ADAMSONIAN

Counterflow na naman.

Stuck na naman ako sa highway na ito. Araw-araw ko nang binabagtas itong daan na ito pero hindi ko pa rin makuha ang ganda ng counterflow para sa buong sanlibutan. Mabagal ang oras pag naabutan ako ng counterflow, nakakabagot, lalo na pag wala na akong perang pambili ng nilagang itlog, o kaya ng fishcracker kay Boy Kukote o kaya ng tubig o C2 kay Tukmol. Lalo lang akong inaantok sa mga ganoong panahon, pero hindi ko naman magawa sa takot na mawalan ng bag, o kaya dahil sa sobrang init ng tama ng sinag ng araw mula sa nakabukas na bintana ng ordinary bus na lagi kong sinasakyan pauwi. Masarap pa naman sana ang biyahe mula Baclaran papuntang Cavite nang nakasakay sa bus na ganito tuwing madaling araw, yung tipong kakasinag pa lamang ng araw mula sa kalangitan. Malamig ang hangin na sasalubong sa iyong mukha habang nakikinig ng mga lumang kanta ng mga pop bands ng nakaraan: Beatles, Beegees, Bread, Take That, paminsan may mga naliligaw na mga bagong artists (na kuko lang ng mga naunang binanggit) sa radyo ni manong driver, na tiyak na sisira ng serenity ng aking pag-uwi. Pero alam mo ba ang pinakamagandang nagagawa ng pagsakay ko ng ordinary bus tuwing madaling araw? Madalang akong makarinig ng novelty songs ni Lito Camo, o ni Bayani Agbayani, o ng Sexbomb o ni Willie “Wowowee” Revillame.

Tuwing dumadaan ang sinasakyan ko sa may dagat, amoy na amoy ang sangsang at lansa ng mga bulok na isda sa kalsada. Pero hindi iyon naging hadlang sa masarap kong paglalakbay. Sa totoo lang, iyon nga ang hinahanap-hanap ko tuwing umaga, nakasanayan ko na siguro. Parang ginawang isang malaking sipa pabalik sa katotohanan ang amoy na iyon sa akin, para maiwan ko ang responsibilidad ko bilang barker sa lugar kung san lang ito nararapat. Ito ang isa sa mga tagpo na kung saan e hindi ko makakalimutan. Isang stimulus na magpapaalala sa akin ng aking mga struggles bilang isang bata, ang aking mga matataas na convictions ukol sa mga bagay-bagay, yung mga lumang ideya, ang mga “eureka!” moments, mga kanta ng Beatles at mukha ni Ely Buendia at ang mga pangarap na makakiskisan sya ng siko sa loob ng mainit na bus na ito. Para na rin akong nag-bunjee jump sa memory lane tuwing naaamoy ko ang lansa habang umuusad ang bus na sinasakyan ko. Mas malupit pa nga doon paminsan. Minsan para ko nang napatunayan na meron talagang fifth dimension at time warp.

Kaya lang, counterflow nanaman. Naabutan na naman ako.

Kaya lang, counterflow nanaman. Naabutan na naman ako. Stuck. May nagsabi sa akin noon na, “bakit hindi ko gawan ng isang malupit na kwento ang counterflow, tutal lagi ko naman nae-encounter to”. Masarap ang imbitasyon na iyon, pero nga lang, ang problema, hindi ako makakita ng ganda sa counterflow na iyon, hindi ako makaisip ng konsepto para dito. Mainit na nga, nakakaantok pa. Malas ko pa pag wala akong mapaglilibangan (maliban na lang sa pagtingin ko sa mga kapwa ko pasahero, paghahabi ng mga kwento tungkol sa mga hitsura nila, pero paminsan nakakasawa rin yun. Mahirap mag-assess ng tao. Nakakatawa).

Ano nga ba ang ganda sa counterflow na ‘to? Mas naalala ko lang ang mga kanta ni John Lennon e. At ang boses ni Petula Clark, at ni Gilbert O’Sullivan. Marahil, ang counterflow ang magsisilbing bakas ng pag-iisa. “Alone again, naturally”, sabi ni Gilbert O’Sullivan.

