Author: Pinoy Penman

Barfly for Tuesday, October 22, 1996


A READER named Max Fabella asked me if I’d ever had the tamilok (what it is, you’ll soon find out). I did—and I wrote about it many years ago. His query prompted me to go over my old files, and so, starting today, I’ll be posting some pieces from the “Barfly” column I wrote for the newspaper TODAY back in the early ‘90s.

Few people will remember that column in TODAY’s Lifestyle section (where a sassy young writer named Jessica Zafra also got her break), but the story behind it was that TODAY hired me from the start as Editorial Writer (a job I shared with the publisher, Teddy Boy Locsin). But after about two years of pontificating three or four times a week on urbi et orbi, I felt I needed to decompress in a wala-lang column for the back page, which I asked for and got. Thankful for the relief, I wrote Barfly for free, and had loads of fun until I left TODAY and joined the Star in 2000. (I later compiled some of these columns into The Best of Barfly, published by Anvil Publishing in 2002.)

So here’s a blast from the past, on Max Fabella’s tamilok.

Let me also take this occasion to say that I’ll be gone again for a few days, this time to Hawaii, on nothing more and nothing less than a press junket. Someone’s got to do it.


I ASKED for it. Down in Palawan last week, at a beachside birthday party (regrettably not mine) that I crashed as gracefully as I could, I had the temerity to bring up a subject perhaps better left in the closet—or, in this case, the mangrove swamp. It was that of the tamilok—the marine borer, or woodworm, that I'd written about before in this column, but had yet to see. More to the point, as far as my hosts were concerned, I had yet to eat the bloody (bloodless, actually) thing, which reputedly ranks even higher than raw sea urchin and crunchy seaweed in the pantheon of Palaweño delicacies. Awash in broiling lobsters, marlin, squid, lechon, and even a calf roasting on a spit, I made the mistake of asking for the invisible—something that I thought would be as rare as a blue mushroom—and got my wish.

"How's the tamilok?" I asked Ben Torcuato, an affable balikbayan from suburban Chicago who runs the disco at Puerto Princesa's swanky Asiaworld Hotel. It had been Ben who, a couple of months earlier over dinner at Asiaworld, had introduced me to this creature—in theory, because they don't have it on the menu at the hotel, the better to maintain their high occupancy rate. I thought that inquiring after the tamilok would be a friendly way of greeting Ben and reminding him of how we first met—you know, they're called "pleasantries," these innocuous remarks people make about the weather, etc. I should've told Ben what a nice day it was, as truly it was with Honda Bay glimmering in the brilliant sunlight, but instead I just had to open my mouth and ask about a woodworm.

Indeed Ben remembered our first meeting, and promptly chided me for passing off my shoddy fictionalizing as responsible journalism. "You wrote about it," he said with a wry smile that damned me better than an accusatory glare, "but you've never had it!” Well, I thought, that was hardly my fault. "So, where is it?"

That, I found out, was a question you don't ask someone from an island where they have native peacocks and exotic lizards running around in their backyards. Ben clapped his hands, calling the attention of an obliging local who, before I could steer the conversation around to the wondrously familiar virtues of roasted calf, returned with two—not one, but two—heaping bowlfuls of fresh woodworm swimming in a briny bath, with vinegar on the side.

How does one begin to describe what the stomach insists should remain ineffable? The first thought that seized me was that I was in the presence of a future "X-Files" episode, with me not as Mulder but as one of those hapless extras who die in the teaser, just before the opening credits and the first commercial. I knew what Scully was going to tweezer out of my cold tissues on the autopsy table. It was going to be a slimy creature about six inches long, as round and as thick as your ring finger, a translucent gray slightly darker at the core, and—wait a minute, where's the head? The head, folks, is the only hard part—the literally hard part—of the tamilok, a cartilaginous affair topped by a snail-like pair of horns. Scully won't find any heads, because you're supposed to bite them off.

OK, here's how it's done: you take your pick from the catch of the day (I naturally sought out the Mickey Rooney of the lot, still a formidable morsel at four inches), hold it by the head between two fingers, dip it into the vinegar for that contrasty effect, raise it above your head, close your eyes, open your mouth, and remember what made Linda Lovelace a household name in the '70s. And as Linda would've sagely advised, don't gag; relax those throat muscles; let the thing in as gently as you please. (But don't forget to bite down—on the tamilok, of course—to decapitate it; I think it's an ancient ritual to ensure that the creature doesn't regenerate where it shouldn't.)

