The Philippine Online Chronicles

It’s not uncommon for the young to make observations, to look at something and ask, “Why?” But as we grow older we are discouraged from asking too many questions, and asked to just accept things as they are. What’s worse is that thinking too much about things is frowned upon, as if placing thought and finding deeper meanings is distasteful.

Possibly because I’ve watched so much Seinfeldin my life, I’m always noticing things and likewise asking people, “Have you ever noticed…?” And then jumping on that thought and trying to figure out what we can gather about people, about society, by these things observed.

For example, aside from being on the citizen’s patrol of the grammar police, I am intrigued by all the different signs that are everywhere in this country, how they are written, what they express, such as the Filipino love of puns, and the kinds of cultural allusions that different establishments are willing to make. As an example, we have these interesting allusions that double as puns: 1) Felix D’ Cut for a barbershop (and one has to wonder how many people can still make the connection to the character being alluded to); and 2) Bread Pitt for a bakery. There are so many of these fun signs but these are the ones that come off the top of my head.

Going beyond myself and my own thoughts, I would make observations and wonder what my friends would think of them. I’d post the thoughts on plurk, facebook, or twitter, and wait for people to respond. But as I was reading Action Philosophers, there was a panel that read, “Dialect this, Mofo!” and I thought, hey that sounds like a great call to a challenge.

And thus, we have this series of features. It begins with one writer making an observation, and instead of writing a critique about that observation, he challenges another writing to write a critique of that observation. That writer passes his own idea along to the next writer in the line, until we come up with one round of analyses. Then we start up again.

This first set will feature three writers, Adam David, Angelo Suarez, and me. But we are hoping that after this first round we can get more writers in on the game, and eventually have readers throwing us topics and asking us to Dialect This, MoFo!

Topics will cover anything, and the ways that we analyze them will also be free, so any kind of theoretical framework or intelligent musing is available to the writers. The attempt will be to expand on one writer’s observations (or peeve, or experience, or whatever) and see how these things can have reverberations of meaning which we wouldn’t normally think about or realize, had we not been asked to. One of the exciting things will be to see how one writer handles another writer’s observations, and what the writers come up with will hopefully provoke more discourse which the readers can join in.

And so we begin.

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