(Not my picture.)

And so it was that I found myself facing the sea on a breezy Sunday evening, waiting for a solitary barge floating in the middle of the bay to light up the darkened sky. The event seemed well-organized and quite comfortable, although perhaps this initial impression was colored slightly by the fact that we were in the VIP section, and they were serving us dinner.

We arrived about an hour before the competition was scheduled to start, and sat ourselves down as close to the bayside as possible. The VIP section was a long rectangular strip of pavement along the outermost edge of the baywalk, with about 2 dozen large round dinner tables and a modest dinner buffet. The size of each table was such that you were most likely going to share with someone, unless you happened to bring a whole van full of friends along with you. For awhile, I allowed myself the small fantasy of actually having the table to ourselves – perhaps the VIP section wasn’t running at capacity? – but alas, this was not to be.

Half an hour before the United Kingdom performance began, a young man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me in Tagalog whether there were other people sharing the table with us. I admitted, “No,” and when he turned to wave his companions over, I wished I had lied. Their group consisted of three ladies suffering from varying degrees of obesity and looking like they sold hair elastics in Philcoa, and three squealing 5-year-olds that they were dragging along by the pigtails. They fell into their chairs, making the silverware dance and the wine glasses shudder. They chattered at each other while trying to get their respective bundles-of-joy to sit still for more than two seconds at a stretch. Behind us, a string quartet was playing, and I imagined the sinking Titanic.

One bundle-of-joy in particular was quite memorable. She didn’t like the sound of violins and so decided to play Paramore over her cellphone’s loud speaker. She placed the cellphone, of course, right beside me. Thus energized, she began to explore the subterranean world under our dinner table, crawling over our feet and seriously destroying my calm. Resurfacing from her excursions, she proceeded to smash her head against the underside of the table, and our glasses spilled their contents out on to the tablecloth in fright. I half-stood to see if she was alright, but her mother, mistaking my reaction for concern, waved me back down. “OK lang sya, OK lang sya,” she said. I was hoping she had knocked herself unconscious, and would have to be taken to the hospital.

Thankfully, the performance soon began, and apart from the occasional non-sequitur interjections of “Nasan yung dede nya? Yung dede nya?” from our tablemates, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The Brits were good, but the Chinese were better, and unfortunately there’s no way to properly describe the experience of either performance to someone who hadn’t been there, at that distance. We watched the spiraling, cascading fireworks cast triumphant reflections on the water, and I have to admit – for all my complaints about the mediocre food, and the presence of other people – I was enthralled.

Wirth’s Law states that “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster,” and nowhere is this law more true than in the mobile space. The computing power that you can squeeze out of these smaller machines is severely restricted by physical limits such as size, heat output and power usage. The single most common source of computer frustration is the fact that our machines take too long to do what we ask of them, whether it is opening a Word document or loading up a desktop game. We know from Wirth’s Law that the software is the culprit here. In fact, no matter how advanced our hardware gets, our software will continue to overtax it. That’s just the way we write code, I suppose.

Are there any solutions? Well, Apple’s solution was to not allow third-party apps to multitask at all. This, at least, restricts the number of applications competing for your device’s limited resources. People have been whining about the lack of multitasking in the iPhone since its inception, and they continue to do so with the new iPad. But having used all manner of smartphones, pocketPCs, netbooks and tabletPCs over the past 6 years, I can say with much conviction that multitasking did not make these devices better. All it did was make them slower. Generally, you end up turning all of the other apps off anyway, because the foreground application needed as much computing power as your device could muster.

What people tend to misunderstand about these smaller mobile devices is that you cannot look at them the same way you look at a full-blown laptop or workstation. Even the manufacturers misunderstand this, which is primarily why the TabletPC initiative floundered during the mid-00’s, and why smartphones have such limited resonance with consumers. They just shoehorn traditional ideas into a form-factor that is fundamentally different, and people just end up getting confused about what it’s for. And these machines are always, without fail, abysmally slow. This is ironic, because the primary use-case of a mobile device is that you are using it “when you’re on the go,” i.e., when time is most critical. Instead you find yourself rooting around the Task Manager killing various processes just so you’ll have enough memory to load up OneNote. The sledgehammer “single-tasking” solution that Apple took with the iPhone has largely been vindicated by the fact that it now boasts 17 million users around the world, and I think that doing the same thing with the iPad was a good idea. It keeps thing simple, and here’s the really important bit: reliable.