Halfway through this exquisite ordeal, it occurred to me to ask Ben if one was supposed to chew on one's tamilok, to hasten the digestive process, but I should've known that you really can't speak with your mouth full, especially with what I had in mine. So I concentrated on swallowing that mouthful instead, as quickly as humanly possible. And I succeeded, retaining only the vaguest impression of having ingested something quite unlike shrimp, certainly unlike tenderloin, most definitely unlike potato chips or french fries. I washed the experience down with a fresh bottle of Coke, wiped my lips, and did the next best thing to being miserable all by lonesome, which was to inflict the same opportunity on others.

"Yummm, that was great, I can't believe how good that tasted!" I announced to the curious, to my fellow Manileños—men and women both—who had been watching me with the greedy anticipation of a crowd at an execution. "Try it. You really must. You'll be sorry all the rest of your lives if you don't.” And one by one, they did; and standing as their witness, I thought I saw a flash of recognition in those stricken eyes. But then the one goaded the other on, and then the next one, and so forth—and then, with all of them proclaiming the woodworm's savory qualities, I understood how the tamilok became a delicacy, and how delicacies come into being.

I thanked Ben and left him to clean up what was left in those bowls, a task he happily performed—you don't find too many mangrove swamps in Skokie, Illinois—and helped myself to the pancit.

Next time I wish on my stars, it won't be for some woodworm, that's for sure.

(Photo courtesy of juanthesleepwalker.blogspot.com)

Penman for Monday, April 14, 2008



WE HAD a very fruitful and engaging time last week in Baguio at the 47th UP National Writers Workshop, run by the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing. This time around, we shared the company of 12 of our best younger and newer mid-career writers: Bobby Añonuevo, Jun Balde, Ian Casocot, Frank Cimatu, Allan Derain, Luis Katigbak, Mookie Katigbak, Jun Lana, Nick Pichay, Rica Bolipata Santos, Tara Sering, and Vincenz Serrano.

I was particularly impressed by the work of two fictionists in English, Luis Katigbak and Tara Sering. Both had been my students when they were undergraduates, and even then they had shown the promise they soon realized. Luis has gone on to write science fiction, music criticism, and advertising copy, among other things. Here’s an excerpt from a story titled “Dear Distance”, the climactic scene which brings the aging but technologically-enhanced narrator into physical contact with a new girl named Jenn5:

“She turns her back to me, and I notice three pairs of metallic ridges slowly rising through slits in her shimmery dress. They push up and out, and grow. They begin as shards, then shape themselves further until they resemble swords, then expand, downwards, outwards, row upon overlapping row of shiny leaf-like protuberances, and I realize that what they are is wings. Glorious steel wings sprouting from little Jenn5’s back. More sounds of admiration from the other clubgoers. I am ecstatic. Some people seem to crowd in closer, some seem to be moving away, and in this place, it’s hard to tell which is which, really, and after a while, hard to care.

“Jenn5 spreads her wings, turns to face me again, and we continue dancing, our movements unusual and mesmerizing, a city and a seraph engaged in the oldest of rituals in this newest of places.

“We dance and laugh and little else matters for now.

“We will never really know each other, Jenn5, though eventually—and briefly—we may imagine we do. Whether you are too young and I am inexcusably elderly or vice versa, there will always be things we have in common, and things we will never understand about each other. In the end, distances and surfaces are all we can ever be sure of, and this is no sad thing. In a world that has accelerated almost beyond recognition, it may be the only comforting thought of which I am still capable.”

Tara, on the other hand, has found success as a magazine editor and a writer of “chick lit” novels. In this excerpt from her novel-in-progress titled “Good People,” she flexes her literary muscle in a paragraph worthy of Greg Brillantes:

“With adjectives she didn’t even know existed, they toss praises over his casket so relentlessly it almost makes the dead man blush. Lola Paz calls her departed husband ‘the most generous man I know’—her mind a camera panning over years of imported clothes, jewelry, allowances, houses, a farm, a roasted calf every time she turned a year older—because she does not suspect, for the time being, that two days after the funeral, the lawyer will read out the will, unrevised since 1985. It lists all his properties and to whom they should go—the houses to his wife, parcels of land to each of his children except Andoni, his old car to Fred, another farm further north to his other son, Michael and his mother, Dina. Within minutes, they will also all discover that the house on the beach had been sold five years ago to an unknown buyer, along with everything else, except the house in town where Lola Paz still lives part of the year. But for now, at the wake, not a soul suspects that the lawyer, a long time friend of the deceased, will utter the words, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing left, actually.’ The lawyer will then think to himself that the formerly wealthy, when they brace for a fight over phantom spoils, are among the most tragic people in the world, and close his briefcase.”

