Tough weekend at da beach

AKTV, UFL ink historic 5-year deal

“It’s a historic moment,” gushed Philippine Football Federation President
Mariano V. Araneta during the contract signing between the AKTV and the United
Football League Friday at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel in Mandaluyong City. “This
was a long time coming and it can only mean well for football.”

The five-year contract signed by both parties guaranteed that two live UFL
matches will be shown every Saturday beginning October 8, 2011 on AKTV with the
televised matches played at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium and
non-televised games played at the University of Makati.

“What this gives Filipino football players and clubs all over the country is
a chance to continue playing the sport they love even after their college
playing years,” said Santi Araneta, chairman of Football Alliance which
organizes the UFL. “It gives them a platform to showcase their talent not just
to the country but who knows – it might lead to a stint in the national
team.”

Former national player Alvin Ocampo, who now works as an assistant coach in
Pachanga FC, said that the quality of football played in the country has grown
by leaps and bounds with the influx of foreign talent as well as the exposure of
locals to international tournaments. “This is a good time to be playing
football,” said Ocampo, the son of the late Olympian Ed Ocampo who was once
named Mr. Basketball and Mr. Football.

The season kicks off with the UFL Cup where 28 teams, including 13 guest
squads, will compete for slots in the UFL’s Division II.

The press conference also featured the draw where clubs were seeded into a
group stage for the UFL Cup. The seeding results are as follows:

Group A: Nomads FC, Baguio FC, Union Internacional FC, Lions FC

Group B: Loyola Meralco Sparks FC, Internacionale FC, Agila FC, Team Socceroo
FC

Group C: Global FC, Pachanga FC, Stallions FC, Cebu Queen City FC

Group D: Kaya-Cignal FC, ABC Stars FC, Schwarz, Diliman Victory Liner FC

Group E: Philippine Air Force FC, Philippine Navy FC, Manila All-Japan FC,
Laos FC

Group F: Green Archers United FC, Dolphins United FC, Pasargad FC, Forza
FC

Group G: Philippine Army FC, Manhur FC, Sunken Garden United FC, and Garuda
FC PH

Tournament Committee Member Chris Hagedorn labeled Group C the “Group of
Death.”

“It’s going to be interesting because you have two tough Metro Manila teams
(Global and Pachanga) and two very good provincial teams (Stallions FC, an
Iloilo-based eleven, and Queen City FC, which is from Cebu) who are rivals
themselves. That bears a lot of watching.” said Hagedorn.

In the UFL Cup, the top two teams of each group as well as the top two
third-place teams advance to the Round of 16. The survivors are then pitted in
the quarterfinals and semifinals until the last two remaining teams battle it
out for the Cup. The third and fourth place teams will also figure in a one-game
match for the Plate Winner.

Heading into the third season of the UFL, there will be some new faces in
different clubs.

National team mainstays Phil and James Younghusband will be playing for
Loyola Sparks FC along with another set of brothers who are former national
teammates in Mark and Matthew Hartmann.

The Azkals’ Fil-Spanish striker Angel Guirado and Fil-Iranian Misagh
Bahadoran will be donning the colors of Global FC.

Kaya FC will have Aly Borromeo, Anton del Rosario, Jason Sabio, Yannick
Tuason, and Nate Burkey in uniform.

Philippine Air Force FC has scoring threats Chieffy Caligdong and Ian Araneta
in harness while rival Philippine Army FC features Roel Gener and Nestor
Margarse.

The UFL Cup will also have an interesting mix of Ghanaian, Sudanese, British,
Malaysian, Indonesian, Spanish, and Dutch players.

You can't compete

huh

Galvanize

Malapascua above water

Lykke Li - "Can I Kick It?

Can I Kick it!

A day in Puerto la galere

Start of the weekend at Guli Dive Shop on White Beach, good vibes as usual

On the way to da floating bar for some refreshments.

