Storage Devices. NY Times & MY Brain RAM-On-Demand

Revised 21 June at 0740 hours Manila time

I LOVE NEW YORK TIMES, even if I'm an Asian, I'm in Manila, I don't buy it and I read it only once in a blue moon – a neo-science writer, I love the science stories, less the story and more the storytelling. The blue moon showed itself today, on the Internet, Google News, to which I subscribe – perfect for the Ilocano that's me, for it's fast & free. The New York Times fascinate this Asian and so, I say, the Times itself is in the news very early today, 19 June in the Philippines, and this one caught my eye and I quote (Seth Mydans, 'Sex Scandals Fascinate Asia,' 18 June 2009, nytimes.com):

The videos speed through cyberspace on YouTube and other Internet sites, multiply on video discs and hop from one cellphone to the next. ¶ 'I got mine on a USB stick,' said Michael Tan, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of the Philippines, speaking of the Halili video on his data storage device.

At a recent international conference on sexual mores in Hanoi, he said, researchers busily shared their data. ¶ 'One of the Vietnamese came up to me and gave me (a copy) of a film on a USB stick,' said Mr Tan. 'I gave it to an Indian colleague. It's almost like international solidarity; 'You might want to study this.'

If you want more background on the topic, I have written on the Katrina Halili-Hayden Kho sex video scandal earlier; see my 'Hayden Kho Vadis? Katrina Halili, Marshall McLuhan & Peter Drucker,' 22 May 2009, americanchronicle.com). Videos are great for education, but how can sex videos be for the edification of both maker and watcher? Or annotated for one with the prudent concern and not one with the prurient interest?

I'm writing this Friday, 19 June 2009 starting at 0630 hours Manila time; today is the birthday of the Philippine National Hero, the Gentleman, Heterosexual, Virile, Malayan Genius Jose Protacio Mercado Rizal y De Quintos Alonzo Realonda, Jose Rizal in short (as I have written in my 'Rizal in June. What color is blush?' americanchronicle.com). Among other things, my hero's reputation is that of a playboy and so, I must not forget that I'm treading on holey ground. (After setting aside my new wine of an essay for it to age in a few hours, as is my wont, I checked again today, at 1645 hours, and Mydan's title has been changed to a less scandalous one, 'Across Asia, Dalliances Are News' – the only change in that article as far as I can recall. The title change changes nothing; my reaction to his report is exactly the same.)

So, I'm dealing here with past history and history in the making. I have quite a number of Jose Rizal books, among them my own book indios bravos! Jose Rizal as Messiah of the Redemption (2005, self-published, 187 pages), Gregorio F Zaide's Jose Rizal: Life, Works and Writings (2003, National Book Store, 318 pages), Antonio Morga's Historical Events of the Philippine Islands (with Rizal's annotation, 1997, National Historical Institute, 353 pages), Rizal's Poems (1995, National Historical Institute, 174 pages), Rizal's 2 novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo (my favorite English translations, by Ma Soledad Lacson-Locsin), and several volumes of at least 1,500 pages of a collection of correspondence involving Rizal, his family, friends, and fellow patriots in Europe and the islands in the 19th century. (I avoid the works on Rizal by other authors because I want to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, to look at my hero's life, works and writings with fresh, not jaundiced eyes.) What do these Rizal books have in common? They have my undivided attention.

Question: Also at home, I have all these; what do they have in common? CD disk, DVD disk, flash drive (what Mr Tan calls a 'USB stick'), an external hard disk, a second hard disk. Answer: MY Brain. They are all data storage devices. I can't use any of them without knowing something; I can't use them without thinking. Like: 'data' here refers to documents you create and save with Microsoft Word 2003 as well as setup and program files of Photoshop CS3. I started learning to use the desktop computer in 28 December 1985, Innocents Day; on my own, I haven't stopped learning more on the hardware and software since then, relying mostly on my eyes and brain. Just as I can't read the news without using my eyes and head.

2 boys and 3 girls working the PC everyday, the Hilarios are a study in storage devices. The data storage devices we have at home are disk stands of Maxell CD & DVD disks (700 MB, 4.7 GB), DataTraveller & Imation flash drives (2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB), generic & Western Digital external hard disks (120 GB, 160 GB), not to mention the Seagate hard disks (120 GB for the HP laptop, 80 GB for the Celeron PC, 2 x 120 GB for the Intel Core 2, and 2 x 160 GB for the Intel Core i7. I have written about the last one, 'Designer Crops. My Intel Core i7 Sanger sequencing in Manila,' americanchronicle.com.

On second thought, Intel's Core i7 is not 'the fastest processor on Earth' – MY Brain is. My PC works with random access memory, RAM, without which the PC cannot think – it can only blink. A Roman Catholic, since I cast (almost) all my cares at the foot of The Cross a few years ago, I have had gray matter that is not hampered by having to think left or right but as a whole, as fast as the speed of non-thought, so that my brain is even faster than RAM-on-demand (my term, to describe how the Intel Core i7 processor works). At this time of my life, at 69, believe it or not, I'm the fastest typing-thinking me ever. Think, thank God! And yes, my brain is the biggest data storage device I have ever had, and I intend to use it to the advantage of my readers.