Away from the workshop, the highlight of our evenings was a visit to an old Baguio favorite—the singing ensemble On Call, one of this country’s finest, and always a pleasure to hear for their Broadway and OPM medleys and old standards. Many thanks to performers Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, Miles Vazquez, and Ivan Cruz, and to their brilliant musical director, Dr. Dennis Flores, for a great show as usual. For the rest of April, you can catch On Call at Forest House on Loakan Road on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and at the lobby bar of the Manor on Fridays.

And speaking as this year’s Workshop Director, I’d like to thank AIM’s Henry Tenedero for ensuring that we had a pleasant stay at AIM’s Igorot Lodge. We hope to return next year, with another batch of our best and brightest.


I'VE OFTEN brought Beng shawls and scarves from my foreign travels (because—thinking like a guy—they’re cheaper and lighter than jewelry) but they’ve often ended up in closets and boxes. It’s a good thing they haven’t been used, because they’re now coming out and joining many others that Beng and her UP High friends (who opened a shop called 57 & Co.—their age, ooops, and its location at Unit 57, Cubao Expo, Araneta Center, Cubao, Quezon City) are presenting in a show and sale called “Romancing the Shawl.”

The shawls and scarves come from India, China, the US, and the Philippines—in silk, cotton, and nylon; they’re machine-made, handwoven, embroidered, and embellished in beads and sequins. Handmade jewelry and costume jewelry from the Philippines and abroad will be on sale. The exhibit will also feature watercolor paintings by the art group Kulay Agos and other leading Filipino artists. “Romancing the Shawl” opens at 4:00 pm, Saturday, April 19.

Penman for Monday, April 7, 2008


I'm putting this up early because I'll be away again for a whole week starting Sunday, this time for the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio, and from my experience there last year, the wi-fi was spotty where we were. So again, if I don't respond to emails or don't see or acknowledge your comments right away, my apologies in advance.

IT TAKES a lot to bring a tear to my curmudgeonly eyes, but I came close to it a couple of weekends ago at a graduation event in Marikina. Nope, no one I knew was among the 80-odd graduates who went up the stage. They weren’t even really graduating from high school yet, much less college. So what did I find so moving? I think it was the fact that these students came from schools in poor communities in Marikina and Quezon City, and they had just undergone a program to prepare them for college entrance examinations.

Those examinations, of course, mean more than just another test. They’ll be gateways to the future of these children, determining who’ll become an engineer or a doctor, and who’ll have to drive a truck or sell insurance—or maybe sing and dance in Yokohama—for a living. Standardized exams are supposed to represent a kind of intellectual democracy that rewards the intelligent, but ironically and unfortunately, the way things work in a highly stratified society like ours, they often produce anything but democratic results. Students who’ve been privileged to go to grade schools and high schools with good teachers and facilities—what we Pinoys refer to as “exclusive” schools—will always have a leg up on those who didn’t. This has been a matter of great concern for us at the University of the Philippines, where the “excellence vs. equity” debate has gone on for quite a while, the central question being, “How are the people’s taxes better spent: on investing heavily in our best minds, no matter where they come from (most likely Metro Manila’s middle and upper class), or on affirmative-action programs that can help less-advantaged Filipinos catch up with the leaders and create a more level playing field?” It used to be—and I still caught the tailend of this—that some public schools could go head to head with private ones, and produce graduates who may have been short on some social skills but could run rings around you in the chemistry lab. I met a lot of those promdi whizzes at the Philippine Science High School, and their brilliance and modesty put me—coming from a private boys’ school, though none too rich myself—in my proper place.

Today—while outstanding students no doubt exist in even our poorest schools and communities—that’s sadly not the case. The better libraries, teachers, computers, laboratories, and other facilities of private schools do matter, and it shows in tests like the UPCAT, not to mention other exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

If I had one advocacy to choose, it would be education for the poor, and this program sponsored by the Ateneo de Manila University’s Pathways to Higher Learning is a fine example of how far a little volunteerism can go in our society to even up people’s chances. What Pathways does is to send volunteer teachers—many of them Pathways alumni themselves—to high schools where they help out students (typically in their junior year) with science, math, and English, the subjects they most need to master to do well in college entrance exams.