There’s this saying that, as a designer, you know your work is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It’s this exclusionist strategy that has served Apple so well with their consumer devices. By stripping their mobile products down to the essentials, and then polishing the heck out of those essentials, they’ve produced devices that people describe with words like “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking.” Me, I’m just glad it doesn’t multitask.

Capturing flash motion is a favorite photography subgenre of mine, probably because it’s notoriously easy to pull off once you’ve got your camera settings sorted. On my D90, I shoot with an 85mm lens open at f/2.5, ISO 200. I like the 85mm for this because it’s very light compared to any of my zooms, and this technique involves a lot of camping (i.e., holding the camera to your face for several minutes doing nothing, then blasting off 5 shots in quick succession).

Shutter speed should be in the non-handholdable* range of 1/5 to 1/8, depending on how much of the background I want to be able to resolve in the image. You have to make sure that your strobe syncs rear-curtain; every camera has a slightly different way of doing this. I believe compact cameras have these too, so theoretically you should be able to pull this off even if you’re not using a DSLR.

Right before the gig starts I usually take a few images of the stage area so I can see what kind of flash power I need to illuminate it appropriately. For Route196 last night, this was 1/4 to 1/8 on my smallish SB-600 flash (with an aperture of f/2.2 to f/3.2).

Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the right moment. These flash-motion portraits work best when the subject is about to make a quick move. Guitarists are super-easy because there’s a lot of repetition in their hand movements, so you’ll have a lot of chances to get something nice. Essentially, you open your shutter right as the move’s being executed. If you do it right, you’ll get a nice motion blur around the subject.

*Why non-handholdable? The rule of thumb when judging whether a particular shutter speed is "handholdable" is 1/focal-length. In other words, on my 85mm, I shouldn’t be able to handhold the camera at anything lower than 1/80-1/100. The reason is due to the fact that longer focal lengths magnify vibrations, so you are more likely to end up with blurry images. Conversely, if you had a very wide lens, like Canon’s 10-22mm, you could handhold that even at 1/10 or 1/15 and still get a decently sharp image.

Strobes allow us to cheat this law because the light coming from our flashes travels at around 1/1000 or faster. When you are making a flash-enabled exposure, the area illuminated by the strobe will be crystal-clear because it was lit at a speed much, much higher than your handhold minimum. Meanwhile, everything that wasn’t lit by the strobe (your background, usually) will still exhibit all the usual camera-shake. This is why you want to have your aperture open pretty wide when capturing flash-motion. Since your background will be pretty shaky, you want to bokeh it out as much as possible.

One of my first really decent flash-motion images from back in May 2009. (In photographer-years, I was 3 months old at the time.) Ironically, this is of Miggy Chavez of Chicosci, but let’s not judge. This was pretty textbook stuff: 50mm lens at f/2.5, 1/20 shutter speed. (I didn’t own an 85mm back then. And oh, I was still shooting Canon.)

Although my recent flash-motion images have been taken with on-camera flash, I occasionally have the luxury of setting up colored, off-camera strobes. The image above was taken in Magnet High Street with a green-gelled flash clamped to a ladder about 4 feet away from the subject. I guess I must’ve been feeling cocky that night coz my settings were all over the place: 2 second exposure handheld, f/8 opening and 17mm focal length.

This fire-dancer image pushes the limit of the flash-motion technique. In order to track the flames as they moved around the subject, I had to shoot a 4-second exposure, which is impossible to handhold, no matter what you do. So I tripoded it - the sane solution. The flash hardly did anything in this instance because the light from the fire was already more than enough to expose the dancer in its center. This actually speaks to an important caveat in shooting flash-motion: if the subject is throwing off a lot of its own light, your flash is unnecessary, unless you want to try to overpower the subject’s light with your own.

The rest of my flash-motion portraits can be found here.

