NOW that Pinas’s Christmas season is here, it’s time to sing:
“Whenever I see…”
But this version goes like this: Whenever I see choppers flying overhead, I wonder who’s in them… PBBM? The Vice President? Senate President? House Speaker? Some chairman of the bored, er, board? Whose time is so precious, they’re not allowed to waste hours stuck in traffic.
This is one perk they have to savor while it lasts because of this saying: nothing lasts forever. Which happens to be the title of a 2022 documentary film about diamonds.
Anyway, only “diamonds are forever, forever, forever,” as the James Bond theme song goes.
In reality, though, gold is the better investment, as proven by the controversial Yamashita’s gold which the Marcoses supposedly, allegedly, reportedly own.
The Marcoses during the time of former President Ferdinand Sr. tended to host Imeldific parties, and it seems like they have not mellowed down in that department, with PBBM’s 67th birthday on Friday the 13th having Duran Duran as his birthday party’s most pleasant surprise.
What’s with Friday and the 13th? “Please, please tell me now/Is there something I should know?/Is there something I should say.” Tsk tsk.
I’ve been waiting for a Duran Duran concert here in Pinas since forever, and to learn that they were PBBM’s birthday guests makes me feel so deprived. I wasn’t invited to that party. Therefore, PBBM and I are not friends. We’re not even acquaintances. Neither are we “Strangers in the night exchanging glances/Wondering in the night.”
PBBM’s birthday party at a Pasay hotel was a gift from his “old friends” as revealed by the Presidential Communications Office through a statement on how his birthday went, the details of which included this: “The President celebrated his birthday with his signature compassion for the needy and the sick, and his deep appreciation for the farmers who feed the nation.”
Gosh. Who wrote that? ChatGPT? Yes, if you’re Pinas’s president, even your birthday party needs an explanation, especially on who wrote it.
A friend, who’s usually asked to speak at events, told me months ago that ChatGPT is now his ghostwriter.
Nothing wrong with ghostwriters for those who don’t like to write. Except for that one problem: there’s a possibility the speech won’t sound like the speaker who will end up saying the words stiffly as he struggles in pronouncing them.
Human ghostwriters always ask their clients to read the written speech aloud so they could train the latter on pronunciation, delivery, where to pause and for how long, etc. If the speech has a joke but the speaker doesn’t know how to deliver it, the ghostwriter will eventually delete it. Better no jokes than a speaker who can’t be funny.
The speech should have the speaker’s character and personality, and the only way the ghostwriter can achieve that is by getting to know the speaker so that by the time he’s writing the speech, it sounds like the speaker himself wrote it. In other words, a close friend can be a speaker’s best ghostwriter.
And how lucky PBBM is for having old friends who may not be writing his speeches but at least they give him expensive gifts.
