BUGS & BYTES,
In Bigger Prints

Table of Contents

 

Section I
PROLOGUE, EPILOGUE, IKLOG (O MANOK?)

1 The Egg

2 Hatsing! (Bless Me)

3 Arthropodic Wisdom

4 Dear Decision Maker

5 Letters To The World

6   A Pain In My Head

7 Something Happened On My Way To School
8   A Discourse on The Grand Laws of the Universe

9 Black or White

10 Bayanihan in Jeddah

11 Chair of The Interim Board

12 Breakaway Telephonic Existence

13 The 'R' in Mrs. Regis

14 One City, One School

15 Eggs Breaking

16 PESJ History

17 The Chicken Fence

18 Believing The Man

19   My Own Version of The Jolo-Caust

20 My Sister's Version

21 The Rifle Guitar

22   Cat Stevens Unplugged

23  Landing on D-Day

24 The Great O-O-Os of the Late 20th Century

25 He Kept On Stumbling Over Chickens And Eggs

26   The Renaissance of Tilapia Farming And The Likes

27   The Saga Continues

28   The Pigeons In Our Lives

29 The Essence of Education

30   A School Is A Home

31  Gentle Fire From The Qur'an

32  At The Threshold

33  A Brief Discourse On Dancing

34  Being First

35   At The Edge of Light-Blue Metallic

36   Grappling With The Colossus

 

Section II
BUGS & BYTES
In Bigger Prints

The Power To Be
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 1 # 1

Of Crabs & Men
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

PathWalks
Excerpts from B & B Vol. 2 # 2

An Inability To Understand
Excerpts from A Speech by Prince Charles,
B & B Vol. Vol. 3 # 1

'Educating Miriam'
Excerpts from A Case Study of A Philippine School,
B & B Vol 3 # 2

 

Section III
BABEL RISING

A millennial short story

 

A Glossary of Pilipino
(& Near-Pilipino) Terms
Wondering what iklog is?

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Prologue, Epilogue, Iklog (O Manok?)
Copyright © 1999 by Said Sadain, Jr.

8   A Discourse On The Grand Laws Of The Universe

Immediately after the mauling incident, our parents' group boycotted the school and kept our children at home.

After a few days, without lifting any finger to punish the maulers except for some lame and brief suspensions, the Philippine consul general in Jeddah summoned me, as the representative from our parents' group of school board candidates, into a night meeting at his house. A proposed horse trading as a way out of the aborted election was discussed, among other things. Two from your side and two from the other side. Take her out, take him out; we let him in, we let her in. That’s our school board.

The consul general was plainly going for a win-win situation. He kept on saying: "Look now, consider both sides of the equation, try to look at things fairly", in an effort to appeal to the sense of fairness, justice and equality.

Nothing puts me off more than a person whom I consider to be working from a wrong basic assumption. Looking at both sides of the equation does not have anything to do with fairness or justice or equality.

My Compton’s Multimedia Home Library CD defines equation as "a statement of equality between two quantities, as shown by the equal sign (=)." That is silly. If two quantities are indeed equal, absolutely equal as shown by the equal sign (=), then you could not be referring to two quantities. It has to be the same quantity, the same entity.

An equation is not even trying to equate one entity to another entity. An equation is a statement of the absolute uniqueness of a single entity, or the absolute state of the unity, difference, multiplicity, division of several elements that you combine into a single entity. It is absolute. There are no two sides here. And it certainly does not make any sense to consider two sides.

What about two men being equal, you say?

Give yourself a break. Two men will never be equal.

This is the very premise why the death of one American can send intelligent missiles raining down on peoples of another country while the massacre of an entire nation in Rwanda will hardly merit a yawn from the couch potato. This is the very premise behind the structure and functioning of a United Nations Security Council that all of the free world accept as legitimate.

You can of course try to treat two men equally, yes, to try to compensate for the inequalities.

And when one talks about inequalities, "Look now, consider both sides of the inequality", then one is making sense.

Inequalities are after all what life is all about, what constantly move and shift things around, up and down, left and right, forward and backward, in and out.

The laws of the universe can be more appreciated not by their tendency to maintain equilibrium and order but by their propensity to cause and to effect inertia and chaos.

So it came to pass on that night that my mind was paying more attention to the grand laws of the universe than to the political bargaining on the table.


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