It’s better to have loved me again and lost me again than never to have loved me and lost your balls. This is the moral of the Piolo Pascual-starrer “Love Me Again.”

I attended a matinee while bored as a cinema checker for ‘Concerto (Davao War Diary)’ in SM City Cebu earlier this month. I didn’t regret spending my whole day’s salary so I’m sharing my unbiased review.

First of all, the movie is a love story about animals. The leading man

(Pascual) is so in love with his cows that he breaks up with his girlfriend because she has to work in a ranch abroad to help pay for the management of her father’s health. While in the Australian outback she (Angel Locsin) falls for a kangaroo that has fallen for another cow. In the meantime Piolo falls in love with his horse.

In the end the hero comes to his senses and tries to woo back the pretty maiden. In an unusual twist, however, they ride into the sunset, and the hero falls from his horse and dies. (See suggested and more upbeat ending below).

‘Love Me Again” is further proof of ABS-CBN’s tendency to fool audiences with claims of expensive productions with locations abroad. For all the hoopla about shooting in Australia, all the shots of the ranch abroad are all narrow and shallow and could have been taken in Talamban in Cebu City. This suspicion is supported by another suspicion: the man that plays the Australian rancher who employs Locsin has an uncanny resemblance to an undernourished American missionary who hangs out in Kukuk’s nest in Lahug, also in Cebu City.

A few good words about the acting. If the producers hired Pascual to portray a clueless lover, they did well. He doesn’t even know how to kiss and the love scenes really are delightfully hilarious. Locsin is

pretty, and could have been prettier if she were a cow in real life.

Suggested ending. Angel asks Piolo to kneel so she could brand him with a cattle rod and forgive his idiocy. He refuses. They plant corn and all the cows and marsupials live happily ever after.

(The Washington Pest)

“No you don’t. No I won’t.” These were the stern words of Hillary Clinton to John Mccain, that wrinkly, white-haired stupid man whose claim to fame is having been shot down in Vietnam in a war that humiliated the United States. Mccain, who has shown no indication that he learned anything from the Vietnam War, called Hillary to ask her to be his running mate.

The Republican camp has been shamelessly running ads showing Ms. Clinton’s attacks on Mr. Obama’s alleged lack of experience and non-preparedness for the presidency.  It has been courting Clinton supporters whose lack of warmth for Obama has could not but be fired up some more because she was not chosen running mate.  Our investigation, however, revealed that Mr. Obama did offer the slot to Ms. Clinton, but that her husband would not agree to one condition: that he stay away from Washington politics and be content with an appointment as US ambassador to Kosovo.

The first is for all policemen to use bicycles instead of cars, at the same time trimming the fat bellies which ex-PNP chief and human rights abuser Ping Lacson had vigorously campaigned against. The second is for all cops to be absolutely deskbound and idle.

The drawback to the first proposal is obvious. The PNP would have to appeal to all criminal types to use non-motorized transport as well, a tall order since criminals are thought to be better funded, and those which use bicycles would betray their provenance, which is of course, the police.

Arroyo, we’ve learned, dismissed the second proposal without a thought. “Isn’t that what they’ve been doing all along? Where’s the incremental benefit?”

“I’ve been honest with all of them… unfortunately I can’t be honest with you about the ZTE deal, you have to give me more time to find my balls, it’s been a long time since I played with them.”

“You of all people should know that since TPO advertises itself as a radical paper,” Neri said. (os)

John McCain’s definitely not a sissy. This was the message most of the media failed to get from George Herbert Walker Bush’s endorsement of the senator from Arizona. “Unlike my son,” he whispered to me, ” John will not inflict any costly and unnecessary war on the American people because he doesn’t need to prove he’s not a sissy.”

But, the father of the president said, his endorsement should not be taken to mean he believes all the crap about the war hero’s recollections, especially the accounts about Cuban officers sighted in Vietnamese jungle camps.

Phnom Penh—Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen today urged resigned Philippine Commission on Elections chair Benjamin Abalos to confess and reveal the whole truth about the scandalous ZTE-NBN deal, as he dismissed as unrealistic demands of the Filipino community here for Cambodia to break diplomatic ties with the Philippines to pressure self-proclaimed Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into resigning along with her vice president so early elections could be called.

“While I appreciate the situation in the Philippines and sympathize with the demands of your people, breaking diplomatic ties is too harsh and would even backfire on the hundreds of overseas Filipino workers in Cambodia,” the prime minister told me in a phone interview (I first met him in August 1982 when he was foreign minister in the Vietnam-backed government). “What I can do, comrade, is to offer Abalos a lucrative consultancy with the Cambodia National Election Committee…It is timely because we have national elections in July…he can even help us with the automation of our elections. Perhaps that’s enough to buy him off?

Last Friday (February 15), influential members of the Filipino community here gathered at a political dinner meeting where a statement calling for Mrs. Arroyo to turn herself in at the police station closest to Malacanang was read. Another statement was addressed to the Cambodian government. During the meeting, social activist and professional political agitator Dinky Soliman, who does consulting work for the World Bank as a hobby, presented likely outcomes in the recent Philippine crisis. The dinner was subsidized by the WB and the US Agency for International Development (USAid).

Smarting from recent losses in key primaries, Hillary Clinton has not only replaced her campaign manager but has also instructed her lieutenants to start a new smear job against Barack Obama. This time, Obama is being linked to the ZTE scandal in the Philippines which might lead to the resignation of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo soon.

Clinton staffers are peddling to media that part of the kickback advances by ZTE officials has found its way into Obama’s campaign coffers. How that came to be is the subject an investigative story that is to come out in the New York Times over the weekend.

Obama, however, remains unfazed and claims that Mrs. Arroyo is helping his opponent so she could make a deal should Hillary succeed Bush. “There is no way for Mrs. Arroyo but down…if Hillary wants to go to bed with a corrupt Asian leader, that’s her call,” he said.

Our experts say there is a ten percent chance that W. will order the Pentagon  to bomb Australia and California in 2008.

The political consultants of Senator Mar Roxas have long concluded that his romantic involvement with Korina Sanchez is a winner with respect to his chances of bagging the presidency in 2001. For one, they say, it gives him mass appeal. For another, it ‘lays to rest’ doubts about his being a ‘real man.’ We don’t buy that crap, but our experts say the couple will wed late next year, but with a web of complicated strings contained in a prenuptial agreement.

In brief, the two major condition is: If the costs of feigning romance and intimacy outweigh the trappings of political power for Roxas and the influence to be derived by Sanchez, the two will embark on a ‘no-contest’ annulment, with each throwing the charge of psychological incapacity against the other. Our resident psychologist says the case should be a no brainer for the judge, since, she says, the marriage vows are irrefutable proof of psychological incapacity.