Marahil, ang counterflow ang magsisilbing ebidensya na may self-realization ang bawat tao. Marahil, ang counterflow ay magsisilbing isang masarap na memorya para sa mga taong lumilipad ang isip sa huwad na mundo.

O kaya isang salvation camp para sa mga naliligaw at hindi mapakali.

Marahil, sa counterflow na ito dadaan ang Mesiya (sa gitna ng kalsada, sa pagitan ng mga maiinit na makina ng mga sasakyan) na syang Tagapagligtas ng Sanlibutan.

Ano nga kaya ang kagandahan ng counterflow na naaabutan ko palagi?

Tags: Adamson University, Adamsonian

tikgirl has blogged 12 posts

If you’re an Adamsonian and you have a site/blog, you may join this site’s blogroll (”Affiliates” as seen on the left sidebar) by posting the URL of your blog/site on the comments section of this post. Your site/blog has to be:

1. Well-maintained or at least 3 months old.
2. Belongs to any organization that has something to do with Adamson University (like ACOES).
3. Personal blogs may be submitted and included, but ONLY if we “like” it (”likeability” depends on how much you participate in Adamsonian’s blog or forum, at least not a Friendster or MySpace or Multiply blog, and can shoot straight with some decent language).

We want to know every Adamsonian that has an online life, so if your blog/site is all these three things and more, feel free to join the party.

Tags: Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

I know this is late, but I’ve already installed a new Word Press plugin that makes it easy for you to upload your favorite videos from YouTube, GoogleVideo, and iFilm. Just place the cursor on the Compose page where you’d want the video to appear, then click the appropriate button (YouTube, iFilm, etc), then just provide the video ID.
Click to enlarge.

For example, if you’re uploading a YouTube video, the URL looks like this:

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

The video ID are the characters AFTER the Equal sign (ID as follows is highlighted):

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

Click the YouTube button, then paste “ALYzQHeLXqE.” And that’s it; your video is clickable on the post itself.

Tags: Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

The latest hot news from the Jet Propulsion Lab is about a hexagon spotted on Saturn’s North Pole, big enough to fill it with four Earth-sized planets.

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

While folks at NASA and JPL are still debating what the hexagon represents, I’m sure hordes of people who have a thing for “long-lost civilizations” are now beating their drums, in much the same way the “face on Mars” got us all excited about extraterrestrial life until higher resolution images became available. But for now, nobody knows for sure; I’d like to think it’s some long-abandoned Saturnian government building, but unless Cassini sends back true-color photos, everyone can just wildly speculate.

Update: It turns out, things that are spinning so fast make different shapes, as seen in my other hype-deflating post (this post is currently climbing up Reddit’s charts). So Saturn’s hexagon may just be a product of extremely powerful centrifugal forces. No “alien government building” there.

Tags: Adamson University, Adamsonian, NASA, Saturn, Mars

JB has blogged 101 posts

Something’s up. What is this? I see another sordid reality dawning upon this very moment. Could it be that I live in this so-called kafkaesque world of fear that I am starting to feel this way at this very moment.

I’ll never know what could have happened if Atlantis wasn’t swallowed up by those pesky antagonists. They are the Bozanians of our world. Our once peaceful, intellectual palace became a playground for college kids who don’t know the sacredness of the palace. The palace of Babylon, with its king cockroach and humming airconditioner, its dilapidated refrigerator of memories and the feel of warmth in its cold floor…

I sometimes dream of the good old times back then. The ever-present sky in the balcony, the music of scratching pen (or pencil, or barbeque sticks) on paper, the clickity-clack of  keyboards and the vast places that I see inside that palace. It’s the kingdom of good and evil, where the Karamazov brothers, especially Ivan, visit every now and then. It is where Rashomon airs even in the most unlikely time. It is the kingdom where public masturbation is permitted (intellectual, that is). Those were the good times.

I know I still deny the fact that the old days are gone. Much like vanished into thin air, its ideas, its memories all gone. I was once told that now that the palace is closed, its existence chained, who will even care if the moon is at its fullest? Only those monsters and blood-sucking creatures that we feared during our childhood.

Could Voltes Five save the palace? Could that super electromagnetic robot revive the palace and its inhabitants? The absurdity of the case is as absurd as Kafka’s The Castle.

“To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.”

