This is a typical sight at the Manila airport every Christmas. Seven hundred cranky passengers multiplied by an average of three bags per person equals mad rush for luggage carts.

I have several favorite kinds of snow, two of which appeared magically last night.

It started with the Pixie Dust. This fine sparkly powder is like lightly sprinkled caster sugar on the earth and crunches underfoot. The world shimmers at night. When I woke up this morning, it was Frosting. Everything is covered with a soft smooth layer of white fluffy snow. It’s the stuff that transform Christmas scenes from hectic to serene.

My five-year old point and shoot can’t do the vision justice.

And what’s that? Animal tracks! What could it be? A bunny?

PRODUCTION NOTE: No Video cameras were used in the production of this music video.

Graphic designer/animator/photographer Cesar Kuriyama produced this 4:15 music video with 45,000 photographs from a Nikon D200 DSLR. The song is “Long Gone” by Fat City Enterprise.

Fat City Reprise – Long Gone from Cesar Kuriyama on Vimeo.

When I first moved here several years ago, I made a list of things almost unique to America that I would miss if I had to live somewhere else for more than 6 months. Included in the list: online banking, gift cards, self-serve checkout, free wifi, 24-hour stores, and printable maps with driving directions.

And there’s pre-cut fresh fruit in a tub. One of the modern grocery store’s strangely successful innovations, this provides easy snacking without the hassle of washing and slicing! Perfect for kids and lazy people. Now, raspberries and blueberries in a plastic tub is preposterous (people buy them anyway). But pre-cut pineapple is sheer genius. Who on earth knows how to cut a pineapple anyway?

Then last week Jason returned from his vacation in Hawaii with pineapple for me. A whole pineapple…!

After years of enjoying pre-cut fresh pineapple chunks, I finally have to figure out how to cut one up myself. All I can say is, thank you Internet.

Step 1: Lay the pineapple on its side.

Step 2: Slice off the top.

Step 3: Slice off the bottom.

Step 4: Now it can stand on a flat bottom. Slice off the skin. You can go straight down or try to do curved slices and make a mess like I did. Your choice.

Step 5: Yay clean pineapple! Now, turn it on its side again and start slicing discs.

Step 6: Almost there. Using a paring knife, cut away the hard core in the middle.

Step 7: Whee! You can stop here and grill them for some delicious caramelized pineapple rings. Or you can go with chunks for instant gratification.

Yes I ate a piece, okay?

This song “I’ll kill Her” by French singer Soko is so adorable!

I would have met your friends,
We would have had like a drink or two,
They would have liked me cause
Sometimes i’m funny,
I would have met your dad,
I would have met your mum, she’d have said,
“Please, can’t you make some beautiful babies,”
So we would have had a boy called Tom, and a girl called Susan,
Born in Japan,

She’s a bitch you know, all she’s got is blondeness,
Not even tenderness, yeah she’s clever-less,
She’ll dump your ass for a model called Brendan,
He will pay for a beautiful surgery, because he’s full of money,

So man I told you… if I find her,
I’ll just find something, anything… a gun if I can. Anything.
And I’m strong enough, so I’ll do it. I’ll kill her.

Her website explains how it started:

SoKo put up “I’ll Kill Her” at her MySpace for some friends in November 2006. This version, which she recorded in her bedroom, isn’t really that much to her liking. Telling Courier Mail: “Say you want to do a huge painting, and you make a little black and white sketch on a napkin and you’re like, ‘I want to do that with a lot of colour and really big’. Then people are like, ‘Oh no, this one on the little napkin is really good, we should put in in a museum’. But that’s not what you want to do.”

I think the homemade video was perfect! I love the defiant yet plaintive juts of her chin when she sings the refrain, like she’s trying to be tough. A studio-produced version would’ve made her into a Pink-styled psycho ex-girlfriend.