The tutoring has made an enormous difference, not only in the hundreds of Pathways students who made it to college after six batches (the batch I observed was the seventh), but also in the attitudes of the kids, who come to feel that, with proper preparation and support, they can study as well as anyone else in our country’s best public and private universities. Five members from the second batch have just graduated with honors from college—at FEU, Ateneo, and Assumption College.

Pathways Executive Director Solvie Nubla introduced me to young men and women who had finished or were now taking up Computer Engineering, Psychology, and Mathematics in UP, Ateneo, and other institutions; they had returned to pay the program back with their time, as Pathways kuyas and ates leading on the next generation. (I was personally glad to meet the energetic Solvie in person, finally, after corresponding with her online for over a year to help work out the placement of two young and bright but impoverished boys in Bicol, who are now doing very well in their studies at the Ateneo de Naga.)

Pathways had invited me to speak to the graduates, and instead of a prepared speech I brought along a slip of paper with some bullet points to share with my young audience. Here’s what I told them:

1. You can blame poverty only so much for holding you back. Instead of using it as an excuse to do nothing, use it as a reason to do all you can. Don’t waste time grumbling, or feeling embittered.

2. Those of us who are poor simply have to do more to catch up. The only thing we have is our intelligence and resourcefulness, and no one can help us best but ourselves. Find ways of compensating for your shortcomings (in my case, this was through reading and, later, writing).

3. Education is the great equalizer. Don’t waste this chance when you get it. Have fun learning, and learn to have fun, but stay focused. Your richer classmates can afford to bum around, but you can’t.

4. A good school is a great help, but a good mind is even more important. The best school can’t help a lazy mind.

5. Learn how to write and to speak well—it really helps. And read, read, read. Read things beyond your immediate interest and competence. Nothing you read is ever wasted.

6. Be engaged in the issues of your time. Some things are more important than personal prosperity and success. When you succeed, give back. UP’s “iskolar ng bayan” and Ateneo’s “a man for others” suggest the same thing: we study to serve the people, not just ourselves nor our families.

Thanks again to Solvie Nubla and the Pathways people for the chance to hook up with their wards, for whom I have the highest hopes and expectations.

(If you’re interested in knowing more about Pathways and its work, take a look at their website at http://www.pathwaysphilippines.org, or send them an email at info.pathways@gmail.com).


AND SPEAKING of studying and lucky chances, I’d like to invite all Fulbright alumni in the Philippines to attend the general meeting (heck, let’s call it a grand reunion) of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA) on April 18, Friday, at the Dusit Nikko Hotel in Makati. This year happens to be the 60th anniversary of the Fulbright program in the Philippines—which also happens to be the longest-running national Fulbright program in the world.

For those who don’t know, this program—originally conceived by Arkansas Sen. James William Fulbright—has been one of the United States’ most effective ways of extending its influence around the world, through graduate scholarships extended to students and professionals from all over the world—nearly 300,000 of them to date, including more than 100,000 Americans sent for studies overseas. There should be over 2,000 Filipino alumni of the Fulbright-Hays program (and the related Hubert Humphrey and East-West Center programs) by now, give or take a few who’ve passed on to another kind of fellowship in the sky.

Those alumni include many of the most illustrious names in Philippine education, science, arts and culture, agriculture, law, and public policy—among them, just for starters and in no certain order, Cesar Buenaventura, Lucresia Kasilag, Bienvenido Lumbera, O. D. Corpuz, Jaime Ongpin, Rolando Dizon, Maximo Soliven, Gabriel Singson, Jose Cuisia, Rene Saguisag, Corazon de la Paz, Doreen Fernandez, Antonio Arizabal, Cayetano Paderanga, and the PFSA’s current president, Isagani Cruz (the writer, not the jurist). Younger alumni include filmmaker Nick Deocampo, lawyer Macel Fernandez, and poet Ricky de Ungria, and engineer and educator Rey Vea. (I was a Fulbrighter myself from 1986 to 1991, at Michigan and Wisconsin, and it was an experience that changed my life and how I saw the world. To this day, I still reckon my life in terms of pre- and post-1991, which was when I came home.)