And so it was that I decided to conquer this fear on this bright Sunday morning. I set 10 strangers as my initial goal, figuring that it’d take _at least_ that many before I would start to get the hang of it. I’d shoot in UP Diliman campus, as the volume of pedestrians there would be sure to provide me with the subjects I needed. I packed my 85mm prime, widely-regarded as the best lens for this sort of street photography. And off I went.

The first 30 minutes were fairly horrible. I stood along the side of the road and pathetically watched joggers and cyclists go by. There were tons of people, way more than I was really expecting. Just focusing on any one individual was turning out to be tricky, as the background was always too busy.

Eventually, I decided that it’d be impossible to shoot the kind of images I wanted with joggers or cyclists. They were just going too fast, and it wasn’t like I could run alongside them as I shot. What I needed were slow-walkers, or people sitting around resting. And so I began my own slow-walk around the UP oval, pausing occasionally to eye a potential subject, but never actually bringing the camera up to my eye.

The working distance of an 85mm lens on a cropped-sensor body is about 5 or 6 feet for a very close portrait. This is perfect for street photography because you are neither violating anyone’s personal space nor are you too far to actually talk to them. Because, yes, you will have to talk to them. Trying to steal a frame will usually result in a nice picture of the back of someone’s head, because people sense when a lens is being pointed at them and tend to become self-conscious.

I finally got up the courage to approach my first stranger after nearly 45 minutes of walking around aimlessly. She was a teenager in a blue jersey, carrying a little dog in her arms. The camera was already set up, so really all I had to do was go up to her and say, “May I take your picture?” and tap the shutter. I mean, seriously, how hard could that be.

As it happened though, I walked right past her first, before turning around and kinda sheepishly mumbling, “Excuse me, can I take a picture of your dog?” And then, hurriedly: “And you?”

She said, “Yeah sure,” and like the proverbial overly-excited virgin, I thrust my camera at her and … fired prematurely. Before I even looked at the LCD, I knew I had screwed up big-time. I had managed to get the top half of the dog’s head and most of hers into the frame, but the focus was on the trees behind them. Even more sheepishly now, I asked, “Uh, one more? Sorry.”

The second image was still not very good, but at least the foreground was in focus this time. I thanked her, and walked hurriedly away before she could ask to look at what I had taken.

It occurred to me that part of the reason why it was so difficult to approach anyone before was because there is an implicit declaration that you, the photographer, know what you are doing. And 95% of the time behind the lens, I literally have no idea. Finally coming to grips with this notion made me feel a lot better. As long as none of these strangers actually saw how crappy their portraits were turning out, then I was ok.

I spent the next hour botching up most of the 40 images I took, although to my credit, I did shoot more than 10 strangers. The standard line was “Excuse me, may I take your picture?” which I would switch to Tagalog depending on who I was talking to. (When shooting kids, I’d have to ask their moms for permission, and it just seemed more polite to say it in English.) Out of about a dozen approaches, I was rejected only once. And I actually started getting decent images towards the last 15 minutes. These are my two favorites:

The girl in white was hesitant, but I told her that all she had to do was ignore me. The grand-dad, meanwhile, just nodded when I asked, and my focus point just happened to land perfectly on his eyeball. Photo of the day, easily.

You can check out the rest of my new Strangers set on Flickr here.

Last night’s #dream: As a young Dark Knight, I had taken to using my skills to “watch over” this girl who had recently dumped me.

Her younger sister had been abducted from their creepy mansion of a house, and as she wept, I knew I had to get involved.

I swooped down from my gargoyle perch, landing lightly in front of her. She was not glad to see me. “I can help,” I rasped.

“Stop doing that stupid voice, I know it’s you,” she said, glumly.

Using various bat-devices, I determined that her sister was all the way across town, in the mountainous Batangas. “We’ll take the car.”

The interior of the batmobile looked similar to that of a 2008 Honda Civic, but this was beside the point. It sounded big and scary anyway.

We saw ambulances and fire trucks as we approached, and by way of movie-montage, we found ourselves at the Anilao Gen Hospital.

I cast a dark, awe-inspiring shadow in the crowded, well-lit E.R. as we entered. (OH, via bat-hearing: “Uy si Batman o.”)

