9.24.2005

Reality Bites

"AHHGGHH! POTEK!"

It was a regular Sunday evening when I heard the missus scream. I was lying comfortably on our sofa watching ESPN-Sportcenter which incidentally the missus is convinced that the Australian-host is gay simply by the fact that he tilts his head too much. Ever since then, I found it quite disturbing since I can't seem to watch the sports-news as normally as I would since I see the alleged gay-host. Kind of disrupts the manliness of watching ESPN, doesn't it?

Anyway, the reason for her scream was simply three words: Pinoy Big Brother (PBB). She is one of the first to see the breakthrough reality show while she was still in Manila. Not seeing it while in Malaysia was not an option so I subscribed online to ABS-CBN on the internet to be able to watch the PBB shows and live-cam. Forty US-bucks for one whole season. They’re even encouraging subscribers to text-vote and even sell PBB shirts and prepaid cards. I guess ABS-CBN is doing all it can to sell so that they could gain back the franchise-fees (which I assume to be quite pricey) paid to the US company that owns the rights. Damn bastards.

The missus was lucky enough to watch live the controversial hawaiian-party night on the live-cam broadcast on the ‘net. She let out a scream when she saw Chx teach Sam the intricacies of mouth-to-mouth, tongue-to-tongue, and tongue-to-ear conversations. Since Day-1, the missus has hated Chx so her actions towards the new housemate had made the missus hate her more. She found solace in the PBB-forums when she saw one topic on reactions to Chx’s punishment to stay at least 3-meters away from Sam. She was described as a “housemaid” (instead of housemate), gilagid, Sadako (of ring-o), pokpok, impakta, etc. to the missus’ delight.

Like the missus who’d always look thru the doors of the other units of our condo, PBB’s success may be due to the Pinoy’s inherent character to be usiseros, always wondering what the neighbors are doing.

As for me, I’ll continue to download the daily PBB episodes for the next 60-over days. As long as the missus has her PBB, I’ll have my ESPN.

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