The Fulbright bash is going to be a whole-day affair from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, featuring a cultural exhibit and a program in the morning and a cocktail reception in the evening. A talk will be given by Thomas Farrell, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Affairs of the US State Department, who will be accompanied by Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones and Undersecretary for Administration Franklin Ebdalin of our Department of Foreign Affairs. The reunion’s highlight will be the giving of seven Outstanding Fulbrighter awards across different disciplines, with trophies designed by National Artist Napoleon Abueva, himself a Fulbrighter.

If you need more information, please call the Philippine American Educatonal Foundation at 8120945, or email them at fulbright@paef.org.ph.

Penman for Monday, March 31, 2008


BEFORE ANYTHING else, here’s an announcement on behalf of my friends in the Volkswagen Club of the Philippines. The VWCP is spearheading an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest motorcade of Volkswagen vehicles. The event will take place next Sunday, April 6, at the Quezon Memorial Circle, with the assembly time set for 6 am at the Quezon City Hall. Free registration, a certificate of participation, and a commemorative sticker await all participants. So haul that Beetle, Scirocco, or Kombi over to the big parade—all VWs welcome (especially my old friend Lisa Araneta’s priceless Hebmuller)! (Alas, I’ll be on my way to Baguio for the Writers Workshop at that same hour!)


IT'S 10:15 am and we should’ve landed in Hong Kong half an hour ago; Beng and I should be making our way to the downtown shuttle just about now. Instead, we’re still inside the plane, on the ground, at the airport—the wrong one, in Manila. We actually took off on time at 8:00 am. We’d just risen above the horrible smog that’s become to Manila what a morning cough is to smokers, winging our way north for the westward turn into the South China Sea, when the pilot made a most unusual announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. I’m sorry to say that we have to return to Manila, because of a problem with pressurization. Please fasten your seatbelts.”

And so we made a great arc in the air, and I leaned over to look out the window so I could pick out landmarks we’d passed earlier. I’ve never quite lost my boyhood fascination with takeoffs and landings, eager to see the city as God—or some hapless soon-to-be crash victim screaming to his death—might see it, a patchwork of rusty roofs and manicured lawns and straight-edged factories and ribbony highways. Everything, I’m sure, is ten times uglier up close, but up there it’s easy to be seduced by the comforting fiction of patterns. You begin believing that everything’s been planned, that someone actually took the trouble of putting all the people here and the cows there and the fish elsewhere. As I’d jotted down in my notebook years ago, on another flight, “Cities are never prettier than when you’re leaving them.” I can’t remember now what city that was, but it could have been Manila, caught in a moment of ethereal beauty, in a mood of anticipated longing.

Right now all I want to be is somewhere else. The plane’s been parked on the tarmac for more than an hour and they’ve served the breakfast we were just about to have when we turned around, and there’s a busy to-and-fro of technicians attending to something in the plane’s midsection, but nobody can tell me for sure when or if we’re taking off again. I’m reminded of the “Trip to the Galaxies” an aluminum company sponsored in my childhood; my father clipped out and saved enough coupons from the newspaper to get tickets for the whole family, and—led by a lumbering attendant in an aluminum space suit—we boarded this fat fuselage, sitting like a big toothpaste tube on Aurora Boulevard—and strapped ourselves into our seats for our “intergalactic flight,” which happened when the windows opened and we began zooming past Jupiter, Saturn, and whatever else the universe offered in lieu of newspaper coupons. I was mesmerized, and bought into the fantasy completely.

I have claustrophobia, which is one reason I turn up four hours before every long flight and buy bus tickets a week in advance, so I can choose my seat, the closer to the front door the better. Not only will it get me to my destination sooner than almost everybody else; I can’t stand being cooped up in a cramped seat in the back, sandwiched between a sumo wrestler and a crying baby. I usually take the aisle seat in planes, but this time I’ve chosen the window, so I can take pictures; I know Beng will be seated beside me, so that’ll mitigate the claustrophobia. Sometimes I come very close to panicking in literally tight situations. I like bus rides with lots of pit stops, and plane rides with multiple stopovers (I like airports, besides, if only to gawk at the local food and the curios in the shops); the businessmen may be very happy with the non-stop trans-Pacific flights that now take you from Manila to the West Coast, but as far as I’m concerned I got cheated out of my stop in Narita or Seoul or Honolulu.

