Daily Report: Cocks On TV

It was a good day of work, but I didn't do much else. Spaghetti for lunch, fried chicken for dinner... the old fall-back meals.


Cock fighting is a televised sport
in The Philippines.I was flipping through my 85 channels of cable television tonight, and on channel 67, I came across Filipino cock fighting... televised cock fighting with an arena, crowd, announcers... all of it. A graphic of two chickens came up on the screen, like two prize fighters, along with some basic info about them... age, name, owner. Then, straight to the ring — which oddly enough was set up with lines like a hockey rink, as if there might be fouls in this game (pun intended). Two people brought two chickens together in the center circle for a how-do-you-do peck, then walked to opposite ends and let the chickens loose.

The two chickens immediately attacked one another and that lasted for about 15 seconds. Then one chicken started thrashing about obviously hurt, and the other chicken seemed to lose interest. A referee came over, picked up both chickens, brought the two chickens close together for another how-do-you-do peck, and they started fighting again for another 5 seconds, until the same chicken went still, and the other chicken seemed to lose interest. The referee repeated the action again, but this time neither chicken seemed to care much about fighting: One because he apparently was dead or unconscious, the other because he didn't feel like pecking a dead thing probably.

Anyway, I spent 30 seconds of my life watching a chicken die purely for my entertainment. Once is enough.

I have to say that the Parasat Cable Internet is turning out to be most excellent. The cable internet has not gone down once in the entire month I have had it, and I know when the internet goes down, because the secure connection that I make with my company gets disconnected, and that hasn't happened in a month.


Some people going down the river
on bamboo rafts.The complaints I have are (1) during periods of high traffic, the speed I get is much slower than what I'm paying for... but that's only about 2 hours per day in the mid-afternoon, and that happens with any high speed internet connection, and (2) the connection has a tendency to "park" itself, which means that if you haven't sent or received data over the internet for 5 or 10 minutes, when you start sending/receiving again, it takes 10 or 20 seconds for the internet to "wake up". Also, I'm paying 4,500 pisos ($110) per month for the connection, which is expensive... but, if you've heard how much people complain about Parasat internet who are paying only 900 pisos per month, you would know why I took the plunge and signed up for the extra service/speed package.