The Motherf**ker with the Hat

THE THEATRE

War Games

Battles at home and abroad.

by Hilton AlsAPRIL 25, 2011

Spend some time on the upper Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the forty-six-year-old Stephen Adly Guirgis grew up, the son of an Irish mother and an Egyptian father, and you can still hear the notes in the scale of his theatrical repertoire: black, Jewish, and Latino voices that meet and crash and land on the predatory streets that his characters sometimes stalk far into the night, in search of a little coke, perhaps, or some Chicken McNuggets. Although Guirgis’s scripts are short on detail when it comes to the spaces his characters inhabit, you can picture them from the way the characters talk and express—or don’t express—their aspirations. Guirgis, a brilliant comedic talent—who began his stage career at the LAByrinth Theatre Company, where Philip Seymour Hoffman, a co-founder, directed his early work with great compassion—also has an original and knowing take on class, particularly as it plays out among the bottom-of-the-barrel working-class poor, who are virtually invisible to the wealthier men and women around them. Guirgis’s characters are strivers who lack the language to “pass” in a white-collar world; they’re frustrated by limitations that they’re only half aware of, and that frustration provides much of the painful hilarity in their dialogue, which piles miscommunication on top of misunderstanding.

In Guirgis’s seventh full-length play, “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” (at the Gerald Schoenfeld), audience members are treated to the author’s customary craftsmanship and themes, but his characters’ interior lives feel a little more considered than they have in the past. This is not to say that Guirgis’s first foray on Broadway is any less hysterical and irreverent than his previous works, which include “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” an outstanding 2000 piece about imprisonment and moral responsibility, and the 2003 comic epic “Our Lady of 121st Street,” which shows how the past can overwhelm and distort the present. After the inventive and poignant “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” which follows the life and career of history’s most famous fallen angel, premièred at the Public, in 2005, one could only wonder where Guirgis would go next. But “The Motherf**ker with the Hat” builds on the strength of those plays and then surpasses them. From the beginning of this elegiac, exhilarating, hundred-minute, intermissionless work, which is surely handled by the director Anna D. Shapiro, you can’t help noticing that Guirgis has shaken his habit of setting up ideas and situations for his characters to fit into; instead, full-blooded people take over and tell the story for him.

Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Jackie (Bobby Cannavale) are in their late twenties. They live in a Times Square S.R.O., but it’s their love that hems them in. Jackie, out on parole, is newly sober. As the play opens, Veronica is doing lines of coke while cleaning the apartment and talking to her mother on the phone. She feels that her mother is too strung out, and that she’s wasting time with the wrong man, and she’d like to get her into rehab. Vibrating with coke nerves, Veronica says, “Ma? O.K., look, for the last time, my opinion, you’re still a good-lookin’ woman with a huge, lovin’ heart and you’re not hard to please—clearly—but you’re dating a fuckin’ big-time loser with a head like a actual fuckin’ fish! . . . O.K., like, please, alls I’m gonna say, Ma, when you see him tonight: Take a moment. Take a breath. Take a real good look and just ax yourself in all honesty, ‘Do I wanna fuck him or fry him up with a little adobo and paprika?’ ” Jackie enters. He’s high on his new job at FedEx and on his love for Veronica, which hasn’t abated since they first met, as teen-agers. He looks as if he’d just stepped out of an eighties porno flick: slicked-back hair, a six-pack, skinny, muscular legs. (When he undresses, we see that he’s wearing a pair of white tube socks.) Jackie wants to make love, but Veronica has something on her mind. She’s been seeing someone else, but won’t say whom. Is it their downstairs neighbor, the motherfucker with the hat? No, it turns out that Veronica has been with Jackie’s A.A. sponsor, the homily-spewing, vegetable-juice-drinking Ralph D. (Chris Rock, in his Broadway début). Meanwhile, Ralph’s bitter, disaffected wife, Victoria (Annabella Sciorra), has the hots for Jackie—though you get the sense that she’d be into any man who paid her some attention. As Jackie’s world unravels, he calls on his wise, sardonic cousin, Julio (the phenomenal Yul Vázquez), who has Jackie’s back but not unconditionally: he tells Jackie exactly how self-obsessed he’s been.

Jackie and Veronica, as played by the astonishing Cannavale and Rodriguez, are two hopeful losers who want to win the kind of intimacy they’ve seen in movies, but for whom it’s always just out of reach. Even if life were to hand the savvy and deluded Veronica a chance at happiness, she wouldn’t be able to grab the brass ring. She and Jackie both desperately need and avoid each other. The interplay of their desire and their deceit makes them one of the most beautifully drawn couples to appear on the stage in years. As the play goes on, we watch the very notion of rehabilitation unravel, too. Guirgis isn’t anti-A.A. or anti-N.A., but he doesn’t shy away from the reality that exists offstage, as it were, in a world that isn’t protected by anonymity and trust. He knows enough about life to ask the right questions: What is recovery? And who, if anyone, can recover from the brutal high of a love hangover?

Panyee FC

Fat People

It's a big club and you ain't in it