I stood there, the silent brooding guardian, as she spoke to the staff. When she returned, her face was ashen, her expression stoic.

“They told me she didn’t make it,” she said. Before I could respond with a bat-quote though, her sister came running out from her hiding place.

“OMG why would you joke about something like that!” she said scoldingly, altho she was visibly relieved. They hugged and laughed in the middle of the busy E.R.

When she finally turned to thank me, I was gone. She looked around a bit, and then shook her head slowly, with much understanding.

That’s what Batman does, after all. He disappears when you don’t need him anymore.

10. The Xx – Islands
These young ‘uns are one of my favorite male/female vocal duos, right up there with Mates of State and the (very) similar-sounding Savoir Adore. Also check out “Basic Shape” from the same EP.

9. Animal Collective – My Girls
When the Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion came out in early January, people were saying that the race for “best album of 2009” had come to an early close, and they weren’t wrong. This album is Noah Lennox’s Ok Computer. “My Girls” is the catchiest track on the disc, although “Bluish” and “Brother Sport” are also sharp as tacks, and indeed, the whole collection is the kind of work that only happens once in an artist’s career, if at all.

8. We Were Promised Jetpacks – Quiet Little Voices
The only rock-out song on my 2009 playlist is from a little-known punk outfit from Edinburgh. This song is hardly “quiet,” though. I have Emusic to thank for this little gem.

7. Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks
Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood refers to these guys as his “favorite band.” Not really much more you can add to that, I think. Also check out their New Moon contribution “Slow Life.”

6. The Swell Season – Feeling the Pull
I’ve been following Glen Hansard’s work since The Frames (and later, Once) and his current partnership with Marketa Irglova is generating some of his most optimistic work to date. The whole album is full of these candid, bittersweet and fervently hopeful hymns. (“Two Tongues” is a very close second as the best track here.)

5. Modest Mouse – The Whale Song (live video clip here)
It’s hard to understate ex-Smith Johnny Marr’s influence on Modest Mouse’s continually evolving sound. “Whale Song” is probably the best example of this, a careening guitar anthem in which you don’t even get any vocals until the three-minute mark. Also check out “Satellite Skin” from the same EP.

4. Thom Yorke – Hearing Damage
Radiohead has been quietly pushing out a handful of tracks via their website for much of 2009, with Yorke himself releasing the sinister Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses EP. “Hearing Damage” is from the New Moon OST, and is possibly his most accessible (and infinitely listenable) solo work since “Harrowdown Hill” in 2006. Perfect for the sparklers.

3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Soft Shock
The It’s Blitz! album is a great piece of work, the kind of followup fans wish for but rarely ever get. Other folks will probably pick “Heads Will Roll” or “Zero” as their favorite tracks off this masterpiece, but it’s so close as to be impossible to call.

2. Phoenix – 1901
I’ve listened to “1901” and my number one pick more times this year than the rest of the top 10 songs combined. Phoenix’s pop indietronic sound blows a hole through the ceiling of what this subgenre was thought to be capable of, and there’s a nary a track on this album that doesn’t instantly grab the listener. (Although if you need additional hints, point your headsets at “Lisztomania,” “Lasso” and “Rome.”)

1. Passion Pit – To Kingdom Come
For a band that was formed as a Valentine’s Day gift for the vocalist’s girlfriend, these guys are remarkably accomplished musicians. Their relative inexperience (they formed just two years ago) speaks to the breadth of their potential. The Manners album is a gem, the kind of electronica that turns cellphones into glowsticks, and hipster bars into dance floors. “Sleepyhead” is the most distinct track in this collection (it’s been used in a number of commercials since 2008), but “The Reeling” and “Make Light” are must-listens as well.

Honorable mentions to The Avett Brothers’ jaunty bluegrass “Kick Drum Heart,” Sea Wolf’s balladeer “The Violet Hour,” Bon Iver’s ruminative “Blood Bank,” and Stagecoach’s rocky “Good Luck with Your 45.”

(If you liked this list, please add me as a friend on Last.fm.)

This is largely how I arrived, today, at The Flying Pan, an Italian ristorante in the middle of downtown Daejeon. I walked past over a dozen more interesting-looking restaurants on the way here, but none of them appeared to have menus with pictures in them. The Flying Pan, meanwhile, had Actual English Words next to the Korean names for all their dishes. As they say in Manila, “San ka pa.”

My favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson, once wrote about how visiting non-English-speaking countries would reduce him to an almost childlike sense of awe. Nothing made sense, everything seemed new and strange, and even the simplest of actions needed to be explained to you. It was like being 5 years old again. I loved how utterly astute this observation was. I can’t remember the last time it seemed appropriate to be proud of having taken public transportation by myself, but here I was. Proud. Now watch me ask for directions from this lady in the convenience store. She motions to go right then down two blocks. See that? A regular Christopher Columbus, that’s me.

In Korea, the custom at restaurants is similar to that of the Japanese. Upon returning with your order, the waiter will leave the bill turned face-down in a corner of your table. Subsequent orders will include subsequent bills, each one turned face-down. When you’re ready to leave, you take the pieces of paper with you to the entrance, where the cash register is, and pay there. I like this system a lot, as it avoids potential disagreements by providing you with status updates. Also, it allows me to indulge myself in that favorite touristy pastime, i.e., computing how much more they are charging you in this country for something you could also get back home. There is also zero tipping here, which is fortunate as I have difficulty gauging the relative value of things. I’ve been in Daejeon for a week now, and I still haven’t gotten used to the 0.04 multiplier. (My Brain Age is like, 75.)

I leave The Flying Pan and resume my exploration of the downtown area. It’s about 6 degrees today, and my gloves are nice and toasty in the cabinet back at home. I duck under the second English sign I see (the first read “DVD”), and find myself in a beautifully modern cafe called Flower: Coffee & Wine. The place is organized into booths with high-backed love-seats, heavy wood tables and dainty glass chandeliers. The Asian art deco is lavender and mauve; the music is 24/7 Korean pop ballads.

Casually ignoring the name of the place, I order a beer. A Cass, this time, one of the two major Korean beer brands. I had tasted the competition, Hite, two nights before and was largely unimpressed. When my order arrives, I notice with some amusement that while Hite’s tagline (“Cool & Fresh”) sounds like it was cribbed from a bottle of mouthwash, Cass’s strap (“Sound of Vitality”) is straight off of an energy drink. Both brand concepts seem to be studiously avoiding the obvious notion that beer is alcohol and alcohol gets you drunk, in their respective branding. (See Red Horse’s “Ito Ang Tama,” as the primary case.)

On my way out of Coffee & Wine, I receive a minor fright when I am informed that I owe the restaurant “two million, four thousand won.” Considering that the currency’s largest denomination is only 50,000 (which they introduced just this February), this was truly a significant amount of money. My feeble Brain-Age math told me that, converted, this was a little under a hundred thousand pesos, which is quite possibly the most anyone has ever paid for a beer and chips in the history of the world. Then I look at the register’s display, and rather curtly inform the cashier that he means “twenty-four thousand.” I thrust the cash into his sweaty palms and walk towards the exit as quickly as I can.

This happens to me two more times over the next 48 hours. Apparently, Koreans have trouble differentiating “tens of thousands” from “millions,” and randomly use the latter when they mean the former. It’s a mildly disconcerting trait, but understandable considering that their number system is significantly less elaborate than ours. (Of course, by “ours” I mean the Western counting system.)

Another interesting Korean trait: they possess near-zero body odor. North-East Asians in general have the lowest level of apocrine sweat glands amongst all races (the glands that produce body odor), and Koreans in particular have the lowest of the low. Nearly half of them don’t possess them at all, which represents, in this writer’s humble opinion, the next stage in human evolution. (The Japanese have, rather predictably, taken this notion to the extreme—it is possible to be exempted from military service purely due to having body odor, in the same way others would be exempt if they were handicapped in some fashion.)

As I stand in line for a cab, I keep my nose alert for bodily scents and fragrances. Happily, I smell only the occasional dash of cologne.

Korean healthcare is a thing of wonder to your average third-worlder. My mother had been working in Daejeon with a foreign passport for less than six months when she learned that she needed to check herself into the hospital, and the amount of coverage that insurance here offers is nothing short of astounding. In the Philippines, you’d be lucky to have your initial checkup covered. Here, they’re so busy writing off various fees from your bill that you wonder if they’ll end up paying you. (And mayhap they actually will, we haven’t gotten that far in the process yet.)