It still echoes inside my mind. And it feels as like a dull heartache inside. It makes me feel vulnerable, knowing that the palace, the Camp Big Falcon of my dreams, is under the hands of those dog-smelling Bozanians.

We need reinforcements. The palace could be revived as Voltes Five could bolt in when its team is complete.

Team, let’s volt in!

Tags: Adamson University, Adamsonian, Kafka

tikgirl has blogged 12 posts

In the ruins, you go there by foot.

In the ruins, they never fall asleep.

You can visit them in there, along with your childhood fantasies of Voltes Five, with Steve as your lifetime hero and Dr. Armstrong as your long-lost father. You can sometimes go back there, sit beside a rotten banana tree, as dust accumulates on your feet, you feeling the tangy sweetness of humanity in the air while watching life’s parade pass you by.

… And then, an airplane swooshes up in the sky. You look at it, with a feeling of contempt, a feeling of regret; as if following the traces of the moving plane is like looking, for a split-second, at your carefree days, your asinine memories of the past; a burnout stub of candle suspended in thin air, so much like Dead Stars…

You will keep on walking once you set foot in the ruins. You wouldn’t dare run, nor rush time. You will ravish your cigarette while walking into the yellow brick road, offering the white rabbit a stick or two from your pack and exhaling puffs of smoke in the shadows of dead trees, those that look like zombies in beatnik movies.

You will own your life once you get there. You will neither be a slave nor a provider. Just you; your individuality and your humanity. Just you and Prince Zardoz (or Zandra), and as you sit side by side beside the rotten banana tree, Prince Zardoz (or Zandra) will hold your hand, and you will pat his horns, and your mind will wander off around the galaxies and the ultraelectromagnetic rings of planet Bozania. Oh, such bliss.

Prince Zardoz could be your best companion in scheming world domination but Steve Armstrong is the nagging voice of Humanity behind your back.

These early morning trysts, you will surely keep on walking and drinking bitter coffee along the way. You will meet many people along the way, albeit you wouldn’t talk; you would know that you are walking on the same route, much like what Christina Rossetti said in “Uphill.”

”Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.”

Those who have been there will certainly go back there, in the ruins, like fertile salmons ready to lay their eggs, their duties for themselves and for older generations (as well as for their culture’s sake) fulfilled.

And at the height of your mind’s wanderings beside the rotten banana tree, you will see a spark in the sky?

Is it the mechanical eagle? Or the solar bird? Or Camp Big Falcon?

It’s Voltes Five. He will pick you up and will bring you back to where you came from.

You will kiss Steve, Big Bert, Mark, Little John And Jamie goodbye and go back to work. You will forget about Dr. Armstrong and Prince Zardoz and your dreams of world domination.

Early morning trysts and aimless wanderings do rejuvenate your sooty soul.

Tags: Adamson University, Adamsonian, Voltes Five

tikgirl has blogged 12 posts

Hi, I am currently looking for a student that went to Adamson University. We had some history together and I was just wondering if anybody outhere knows any information about a student named “Donna Belle Aguas”, if anybody has any information about her, please contact me. Thank you.

jomar4051 has blogged 1 posts

PZ Myers is one of my favorite science bloggers. Here’s one of his older posts that’s just so beautiful and thought-provoking, it begs for a wider audience.

An excerpt:

…a bone isn’t just beautiful operational engineering, it’s a trace of a person. It’s a melancholy memento of all that’s been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that’s the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that’s left is abstractions. For most of us, there won’t even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we’ll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.

See the entire post here.

JB has blogged 101 posts

Discover Magazine is now letting the public to “discover” its archives from 1992 to the present absolutely free; no more hiding behind a subscriber wall. Come to think of that — I used to steal old copies of this magazine from Masagana’s second-hand book stalls, and now everything’s free. Yay!

Tags: Discover Magazine, science

JB has blogged 101 posts

Mr. Perez (I forgot his first name) was (and probably still is) some sort of a “wacky” professor in my day. If there’s anything Adamsonians love, it’s a great entertaining professor. Mr. Perez would usually regale his students with wickedly funny tales about women with loose morals, his opinion on the Philippine government, and his “bar exams” (I wonder if he has already aced it). In this video, Mr. Perez talks about cheap hooker kolehiyalas — a very important topic in his special curriculum.

JB has blogged 101 posts

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