We all have ‘em. Pop songs and boy bands, the occasional folk combo - everybody has something that they’ll probably never want to admit due to the risk of social suicide.

I don’t often have the luxury - or the problem - of dealing with guilty pleasures, though, since I usually don’t bother hiding the songs and groups I listen to. I mean, why should I bother, right? Be proud of what you are. You don’t have much to lose, anyway.

Until these guys came along:

Not only do I listen to Franz Ferdinand, no. Apparently, I like Cobra Starship as well, which is about as pseudo-hipster as you can get, which is why I hesitate to admit to my liking the band.

I can’t help it, though. The video for "The City is at War" is so good that I was entranced. And when I found out that they did something for the b-movie goodness film "Snakes on a Plane," I just couldn’t resist. I just had to hear more from these guys, who blur the lines between pop, art rock and emo, three genres that I, as a rule, avoid like the plague.

So how about you guys? What’re your guilty pleasures?

If you think Pinoy food was never going to get any more bizarre - you haven’t seen anything yet.

Let me present to you - the ADOBONG BALUT!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecANiTOtn_o

Yeah, the owner disabled streaming. It would have been awesome if I could stream the video through here. But anyway. The concept of Adobong Balut in itself is pretty intense, since the singular balut egg in itself is a high cholesterol agent as it is. If you stir fry it, the oil and the lard from the egg mixes.

Thus it leads me to surmise that this dish is one thing and one thing alone: a delicious and slow method of killing yourself.

Is to hard practice the basslines of three Black Sabbath songs that you have no knowledge of in a row. You’re going nuts trying to figure out what the notes are (and since they’re bass notes, the tone is a little duller than usual, so they’re not really as clear as you’d like them to be), and suddenly in the middle of a 2/2 progression of eight-notes that are a hand’s width apart, your left pinky freezes, and a jolt of pain shoots up your arm.

 
That’s painful stuff, yo.

That, my friends, is what you call muscle cramps. It basically means that you have to slow down, rest your arm a bit, maybe have a refreshing glass of orange juice or something similar. But when it’s two in the morning and you’ve got work the next day, you know you have to get the basslines down pat, and to heck with the muscle spasms.

Thus today, just several hours after getting to work, I can hardly type faster than a snail can crawl two meters. I don’t know how I’ll survive band practice tonight, that’s for sure.

Last night, I finally decided to get my PSP downgraded. I’ve had the unit with me for the longest time, and due to the bloody firmware version it had installed (the PSP came from Canada), I couldn’t initiate the process myself. So from around August last year to January of this year, I had a pretty much useless PSP.

Come January, though, I began using it to watch movies on the go (old movies ripped from DVD’s, mostly). I also started looking for stores that could help me out with my downgrading problem. At SM Centerpoint in Sta. Mesa, I found a little stall that was willing to downgrade my PSP for five hundred clams. Which, if you think about it, wasn’t so bad - it was still cheaper than your average UMD (cheaper than a PSP battery, even).

But the problem was, I didn’t have my PSP with me at the time, so that didn’t play out. At a mall near my office, I tried looking for a game store that offered the same deal. Problem was, the mall didn’t have that many game stores, and the only one that I could find wanted to charge me one thousand bucks for the simple act of downgrading.

Which was a flat-out, insufferable way of saying highway robbery.

A buddy from the office told me to check out Tipid PC, a website that hosted buying and selling of computer-related parts and services in the Philippines. It didn’t take me long to find somebody who was offering downgrading services for two hundred bucks - which if this was the real deal, was awesome. So I message the guy, and pretty soon we had arranged to meet later that night. So it was set. I just had to commute from Ortigas Center to Buendia corner Taft at nine in the evening. Not a mean feat, if you count how long the travel would take.

But it was worth it. The entire process took all of five minutes (WHAT), and by twelve midnight, I was happily playing Harvest Moon: Innocent Life. All for two hundred clams. If that wouldn’t put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. Seriously.

Okay, overly dramatic, I know, at least for a first post. So yeah, this is me. Martin Cruz. Welcome to my Sanrio blog which will be chock-full of things relating to me, my life and habits, and, God forbid, my rantings about the writerly life.

So yeah. Rawr. Hello.