Of course, there are tradeoffs for this small fiscal miracle. For us, it is primarily a problem of language. If you took every English word understood by every person on staff in this hospital and strung them all together, you would have the rough word count of The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. I don’t mean that with any disrespect, I’m simply describing the difficulties inherent in our situation. As I listen to them struggle with the peanut-chewing sounds that pass for spoken English in this country, I think about the possibility of my family and I learning Hangol. A halfway meeting, such as it were. I imagine we would sound much, much worse. I cringe at the thought. Instead of peanut-chewing, we would sound like we were stricken with a waking bruxism, like Stephen Hawking without his magic chair.

That said, I have attempted to learn a few words, if only to satisfy my own need to communicate without having to start an impromptu game of Charades. (That, and I had spent $2.99 on a Korean phrasebook iPhone app.) “Yeh” (Yes), “Anyo” (No), “Kamsa Mida” (Thank You), and the quaintly specific “Oosong Kundei Humon” (Behind Woosong College) pretty much round out my Korean vocabulary. You couldn’t even write the first sentence of The Missing Piece with that.

And yet there is so much to love about this city. There is no tension in the air, like in Tokyo. No pushiness, like in Shanghai. No aloofness, like in Singapore. No rankness, like in Bangkok. Instead the people here seem laidback, warm, open, and bathed. Importantly: the internet connection in my mother’s low-rent apartment is a blistering 10mbps; one can only imagine what kind of bandwidth the technologists here are enjoying. If they could only speak some English, I wouldn’t mind living here for a few months. As it is, well, I’m already surrounded by Koreans back in Eastwood city, so no big change, really.

Three hours ago I was sitting in the Sampaguita Lounge, in NAIA Terminal One. To get to the Sampaguita Lounge, one takes a dimly-lit elevator in a ramshackle, construction-barrier-lined section of the airport. It’s exactly one floor up, but there are no stairs. The elevator opens up to a corridor, blocked on one end with a bunch of potted plants, and darkness beyond. The other end is the lounge, and there’s usually a greeter there waiting for you. At least, there was, 2 years ago. Now there’s an electric fan ventilating an empty reception area. It’s just before 10 in the evening when I get there, and the handful of staff are sleeping in the armchairs. I take care to pound my feet against the floor as I walk, in the hopes that my approach will wake them and save me from having to clear my throat or something equally tiresome. As the floor is carpeted, this strategy proves difficult to implement. Thankfully, one of them stirs before I’m within throat-clearing distance. She looks at me like they’ve never had a customer before, and then I suppose, she wakes up.

The Sampaguita was created a few years back as an “airport lounge for the economy class,” i.e., the vast majority of flyers who are not quite privileged enough to qualify for the Mabuhay club, or any of the other premier airport hangouts. When I first tried it, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There was a modest buffet of small sandwiches and drinks, and a decent wireless connection. The plush chairs were loads better than the steel benches in the waiting areas outside. The population density was much lower too, and because there was an entrance fee (PhP450/pax), you rarely saw screaming children here.

All of these things were generally still true of Sampaguita Lounge circa 2009, but it felt worn and used-up, like a promising starlet who has turned to pornography. The low, ambient light was uneven; some bulbs had burned out and had never been replaced. The chairs were beginning to sag, and many needed to be reupholstered. The background music sounded like it was coming straight out of a Magic Sing. Not all the electric sockets worked, so when I asked to charge my gear, they wheeled out an industrial-strength power strip that you would normally use with washing machines or airconditioners.

The restroom was the real discovery: huge drifts of moist, crumpled toilet paper on the floor and sink. The cubicle doors, left ajar, revealed their sordid, unflushed interiors. There were small puddles on the black tile floor and I tell myself that it’s just water. Well, technically, all bodily fluids are at least part water, so I’m not being completely delusory. I zip up and get out of there as fast as I can.

