Roasted chicken with two butts from Sr Pedro

Saturday morning while on our way home from buying groceries at the Gaisano Fiesta Mall we dropped by the stall of Sr Pedro to buy roasted chicken. There were few chicken still turning brown on the charcoal roaster but the fellow manning the stall handed me a prepared styrobox of chopped chicken.

On returning to the tricycle, my wife told me about the story of the driver concerning some bad practice of the guys working at the stall. They would chop the chicken in an enclosed glass partition which was meant to prevent the chopped particles and oil to splatter all over the place. But somehow the glass partition has been covered with something opaque so that one could not really see how the chicken was chopped up.

This is where the guys do their clever trade. When they push the chopped up parts to the styrobox they drop some pieces to the side of the thick and wide chopping board. Either they sell the collected parts or have them for their meals.

I sort of defended the guys. I made a big speech about how a business would lose its customers by these tricks. And Sr Pedro is already a successful business with many stalls in Cebu.

During lunch, I picked out the wings which are usually the parts I eat otherwise I am mostly on a fish diet. I finished eating first and while I was on the phone talking to my brother, my wife called out and showed me two butts (isol in Cebuano) of the chicken and she was firm that she could not find the breast parts (pecho for Cebuanos).

I hope the management of Sr Pedro is not complicit with this malpractice. We have come to like the taste of Sr Pedro roasted chicken. Andok's chicken is just too pricey.

So we have decided that next time we'll just buy but roasted chicken straight from the roaster and chop it up ourselves.

Duke, Duchess and the CIA

I've been tracking this for sometime and finally got it.

In November 2005 there was a news clipping announcing that a Filipina with the name Duchess Marie Cruz got the Gold Medal Award for the Certified Internal Auditors examination. The award means she was the first placer in the whole world for that exam sitting.

That she was Filipino was not the interesting part (I think it is a sign of inferiority complex to trumpet about any accomplishment of an individual who has even the slightest hint of Filipinoness in his/her blood. I am a believer in the Homo sapien.)

The interesting part is that I remembered that in the previous year the first placer was named Duke Bajenting. That he was a fellow Cebuano is not the interesting thing. (Am I repeating myself?)

I have a daughter who is taking up accountancy. She just passed the Certified Bookkeeper exam. We paid with hard-earned money for the exam. But that was not meant to be the end of it, I found out. The certifying agency, it seems, does not make money only from the exam fees but also from registering with them before they give the passer a certification. I told my daughter I allowed her to take the exam to test what she has learned to date. That she passed was enough for me. Who cares about a piece of certificate.

At our office there are two of us who get calls not only from within but also from other branches in the country from colleagues who refer to us their problem about computers and applications. Interestingly, as far as I know, only the two of us do not have any certificates in computer training.

So I told my daughter to wait until she qualifies for the Certified Internal Auditor exam. Her second name is Hara which is Cebuano for Queen. After a Duke and a Duchess who knows. A father can dream, can't I.

Here is where I tracked the Duke and the Duchess of CIA. Just excuse the little "hambog" about who are tops in the world. That is part of the advertising of the group.

Vitamin C and multi-level marketing

We contracted a young man, actually a family friend, to paint two rooms of our house. He estimated the job would take a week. I was adamant that it would be finished within the time frame because I could not stand the smell of paint. In fact my son and I slept two nights on the living room floor until the paint dried. But the painter could not finish on time because he took a few days off in the middle of his work. One to attend a church function; the other to attend some sort of seminar

It turned out he was attending a seminar which was recruiting salespeople and he told us near the end of his job he would go full time selling vitamin C. He said he'd be earning better than what he gets for painting jobs.

But isn't vitamin c readily available over the counter? Yes, he said, but what he was going to sell was a different kind; one that does not cause tummy trouble because it was alkaline instead of acidic like the common ascorbic acid. He would be selling sodium ascorbate.

Weeks later a group was peddling vitamin C at the office during one noon break. It was sodium ascorbate too under the brand of Vital C. I told them I heard about Fern C from somebody else. One of the salesmen promptly announced that their vitamin c was better. Huh!

There are other vitamin c of the sodium ascorbate type that are marketed in the internet. Ultima C, High C, Bio C, Daily C. Unbranded sodium ascorbate are even sold in drums. So far only Fern C and Vital C appear to be sold via multi-level marketing (MLM) .

This brings the story back to my house painter. And I have two things about what he was about to do.

First is that he was getting enticed by MLM hocus pocus. I have always had some serious reservations about MLM or networking, as it is known in the Philippines. Simply put, I believe only the original organizers of a networking scheme benefit from the business. They suck the profit; the rest are the suckers.

Amway used to be the epitome of MLM. Many people's dreams died with it. Read the story here. Wikipedia has a good article about MLM. This piece is blunt about it. And I say amen to it!

