My dad, Jake and I went to SM this afternoon to see Joey Ayala perform at a free concert promoting a pay-per-view university. The ad slogan says "Your classroom inside your television set!" Imagine having your lessons taught to you in your own living room. The TV is your teacher. The idea is intriguing but I, for one, am not impressed. The TV has always been the great purveyor of information. Its lightning quick transmissions have infected mankind for decades. Personally I'm happy with just cable. I don't need to pay another fee for stuff I can watch on Discovery Channel. If I want to get a degree from a distance, I might as well enroll in an open university. At least that happens over the Internet, a medium vastly more interactive than a television screen.

Apart from that, it was still great to see Joey Ayala perform live. It's always a pleasure. (Thanks to Maika who always remembers to include my unrefined ears in finer acoustic experiences.) His show at Ayuyang was so much more fun, though. His humor was better received there, too. It's like the crowd at SM was being particularly daft tonight and couldn't appreciate Joey's uncanny ability to imitate the sounds of mating wildlife.

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For people who are looking for something to read:

Earlier I dropped by Booksale just to see if there were any new books. I had no plans of buying anything since I am currently destitute. My meager salary has been budgeted to the last centavo so I can survive for the next 10 days. I looked around and came across The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. I've never read anything of hers, but people have always said that her best work were her earliest books. I thought I'd just hold on to it in case I might really want it. I also found a great-looking copy of T.H. White's The Once and Future King. I picked it up and stared at it for a while. I could feel that familiar obsessive need to own it. I had to remind myself that I already owned a copy. It was a difficult battle, but I won. I put it back in the shelves so that another geek could find it. Bless (and curse) you whoever does. It's tagged at 105 pesos, which, if you ask me, is a small price to pay for a classic. It's lying on top of The Vampire Lestat in the lower right-most pocketbook shelf.

Sifting through the lower part of the shelf, I found Bram Stoker's Dracula (also Php105), a nice copy of The Joy Luck Club (for Php80, I think) and an Orson Scott Card book whose title I've forgotten. There was also a Forgotten Realms novel down there. The upper parts of the shelves yielded a green paperback copy of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg. I thought I would have to let it go too when Maika said she needed a new copy since her student had annotated her old one with Korean words. We snapped it off the shelves as quickly as you can say Idgie. We got it at the fair price of 80 pesos. Not bad.

For myself, I bought Timeline by Michael Crichton. My fandom for Crichton's sort of writing stretches as far as the Jurassic Park movie. I didn't watch the sequel. Timeline also has a movie. I actually thought it was cool. A group of scientists are faxed into the past. They arrive during the climax of a bloody war. A castle is sieged, ears are cut off and Gerard Butler as Marek is hot. If the movie was this much fun, imagine what the book is like. It cost me 105 pesos. I also bought The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith for 70 pesos. The book appealed to me when I first saw it in National, but I couldn't afford it then. Glad to have made the purchase now.

What was I saying about budgeting?