As I leave the restroom and its midnight horrors, one of the attendants reminds me that my flight is leaving in half an hour. When I get to my gate, I remember why the Sampaguita is a good choice even in its current miserable state: the rest of the airport is like a marketplace. In NAIA, five departure gates open onto the same huge room, and there are hundreds of people vying for space on the perforated steel slabs. It occurs to me that the only difference between NAIA’s waiting areas and Ondoy evacuation centers is that Ondoy victims can queue up for showers. This thought fills me with a great sadness, and I find myself sprinting to the ramp to escape the sounds of the unwashed multitude.

This particular eschatological prophecy has to do with a red heifer – an apparently ultra-rare, scarlet-hued female cow whose presence would allow the Christians to build the Third Temple, and thus facilitate the second coming of their Messiah. (That would be Jesus, to you secular folks.) The rarity of this kind of cow is puzzling – it has only appeared a grand total of 9 times throughout all of Hebrew history. The first was for Moses, he of the Top 10 list. He gave the poor animal to his priest Eleazar to be sacrificed.

Upon the heifer’s tenth appearance, the End Time – man’s final moments on this planet – will commence. Given these circumstances, we’re all quite fortunate that red cows simply aren’t indigenous to that part of the world. They’re relatively common in North America though, which, as it happens, is where this harbinger of doom is currently being bred in large numbers by one Clyde Lott. Turns out he’s been at it since the late-90’s.

Here’s how the fundamentalist Christian view of the eschaton works:

1. The Setup
Three events must occur for the Messiah to return: (1) the nation of Israel must be restored, (2) Jerusalem must be a Jewish City, and (3) the Temple must be rebuilt. (It was destroyed by Romans in 70 AD. Whenever Jews break glass during weddings, they do so in memory of this cataclysmic event.) Of those three requirements, only the Temple currently remains unfulfilled.

Of course, the building of Temple itself has its own set of requirements. The relevant one involves using the ashes of a red heifer to purify its constituents. And naturally, the heifer requirements are pretty tedious as well. Sayeth Numbers 19:

“Speak unto the children of Israel,” the Lord commanded, “that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came a yoke.”

In other words, this cow must be pitch-perfect. Not a single non-red strand of hair, and not a single day of labor to its name. Also, a heifer is by definition about three years of age, so it needs to be properly cared for until its time comes.

Clyde Lott’s breeding work has thus far produced a bunch of near-misses, but no keepers as of yet. Each potential candidate is subjected to the closest scrutiny. When one candidate (not from Lott’s stock though) was discovered in 1996, some Jews rejoiced, while other camps called for the animal to be shot immediately, and “every molecule” destroyed. The poor calf’s tail turned white as it grew older though, solving the problem for everyone. In 2002, another calf was discovered and subsequently disqualified. One wonders if these calves are not simply willing their imperfections into existence in an act of bovine self-preservation.

2. The Buildup
Once this all-important cow is found, investigated and approved by the rabbis, it will be sacrificed on a pyre, and its ashes mixed into water. Jews will flock from all corners of the globe to be purified by this water, and the restoration of the Temple will commence.

It’s easy for secularists to write off this Jewish predilection for temple-building, but its significance does bear some explanation. The Jews believe that their Temple is the device through which God will manifest His presence to mankind. It’s not a building, it’s a conduit.

3. The Denouement
The Messiah’s return is the part familiar to most Christians. There will be seven years of great tribulation, during which an Anti-Christ will appear to wage war against the believers. One can look at this period as a great shakedown, during which the lapsed, lazy or only mildly serious Christians get filtered out (and most likely, destroyed). Jesus will, of course, eventually emerge triumphant, saving all of the true believers and kicking off a thousand years of peaceful reign.

What happens after those one thousand years are over is anyone’s guess. In my most fanciful imaginings, I like to think that the Christians will come back to find the Earth a perfect utopia ruled by the secular survivors. With no religion to hold us back, humankind has explored the solar system, eradicated disease, ended poverty, expanded the limits of human understanding beyond anything previously thought possible. Perhaps Christ’s millennial reign may end up being beneficial to both believer and non-believer alike after all.

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Other eschatological pieces include the aforementioned Mayan Apocalypse, and the Doomsday Singularity, which talks about how technology will one day literally be the death of us.