What inspired this essay is the matter-of-fact statement of Mr Tan that he has the Halili-Kho sex scandal video on his USB stick and the reference of the news reporter, Mr Mydans, to Mr Tan's device (for emphasis, I quote again):

'I got mine on a USB stick,' said Michael Tan, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of the Philippines, speaking of the Halili video on his data storage device.

31 words total. All 31 words considered singly and taken together make the whole Hayden Kho-Katrina Halili sex video story and all look innocuous when it most certainly is invidious. Instead of intelligent, impertinent.

We are talking of privacy invaded here, of the dignity of a person degraded because of the proclivity of one man who looks at himself as a Don Juan, a fast & free spirit, fast to have been there, free to have done that in matters of love or lust, whichever comes first.

We're talking of multiple exposures here, of the nature of YouTube and the Internet to proliferate from 1 copy to 1 million copies in 1 coffee break. Multiple exposures used to be a darkroom secret; that was photography. Thanks to lurid minds, today, multiple exposures now are a bedroom non-secret; that is digital video. Converting a home into a hotel, Man has evolved from the rocky, rugged cave of BC to the well-appointed cave of AD.

We're talking of digital permission here, of someone in a video consenting to that video being shared with the rest of the world. The girl might have consented to the private sexual act, but she did not consent to the public presentation of it.

We're talking of private & public practices here, of mores. After all, we are in the Philippines, the only Roman Catholic country in Asia. It's a bastion of Catholicism in the world, and it is misunderstood and misrepresented. Remember the symbol of the University of the Philippines, the UP Oblation? It's a monument that is likewise misunderstood and misrepresented. When Jorge Bocobo was President of UP, 1934-1939, he was embarrassed by the nakedness and he had the genitals of the nude statue covered with a fig leaf. In the case of the UP Oblation, we are not talking of pornography; in the Hayden-Kho video, we're not embarrassed by the nudity and we don't want the genitals covered by a screen blockout; it's a scandal we keep talking in public. When it comes to statues, we are prudes; when it comes to real life, we are crudes.

Hayden Kho has been quite romantically linked with several beauties: Filipinas Maricar Reyes, Katrina Halili, Ruffa Mae Quinto and Vicki Belo, and Brazilian Mariana Del Rio. In the 19th century, our National Hero Jose Rizal had been similarly associated with pretty girls, based on my own research these 8: Leonor Rivera and Leonor Valenzuela (Filipinas), Josephine Bracken (Irish), Gertrude Beckett (British), Consuelo Ortiga (Spanish), Nelly Boustead (French), Susan Jacoby (Belgian), and O Sei San (Japanese). My own view is that, unlike Hayden Kho, Jose Rizal fell in love with all of those souls, each one of them; he may have enjoyed the thought but he endured the hunger; he did not consummate the love act that Hayden Kho has been proud to display on video.

What may be the modern Philippine lessons then from history made in the past and history being made today? I can document 3 and show you what I mean:

(1) Jose Rizal loved someone else most. It was a girl; she was called Filipinas (Philippines). And he consummated the love act by dying for her in public – he was executed for rebellion by the Spanish authorities at the Luneta, now the Rizal Park. He rebelled against the injustices the Spanish colonizers favored the Filipino people with for more than 300 years. He wanted to redeem his people then; he didn't believe those Spaniards were beyond redemption. While he was a genius and pleaded his own case, he did not have a perfect alibi. Guilty! To the inquisitors, his leadership or inspiration of the Katipunan was beyond reasonable doubt. Rizal was not telling the truth.

(2) Michael Tan is telling the truth. The 'full video' of the Hayden Kho-Katrina Halili sex scandal is all of 686 MB, according to one source (no, I'm not revealing my source). So if you have a CD Writer (never mind a DVD Writer), you can copy it in private – and sell it in public – on a CD that has 700 MB, from $1 to $5, depending on desire and demography. No wonder Mr Tan says he has it all on his USB stick, which must be at least 1 GB (1,000 MB). An accompanying lesson here is this: Nowadays, you can carry a scandal in a data storage device on your breast pocket if you want it hidden, or hang it on your neck if you want it displayed. (I always hang my flash drive on my neck, the better not to forget it. My data storage device, I can't leave home without it.)

(3) Hayden Kho has a perfect alibi, if he wants it. To show that he is a member of the thinking species, learning from Mr Michael Tan, Chair of the Anthropology Department of UP Diliman, if Hayden Kho wants to get off the hook and not lose his license as a doctor, all he has to do is prove that he is computer illiterate, that he knows next to nothing about uploading anything on YouTube, and that he has been seriously studying anthropology in intellectual - and video - exchanges with international experts from universities in, say, Vietnam and India, not to mention UP Diliman in the Philippines. Then he goes to court to show his data storage device, and goes on to prove that he had sex with a girl in private, shot the whole act on video, all for love – for love of anthropology. Anthropology has many sides, and that's what's perfect with it. All Hayden Kho has to say over and over again is this mantra, 'You might want to study this' – and throw at the court (and the art & science gossips among us) highfalutin words like
cravings for beauty and art
tools and techniques
economic mechanisms
artifacts
evolutionary biology
territorial imperative
ethnography
human universal
myth
participant observation
and finally, in reference to the funny-crummy species, the primitive
Homo sapiens, the thinking species.

Think! If you have met one, have you met them all? I leave you now, privy to your thoughts.