The Papaya Craze

Jim Pare­des in an arti­cle last April 27, talked about how Fil­ipinos can wow the world.

This may be a begin­ning. Sev­eral months ago, the Papaya Craze of Edu Manzano’s game show Pilip­inas, Game Ka Na Ba?! (which is roughly trans­lated into Philip­pines, Are You Game?!) caught the eye of peo­ple the world over. ABC’s Good Morn­ing Amer­ica hosts danced to it. Some Pol­ish guys have posted their own YouTube video of the dance. Even Ambas­sador Kristie Ken­ney has caught the fever.

I think a good recipe for suc­cess here is a catchy tune, really easy steps (think the Macarena dance), and a mil­lion hits at YouTube.

And with YouTube, it really is open sea­son for peo­ple to seed the world’s cul­tural gene pool with (hope­fully good) Fil­ipino soft­ware (to use Mr. Pare­des’ ter­mi­nol­ogy again).

===

I got a mes­sage from Rus­sel McMa­hon, the guy who was able to pro­duce the solar-powered lamp/flashlight hybrid to bring light to vil­lages in Africa which I fea­tured in yesterday’s post. He sent me the link to the web­site show­cas­ing his “invention”–which he calls “merely good engi­neer­ing com­mon sense”. I think it is pre­cisely the “Engi­neer­ing Com­mon Sense” that makes the whole thing COOL. We have a lot of use­less prod­ucts in the mar­ket nowa­days that hon­estly makes us go “huh?!”. It’s great to see a prod­uct that (1) makes a lot of sense, and (2) has a social con­science. Thanks Russel!

Here are some pic­tures of the lamp/flashlight in action.

1) Dumb Blonde?
2) Scripps National Spelling Bee
3) The Her­itage of Smallness

Quote of the Day: “I have found the para­dox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” — Mother Teresa