into a trendy ladies' shoe store.  The woman promptly begins to ogle and heap praises on particularly beautiful designs, while her boyfriend/husband is reduced to a mixture of boredom and disinterestedness.  Well, that's exactly what Tine and I looked like.  Except that I was the giddy one, and instead of a shoe store, we found ourselves in a gallery of archaeological artifacts hundreds of years old.

This particular artifact almost made me jump up and down:



Yup, that's the Manunggul Jar.  It's a Philippine national treasure.  It's actually a burial jar used to store the remains of a deceased person in the early days of Philippine prehistory.  What makes it so important is its remarkable state of preservation, itself being around 2800 years old.  The top portion shows a boat boarded by two people: a rower at the back and a passenger (the deceased) in front symbolizing a transition to the afterlife.

(I actually embarrassed myself when I got all excited seeing what I believed was this artifact in another more prominent gallery.  That one was apparently a replica that was created for the purpose of decorating that gallery with a specific theme.)

Never mind that I didn't have time to visit the Spoliarium in the original building, never mind if I wasn't able to give due attention to the equally-important Laguna Copperplate., and never mind that I was not allowed to bring Olga (my DSLR) into the museum.  Seeing this jar was worth the Sunday visit.  I'll probably just return one of these days and sign up for one of John Silva's walking tours.

In this day and age....

...being unconcerned about nature seems to be a crime.  Well, I'm no environmentalist and I've certainly almost done nothing for the cause of animal rights.  So yeah, I can be criminal. 

But I've been around cats long enough to be able to at least appreciate the greatness of God's creation in animals, and I've treated any cat that comes my way with a lot of kindness and fondness as a result.  So when I googled about the alleged crimes of a certain "Joseph Carlo Candare", a self-confessed cat killer, it seemed as if I wanted to add murder to my list of crimes.

I'll let you google it for yourselves.  The depraved cat killer's exploits are too sickening and appalling to repeat in this blog.

(Joseph, dude, if you brutally kill a kitten that happens to be well-loved by the college you belong to, brag about it in your blog and make a tongue-in-cheek "apology" afterwards, you are simply asking for it.  And I'm not talking about tree-hugging, nature-loving types threatening you with lawsuits  and/or expulsion for whatever legal violation.  I'm talking about normal joes who don't give a fuck what type of insanity you have, as long as your head is beaten enough to have some sense hammered into it.  ...By the way, where do you live?)

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What's going on with young people nowadays?  Not too long ago there was this bigot from the Ateneo who was not ashamed to show how much she hated Aetas for no reason other than they are poor.  And now there's this sicko Physics student from UP-Diliman who regularly kills cats and brags about it in his blog.

Are these the kinds of kids that receive supposedly qulity education nowadays?

Newest Filipinism

AS seen During Banchetto Day, May 2, 2009.