Atheista -

Quiz nights are a great way to pass otherwise uneventful Tuesday nights for me.  It’s a great way to pit your well of useless information against people who are also geeks and nerds about certain topics. Most of the questions fall under pop culture (movies, music and the like), geography, history, sports trivia and the occasional food topic. Quiz masters sometimes throw a curve ball by asking about constellations (by simply looking at them!) and otherwise obscure but still fun to know topics.

I’ve always loved winning quiz nights but with subsequent trips to play, it has become less important to me to win. We’ve played against really good teams at 121 Pasong Tamo Extension. The most formidable of which is Urban Fervor who are generally a solid bunch until Billboard charts questions are asked. To be fair, my team sucks at sports trivia (one of Urban Fervor’s strengths).

Other teams have also won this year but The Strippers have won 11 times – easily more than any other team and even more than all the other teams combined.

What’s really annoying is that this team called Tea Gang have resorted to cheating just to get ahead in the game. Despite being next to the quiz master during the last quiz night, they still dared to try to pull a few fast ones when they thought nobody was looking. All the other regulars have noticed their not-so-inventive techniques and it’s a shame that they’re claiming innocence despite their blatant disregard for the rules.

I don’t really care about winning anymore – you just can’t expect to win every time. But when you lose, it’s always better to lose to a better team who doesn’t resort to copying off other teams’ answers. The quiz masters have turned a blind eye on this despite the strong protests coming from different teams. Fortunately, a lot of the competing teams are already convinced that Tea Gang engages in shameless forms of cheating and are absolutely on the lookout for further attempts to undermine a supposedly fun activity.

Tea Gang, we’re all watching you.

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Ok, it’s not really a haiku and unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’m writing about vaginal repair. This year, an old apartment that used to be a ticketing office magically transformed to a lying-in-clinic/ dermatology clinic/ spa! Well, the fact that this clinic is an enchilada isn’t the thing that’s most interesting about it. In an effort to reach out to the middle-aged women who probably need to have their vagina umm… remodeled, re-uphostlered and… renovated, the clinic put up a very eye-catching tarpaulin that literally makes everyone look stare ogle gawk.

warning: pictures after the jump may be riveting.

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I’d rather not elaborate…

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Yesterday afternoon, my class of 160 students was subdivided to 6 groups. Each group was tasked to tackle a specific issue concerning the topic at hand – rational antibiotic use. Antibiotics are among the most abused and misused drugs in the world and the consequences of such lapses in judgment contribute to a growing global problem. Not only does it increase costs on the patient’s part, it also makes more disease-causing organisms more resistant and harder to treat.

Here are five second-rate recordings of the group presentations. I was in group 2 and we were assigned to think of ways to promote rational antibiotic prescription from the perspective of a physician. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record the first group’s presentation. They had to do it from the position of a patient and they did a very nifty Starwars-inspired skit. Sorry guys.

The rest of the assignments were as follows:

Group 2 – Physician
Group 3 – NGO/ Community Leader
Group 4 – Media Personalities
Group 5 – Allied Medical Professionals
Group 6 – PGH DirectorWhich one is your favorite?! :p Sorry about the quality.The videos were shot using a paltry SE w800i. hehe

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I’ve seen this tag on over half the blogs that I visit. The responders have covered the A to Z of the blogosphere and finally after 1682 years of waiting, I’ve finally been tagged to answer the Six Weird Things About You tag.

1. I’m a scuba diver now and I used to swim for my class back in high school (about 1/40000 as good as this batchmate of mine), but I nearly drowned as an eight year old. After taking the water slide in the 6-foot deep part of the pool, I suddenly panicked and lost all treading instincts. Luckily (and fortunately), my Dad jumped in to save me. A perfectly nice belt and a state-of-the-art beeper were destroyed as a result of this heroism.

2. I would return the favor to someone at age 12. I went David Hasselhoff on a classmate (and then-close friend) as he struggled to keep himself afloat. Ironically, we’re no longer friends. It’s a long story and somebody ended up getting punched on the face.

3. I am a geography geek. The atlas was among the first books that I ever read. I was six when I memorized the capitals of the world. Of course, I didn’t stop there. Months later, I figured out a way to memorize the largest cities, currencies, languages and major religions of almost all countries. To this day I could still provide a fairly accurate estimate of how big a country is in square miles. One of my fondest memory of my high school academic life was when I drew the map of Africa on the board without looking at another map for reference. I also placed the capitals on the geographically appropriate locations within each country. Needless to say, everyone in class hated me for having the audacity to show off.

4 . I’m terrified of dogs. Everyone who knows me in real life knows this, but I doubt if I’ve ever told any blogger. Have I been bitten? No. I HATE DOGS.

5. I have a weird pathology that makes me prone to seeing words that I haven’t typed yet. That’s the reason why I sometimes make weird-looking sentences. On a number of occasions, I’ve actually left out the word NOT in the sentence and that has made me contradict the essence of what I’m trying to convey. And oh, yeah, I’m dyslexic.

6. Despite my atheism, I enjoy discussing theological and scientific (specifically evolution) concepts with creationists and people fo faith who could ground their arguments in logic and reason. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that being religious makes one inept in discussing scientific concepts – although we’ve seen it time and time again in this blog. There are exceptions to the rule. My hat’s off to the smart people in the debating community who see the value of logic in talking about issues like these.

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You’ll be glad you did. Reactions will be definitely appreciated in the comments section.

I also just finished my first three weeks writing for Froodee and Blog Tutorials. We’re expected to write 2 articles a week for each blog so by now, I have to have at least 12 write-ups. I have 13.

Froodee is a blog for anything current so I could blog about anything under the sun. For the past three weeks, I blogged about:

• Gardasil, a breakthrough vaccine against the Human Papilloma Virus
• The thrill and excitement of scuba diving
• An 18 year-old girl’s conquest of the seven tallest mountains on all seven continents
• The disappointing Heroes season finale
• The growing movement against the relevance of beauty pageants
• American Idol Season 5 contestants’ current careers
• And the newest one (already for June), is a write-up about Spiderman going to jail.

Blog Tutorials is focused on helping people keep functional and successful blogs. So far I’ve written about:

• sites that offer free stock photos
• plugins for better embedding of multimedia
• a regular guy’s analysis of who clicks ads
• the dangers of selling out on your blog
• and a two-part article on the consumer perspective of making your blog as a brand.

Whew! It’s no walk in the park.

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