Cigarette butt did it

The fire that destroyed the headquarters of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Intramuros, Manila was not caused by electrical overload, faulty electrical wiring or by sabotage, according to the Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr.

Since the fire could not have materialized out of thin air, somebody has got to take the rap.

Is Abalos blaming the Marine guards who were supposed to be guarding the building but were nowhere when the fire started? No.

Is he blaming the firefighters for their failure to put out the fire even if the fire station was just a spitting distance from the Comelec office? Nope.

Is he blaming his staff for being careless? No, no, no.

Is he blaming himself for lack of foresight? Definitely not!

Who is he blaming then?

The cigarette butt! Yes, Abalos said a lighted cigarette butt accidentally thrown into a pile of old papers caused the fire.

Now that’s a new reason for waging a campaign against cigarette smoking. It can destroy one’s lungs and even a building!

Jurassic passport

A passport crisis looms in the Philippines following an admission by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) that the country’s supply of passports will last only up to June this year.

No problem. Use Filipino ingenuity. Get those Xerox photocopy machines ready!

Next time you get a new passport, check if the paper is plain bond paper.

***

Still on passports, the Philippines has found itself in the not so enviable company of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Mauritania, Nepal, Chad, Togo, Tunisia and Guinea-Bissau.

These are the countries that still do not have modern machine-readable passports.

As such, Filipinos may soon find it hard to enter the United States, European and other countries using modern passport-checking machines.

The Philippines has again made a name for itself as the only country in Asia with a “Jurassic” passport, one senator commented.

Oh yes, it’s still the Jurassic age in the Philippines. Some of the crocodiles are just pretending to be politicians.

Happy to be corrupt?

The Philippines is now considered as the top corruption villain in Asia, more corrupt than Indonesia or Thailand.

Some Filipinos were shouting: “Yipee! We’re ahead of them all! We outdid ourselves!”

How could some of us be happy with such terribly bad news as reported by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. (PERC), an organization that advices private companies and governments around the world?

The PERC survey showed the Philippines with a score of 9.40 from 7.80 last year. The PERC has a grading system of zero as the best possible score and 10 as the worst.

You know why some Filipinos are happy to be known as corrupt?

It’s because they know that many of them are not really corrupt and that the corruption “hot potato” would eventually fall into the hands of the guilty political leaders.

And there’s always the possibility that the “hot potato” could force those leaders to at least stop stealing someone else’s potatoes even for a awhile!

***

“What?! Are they kidding?” President Gloria Arroyo was fuming so mad at the PERC report on corruption in the Philippines that the mole on her cheek pulsated and doubled in size.

“They got it all wrong! They’ve been infiltrated by the members of the opposition, the communists, the terrorists!” Arroyo glowered.

Oh, but not by potato-stealers?

Intro, intro, intro

My name is Jay Gotera. My friends say my first name sounds like a noisy bird while my surname sounds like a yucky disease.

Don’t worry, my “jay” is caged and my “cholera” will not hit your gut -- only your funny bone, hopefully (if you still have it) -- since it’s only a cholera of words.

Well, starting today the “jay-bird” is here to contaminate you with a rash of “cholera” on the latest goings on in the Philippines.

If reading other blogs before tend to make you fall asleep, well, hopefully reading this blog will be like downing a steaming-hot strong black coffee. I’ll grind the most important news for you, percolate it and serve it right to your breakfast table. Oops don’t spill it!

If you have any thing to say about the news served here, you may email me at jrgotera@yahoo.com. I’ll try to include your inputs in the next editions of this column.

So, you’re fully awake now?