Hanshin Tigers Fans: Taking the "White" out of "White Trash"

Who knew that White Trash didn't have to be white? Apparently it can be yellow, too... though Yellow Trash sounds a lot grimier. The number of people at Koshien stadium who looked like they were still living in their mother's trailer/basement was mind-blowing.

If you don't believe me, take a look at this picture. Take note that the Hanshin Tiger "H" shaved in the back of the center dude's head tapers off into a Rat Tail. Also, though you can't see in the picture, both of the guys (and possibly the girl) have mustaches, which alone makes anyone eligible for White Trash status... except maybe for Burt Reynolds or anyone who owns Magnum PI status.

The good news: like all other Japanese people, the Yellow-White Trash looking people were incredibly friendly and inviting.

Koshien is an incredible place to watch a baseball game. It was built originally to hold the finals of the annual high school baseball tournament held every year, so the capacity isn't near the size of, say, Fenway Park. The crowds at Japanese baseball games are raucous, as well. It's like everyone is a cheerleader, but a little drunk and with crazy costumes and plastic noise-making bats. There's a song and cheer for every player. Instead of the Seventh-Inning Stretch, everyone blows up a sperm-shaped balloon (the likeness is really uncanny) and launches them in the air at once, filling the stadium. It must be to encourage procreation, since the declining birth rate is considered a national problem in Japan.

Philippines: A Pillar of Missionary Success

I would like to give every Filipino a personal congratulatory handshake: their country is the most successfully brainwashed in the world.

Not in a dangerous sense, just in a twistedly amusing one.

I thought I must have met a real nut when a local described the starting point of history in the Philippines as “the Spanish discovered us in the 16th century.” What are you, a planet? A new species of plant? What do you mean you were ‘discovered?’ But it turns out that for many Filipinos, this was the start of their existence. Probably because before that, there was no Christianity in the Philippines.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to call the Philippines the most Christian country in the world, especially keeping in mind that it was more or less forced into Catholicism by Magellan and his successors. Officially it’s 92% Christian (81% Catholic), 5 of the remaining % being radical Muslims living in the southern islands near Indonesia, which are really more like bastions of crazy than part of a country.

Walking through a shopping mall in Tagbilaran, the capital of Bohol Island, I was perusing the somehow legal stores of copied games and movies, when over the PA for the entire mall comes a generic pop beat that I took to be a bland shopping tune. Then a voice dubbed over the beat starts, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” I look around me and everyone, the customers, the clerks, and even the security guards stopped in mid-transaction to bow their head as everyone in the mall repeated the prayer, crossed their hearts, and proceeded walking like nothing had ever happened. I could have run out with all the merchandise in the store and no one would have been the wiser. Not to mention the people around me were praying whilst surrounded by thousands of copies of copyrighted material. Never seen anything like it.

Though most of their Empire has long since crumbled, the Spanish Conquistadors and missionaries can rest in their graves knowing that their efforts were not unfruitful.

Philippines: Pints with Pints

What did you do for Saint Patrick’s Day this year? Oh, me? I spent mine with Leprechauns.

Well, maybe that depends on how you define ‘Leprechaun.’ If you definite it as Merriam-Webster does, as “a mischievous elf of Irish folklore usually believed to reveal the hiding place of treasure if caught,” then my account is slightly inaccurate. If you replace ‘elf’ with ‘Hobbit’, ‘Irish’ with ‘(J.R.R.) Tolkienian’, and ‘reveal the hiding place of treasure if caught’ with ‘hold the key to saving Middle Earth’, the definition now becomes “a mischievous Hobbit of Tolkienian folklore usually believed to hold the key to saving Middle Earth,” and my account can be justified.

The Hobbit House: Pints Served by Pint-Sized Filipinos since 1985. Literally, all the staff are midgets (or ‘little people’, or whatever is P.C. these days). You’re waved down in streets outside by midget doormen, you’re taken to your table by midget hosts, your order is taken by midget waiters, and midget barmen pour your pints, all in a bar based on a Shire Alehouse. Bands play on a stage in front of a giant Hobbit mural. Dirty plates and glasses seemingly disappear as a tiny pairs of hands sweep above the table-tops.

What more perfect day to go to such a pub than Saint Patty’s Day? The Shire turned into an Irish pub for the weekend. Our green pints of Guinness were delivered by midgets in all green and leprechaun hats.

Just to make things clear, I’m the only one sitting down in the above picture.

Philippines: Raiders of the Lost Butanding

I didn’t have an underwater camera with me, but this is a professional artist rendering of what my adventures with the Butanding may have looked like…

Butanding is a regional word in the Bicol region’s dialect for whale shark. In the waters of Donsol, a small fishing town in the region, whale sharks have been consistently spotted seasonally for the past couple dozen years. As a recent program by Filipino local governments to counteract the illegal hunting of whale sharks for their price-fetching meat, a tourist office for “Whale Shark Interaction” was opened in Donsol about 10 years ago. Basically, you can pay a registration fee and hire an ‘interaction expert’ and crew to go out in the nearby waters and ‘interact’ with the butanding. Since whale sharks only inhabit warm waters near the equator and since their migratory patterns only allow a few months in which they can be easily spotted in a given place, I decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.

After careful research (haphazard Google searching), I came to find that despite their status of “biggest fish in the sea,” they don’t throw their weight around with all their man-eating potential. They’re just plankton feeders. But even being equipped with this knowledge only allows a certain amount of ease once you’re face to face with a creature 6 to10 times your size.

By law (or arbitrary Filipino rule), you have to pay to hire a boat, crew, and a professional “whale shark interaction expert” to guide you and find the butanding. In my mind, I was picturing the professor from Gilligan’s Island with dozens of gadgets to track the water depth, give a heat spectrum of the surroundings, and equip a sonar to listen for the whales’ mating calls, but coming from a lone office in a fishing village off the face of any Philippines map, calling this expectation unreasonable would be like calling the Hundred Years War ‘a little long.’ Our resident expert, Jonathan (every Filipino has an American name) explained the plan, ‘We go to the water, and we look for big shadows.’ That was it. Jonathan took his best Titanic ‘top of the world’ position at the helm of the boat (glorified canoe) and combed the waters. It took only minutes until I heard my first “butanding!” cry from the crew. The captain maneuvered the vessel with the bamboo steering rod the best he could until we were a few dozen meters directly in front of the butanding’s path, and we jumped from the moving boat. The visibility of the water wasn’t too great the day I went out on the boat, so it was difficult to see from underwater where the whale shark would appear. I brought my head up and was about to ask Jonathan where it had gone, but he was already yelling “MMM!!! MMM!!!” through his snorkel and pointing right in front of us underwater, so I put my head back under to see a flat, gigantic face darting straight for me. I may have pissed myself a little, but in the ocean, that’s okay. We moved alongside, and swam beside the whale shark for as long as it would let us before it submerged too far and changed course to lose us. I was about to comment on how huge the fish was, but Jonathan told me ‘that one was a baby, that’s why it moved so fast.’ It was “only” 5 meters big. The next ones we’d find after that were 8, 9, and 10 meters long. They were so big that the polka-dots on their bodies were the size of whiffle balls. They’re known to grow up to 18 meters long.