I suppose I got my transit time this time—except that it’s in Manila, I’m stuck in my window seat, and the passenger in front of me has reclined his backrest all the way to my knees, and I can’t even get up to take a stroll because the passenger in the aisle seat has fallen asleep and I’m too nice and timid to wake her up. Beng’s busy reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement—a copy I brought home from another trip, which I haven’t even touched yet; for some reason Beng tells me, “You won’t like this.”

So instead I pull out my laptop from the backpack at my feet—an unscheduled road test for the wafer-thin MacBook Air. It weighs next to nothing on my lap, but it’s not easy to type when the screen’s tilted toward you, thanks to my front neighbor. I peck away at the novel I’ve been promising my publisher and my agent for ages; it’s a sex scene, but I’m finding it hard to focus on creative copulation, and soon enough, intent on making the most of a bad situation, I start filling out a column for Monday, having vaguely to do with being trapped in unmoving planes. At 11:00 the gods of aviation take pity on us and wave our three-hours-late flight through. I feel like cursing, but then I remember the first and only other time I took a plane that was sent home before it could land—back in the late ‘70s, going to Tacloban in the middle of a typhoon; a private plane tried forcing its way through the same storm, and never reached its destination. I’ve learned to be happy for small graces—and maybe anything having to do with a big bad plane can’t be such a small one.


I TRAVEL often enough, but I’m a notorious cheapskate when it comes to eating out at my own expense. That’s all right, because I hate fine dining (defined by me as anything you can’t find in Ma Mon Luk, Tokyo Tokyo, KFC, or Barrio Fiesta). This means I’m a slave to street food, junk food, and whatever you can scrounge up in a 7-11. (Unfortunately, the same bondage applies—unwillingly—to Beng, whenever she travels with me. A few years ago, coming off a month of ravioli in an Italian villa, I took Beng on a budget tour of Paris and three straight days of Chinese food. When she finally expressed a wistful desire for a taste of what the locals ate, I said, “Here’s ten euros, go splurge on ratatouille,” or something to that effect.

Well, Beng’s with me now in Hong Kong, and this isn’t France, so she has absolutely no excuse to pine for non-Chinese cuisine. We stepped into a noodle place in a Kowloon sidestreet for lunch today, and she gamely ordered noodles with shredded chicken—an eminently sensible choice, if you ask me (I had duck soup and rice). The servings were huge; but I finished mine, while Beng nibbled through a third of hers before giving up.

We saved the remainder in a styrofoam box which I stowed away in my backpack, and when it was close to dinner time, I asked Beng graciously and obligatorily, as we marched up Nathan Road from the Star Ferry terminal, “What would you like for dinner?” Thankfully, she knew me well enough not to say, “Whatever’s cooking at the Peninsula.” Instead, she smiled and said, “Oh, I’ll get something light at the 7-11.” I beamed; we’d picked out our dinner from the same 7-11 across our hotel the night before, so I knew what an excellent selection of takeout dinners they had, such as the shrink-wrapped salmon sushi, for just HK$18. “In fact I’ll probably have the salmon sushi,” she said, “but what will you have?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, “I can’t let these fine noodles go to waste. I’ll just get a bottle of Coke and I’ll be okay.” And that’s what we did—achieving new lows in budget travel. Back at our two-and-a-half-star hotel, we laid our humble fare out on the wooden strip that passed for a table, with a lamp at one end and the TV on the other. Her salmon sushi looked scrumptious, but the leftover noodles had become impacted from our walking tour of Wan Chai. Then a bulb lit up above my head and I remembered a technique I’d used at the Edsa Shangri-La, one New Year’s Day, on a similarly recalcitrant bundle of noodles (another long story, so never mind).

I got the hotel’s hair dryer, put it on HIGH, then began blowdrying the cold noodles as if they’d been on the head of Posh Spice herself. I tell you, the noodles soften, fly away, and curl just like human hair. “Take a picture, Beng!” I said. “People should know about this—just in case they ever need to warm up their noodles in their hotel rooms!” And now you do.

Notice for March 26-29, 2008

I'M GOING to be gone fishing for a few days, and I'm not sure if I can get online where I'm going (part of me is hoping NOT), so if I don't get to see and post your comments, or don't answer my email, that's just me all busy trying to land some slippery ideas I can fillet. Start enjoying the summer, folks—trust me, it'll be gone before you know it!

(Sign courtesy of blogs.edweek.org)