The second thing I have about this is the dubious claims about sodium ascorbate. The list of ailments that sodium ascorbate can cure ranges from cancer to erectile problem. One fact conveniently ignored is that it is not good for people who need to stay away from salt in their diet.

Linus Pauling is the icon for sodium ascorbate peddlers. They trot out the vitamin c megadose that Pauling promoted in his lifetime. There are two things wrong here. Pauling did not use sodium ascorbate. He was megadosing with ascorbic acid. But here's the clincher. Pauling who claimed that vitamin c, which in his case was ascorbic acid, could cure cancer died of prostate cancer.

Well, OK, sodium ascorbate peddlers could always claim that Pauling used the wrong kind of vitamin C. Prostate cancer, you said? Perhaps he was using Frenzy, eh?

There are no mongols in government offices.

In many places mongol has attained generic status. It means pencil just the way that xerox means photocopy even if you are using Minolta or pentel means marker pens even when the brand is Pilot.

But there are still pencils in government offices but no more Mongols. And the reason is the procurement law (RA 9184). The law has a noble intent: to eradicate corruption related to procurement in government offices. But as things stand, devious people can get around it for big ticket items.

For procurement officers and end-users who abide by the law and whose procurement requirement is small it can mean substandard supplies and equipment. It means pencils that break easily and equipment that do not deliver the quality they want.

The implementing rules of the procurement law require government offices to procure their supplies from the Dept. of Budget and Management if they have them on stock. DBM stocks the cheapest items from the suppliers, usually China-made. Of course there are quality products from China but they cost more. Mongols, too, are pricier pencils.

When our office was procuring a multi-media projector two years ago I was asked to submit the specification. But specifying a brand is not allowed. Naturally we wanted the projector that could deliver the highest quality within the approved budget. We asked local suppliers to demo their top of the line items. We found one brand's model that was just introduced. It exceeded all our specifications but it was priced higher than our approved budget. However, as a promotional offer the dealer offered to match our approved budget.

But we could not justify getting it because a Manila supplier submitted its quotation for a Mitsubishi projector via the GEPS at a much lower price and the projector met the minimum required specifications. When it finally arrived from Manila we found its image quality a big letdown. I hated using that projector ever since.

What you get from the DBM warehouse, aside from substandard pencils, are glues that do not stick and marker pens (sorry no Pentels nor Pilots) that dry up fast. And our end-users shudder at the thought that we will be forced to buy our electric fans from DBM soon.

In fairness to to the fine guys at DBM, I know they despised the way they are fast becoming sales personnel.

So do not expect to see Mongols in the fingers of pencil pushing bureaucrats.

Paul Krugman on his Philippine stint

Paul Krugman has something to say about the Philippines. Depending on one's mood at the time or one's political leaning, he could be just attempting to be funny or was satirical.

But the comment in poetic form by Arjun Janah is worth reading. It is simply about experts foisting their expertise on other people. Instead, they ought to learn from the people.

That is how great teachers ply their craft. They learn from their students. They learn what their students needed to learn.

A dialogue with a Nobel Laureate

Yesterday, Feb 8, in the afternoon I attended a dialogue with Nobel Laureate for Economics Finn E. Kydland at the University of San Carlos. The place was the auditorium of the new Law and Business School of USC. Nice place, clean men's room (do I need to point that out?).

Prof. Kydland's hour-long presentation was entitled "Peace & Economic Development in the Era of Globalization". I like his sparse Powerpoint presentation because it did not distract from his speech. The foundation of his speech was of course the idea that won him and Ed Prescott the Nobel in 2004. This idea is that time consistency of policy will result in development. His comparison between what happened in Ireland (from very poor to being rich) and Argentina (previously rich and now poor) was very interesting.

One thing I don't like about open forums is that some people preface their questions with long presentation about themselves before shooting their question. It eats into the time. Yesterday was no different. Only seven persons dominated the forum. One professor wanted the speaker to explain some topics not in his presentation.

The briefest question was from a man who said he lived in Ireland when it was very poor and in Argentina when it was still rich. Then he asked whether it was the EU subsidy that propped up Ireland. Prof. Kydland in effect said that any subsidy going to Argentina wold have evaporated in no time at all. It is the time consistency of policies that can make a difference.

Kydland and Prescott's winning paper on "Rules rather than discretion" is available here .

Prof. Kydland concluded his presentation with a quote from the book "Barriers to Riches". It would be nice to have a copy of the book. But the original paper is available here.

Back to blogging

My last blog at http://rankm.blogspot.com was dated October 15, 2006. I have to create another blog because I do not have anymore editorial access to my site.

When Blogger updated its services in 2006 something went wrong with my account. Somehow my password would not match anymore. And Blogger would advise me that my original password was sent to my account at lycos which was the e-mail account I used when first creating a blog account. This was before there was any gmail. But my Lycos account was long ago suspended for disuse.

We have upgraded our home DSL to 512kbps. Altho my top speed is still well below that despite several complaints and follow-up. But that will be the subject of another blog.