Bohol River Cruise

I was fortunate enough to attend an official function with a free day to roam around Bohol. Among the stops of the tour package is a river boat cruise along the Loboc river on one of the many floating restaurants. The river cruise lasts for about an hour. If the buffet didn’t get you then the sideshow on the boat will surely make you do some of the jiggy. But a surprise right after the last bend really gets you into the Visayan culture. Communities along the Loboc river have made some income generation by performing traditional music and dance.

With a bamboo raft as their stage, the community folks perform at their best. The troupe is complete with costumes and musicians who use assorted stringed instruments, from old makeshift banjos to guitars and ukuleles. Dancers perform the kurandang and the tinikling. Here’s a video I took of the dancers performing the tinikiling. Enjoy!

Dewa Ruci

It's more than a year since I went to Bali courtesy of the training team in Singosari (many thanks). The visit to Bali, though short, was memorable. Most of the memories were captured in my phone camera and it's about a hundred or so pictures in all. Standing out among the pictures I have is a nice pic taken by my Vietnamese friend Mr. Tung of the statue of Dewaruci in a circle road near Carrefour. The statue is so huge that you feel looking at a snapshot from an on-going battle.

I tried to understand what the statue is depicting. I learned that Bima is battling with a dragon. Clad in the Balinese black and white checkered cloth.

Whew! Truly breath taking. Thank God the clouds decided not to get in the way of the picture. The sun was up and the sky blue. The bus stood still for a while, just enough time for Tung to take this picture. Enjoy it.

The Hurt Locker: beyond adrenaline

It’s difficult to define borderlines. It’s one thing and something else all at once. For psychological conditions, the difficulty of understanding goes up several notches. Take for example an adrenaline junkie with a death wish. He likes the rush every time he goes to the extreme. But unlike those jumping off buildings and towers, only to scamper out of sight as soon as he lands because it’s illegal to jump off structures; this particular adrenaline junkie gets his fix legally and stays on the spot to enjoy the rush.

Staff Sergeant William James is one such extreme adrenaline junkie. He likes the rush and loathes the time when the excitement dies down. He gets his fixes by heading an explosives ordnance disposal team. He’s the one that dons a blast protective suit and disarms improvised explosive devices in the hostile streets of Iraq. Because of the high, he does it over and over again, even if it requires him to sign up for several deployments with different army companies rotating in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The movie The Hurt Locker centers its story on James and his EOD team. The movie starts with an actual bomb disarming. The first scene is a feed coming from a robot approaching a suspected pile of rubbish. After the bomb is discovered, the bot is hurried back to carry back some more explosives to counter detonate the IED. The bot broke one of its wheels so the team leader, a staff sergeant, suited up to disarm the bomb himself. As the soldier approach the bomb a bystander holding a cell phone detonated it. Too late for any escape, the team leader died, the blast throwing him down to the ground. The blast scene is something else, the shockwave shook gravel on the ground and rust from a nearby wreck were blown off. It’s an introductory depiction of the unit’s unforgiving job in a brutal war.

James comes in as a replacement for the dead sergeant. The other members of the team, Sgt. Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge, are both expecting James to live up to their late Staff Sergeant’s kind of leadership. But James has a different play in mind. He’d rather go in than leave the bot to do the job for him. James’ first action with the team was just that. He suited up, popped up a covering smoke, and disarmed seven IEDs. Sanborn didn’t like that, they have specific roles to play and James isn’t a team player. In the next sequence, James removed his suit and headphones while disarming a car bomb, cutting him off from Sanborn and from any possible cover in case of an attack. After he successfully disarmed the bomb, Sanborn gave him a bleeding nose for removing the headphone.

So James likes to do stuff himself. That doesn’t do well with Sanborn. They’re a team and members cooperate with each other. Sanborn hated James’ guts. In one remote detonation, as they prepare to detonate a second bomb, James suddenly halted the blast because he left his gloves at the bomb location and he has to go back and get it. As he went, Sanborn was thinking aloud about how accidents happen, and how James may be in one of those ‘accidents’.

James is also into some fetish for the dangerous. After celebrating kills from a firefight, Sanborn discovered a cache of IED parts under James’ bunk. These are bits and pieces of ordnance that they’ve disarmed. James calls it “the stuff that almost killed me”.

They got themselves into another firefight, one that Sanborn and Eldridge are hesitant to get themselves into. “there are three platoons who could do this one for us”, Sanborn protested. But James simply pulled rank. Eldridge was almost taken prisoner and was shot on the leg by James during the rescue. As Eldridge is being lifted by a chopper to be taken off the hostile war, he curses James for being shot at just to get a fix. “My femur is broken into nine pieces” says Eldridge as he blames James.

In their last outing, a man was iron-strapped with timed explosives. James couldn’t free him even as he cuts loose one lock as there are several others more. He ran for cover a few seconds before detonation, but before he reach cover the bomb went off. James managed to turn towards the blast; the front of the suit is more protected than the back part. He was thrown to the ground, lays there for a moment, and then opens his helmet. His nose bleeding, he looks up the sky to see a kite flying overhead.

Driving back to barracks, Sanborn thinks deep about his future in the army. He can’t do what James do, for James wasn’t doing it because it’s his job. James was doing it for the high.

After their company rotated back to the US, James is seen doing normal things. Like going to the supermarket, taking care of the baby, and cleaning the gutter. But for James, this isn’t normal. So in the final sequence, James walks off a transport, and joins another company on a 365 day rotation in wherever his skills are needed. In the final scene James, donning the blast suit, walks towards a suspected IED.

The movie was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. It had earned four best film awards in the Venice film festival. Jeremy Renner (SSgt. James) and Anthony Mackie (Sgt. Sanborn) are nominated in the Independent Spirit Awards for best actor and best supporting actor awards while Barry Ackroyd is nominated in the CAMERIMAGE for best cinematographer.

At first glance you could say this is a war movie. The way I see it it’s about James’ addiction with the war as a backdrop. If you’re a movie junkie who gets a special high on war movies, The Hurt Locker is your fix.

Writing again

It feels like waking up from a very long sleep and finding out that there's a black guy for an American president, Israel is pounding Palestine (again) for months now, that two heads of state have both experienced a shoe thrown at them, and that you missed the holidays. That's what this blog is going through right now, still training its eyes to an environment that it had forgotten about in its deep slumber.

We'll, I'm back writing again. Been very busy since my last post, though I never stopped gathering materials for this blog (and for my other blog). I'll try to salvage what little readership I have left and try to do it all over again.

Been very busy? Yeah....been doing several things, like going to my day job, and...doing my day job...