The five greatest fake names from TV

These overly fake-sounding names for imaginary personas always end up being used either by bands (there's a British metal band that's actually called Cletus Van Damme) or message board posters (on the Film Score Monthly boards, I post under a fake name from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). They're all easier to pronounce than Blagojevich, a name that must be giving late night talk show hosts anxiety attacks.

1. Fuzzy Dunlop
Herc's fake CI on The Wire. Sometimes The Wire is funnier than most sitcoms.

2. Shecky Shabazz
A stage name the Fresh Prince creates at the last minute for his wack stand-up act.

3. Rafael De La Ghetto
A legendary street poet made up by the Fresh Prince to impress the shawties, with some help from Geoffrey the butler: "Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volley'd and thunder'd!"

4. Cletus Van Damme
One of The Shield's few running gags: an alias only Shane would come up with.

5. Santos L. Halper
The credit card account name Bart Simpson winds up with after he applies for a card as Santa's Little Helper.

A reason to like G4's Attack of the Show

They love the hilarious "Stop Carlos Mencia" video.

Hell yeah! Pac-Man chomps De La Hoya!

That means I ain't going to work on Monday!

Oh, wait a minute, I don't have a job.

"The sudden aftermath: Pacquiao was handed a sitting duck" [Talking Points]

De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7: "Filipinos, they're a very clingy people"

Well, my mom and some of my relatives are clingy. Not me. I'm a Pinoy who craves his me time. So I guess that makes me more like Manny Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who said the above funny quote about Pac-Man's huge entourage in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7.

The four-episode HBO series about the advent of De La Hoya/Pacquiao Fight Night is my current favorite docu-show. Maybe it's because I'm Filipino, but seeing Filipinos get this much non-Basco brother airtime on American TV is awesome, despite the overabundance of footage of the poorest Filipino areas, as the PinoyLife blog(*) has noted with snarkiness ("Please... film some Pinoys in Manila that are near some offices, universities, and malls"). (During the weight challenge sequence with Pacquiao's entourage, I loved how I could overhear an entourage member saying, "Excited ko!" That's a line I don't hear everyday on HBO. The only Tagalog that's uttered on HBO is during Return of the Jedi, for Christ's sake.)

There's some terrific documentary filmmaking on display in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7 too. The sequence about Pacquiao's Catholic upbringing and his charity work was masterfully shot and edited. The cutaway from Pacquiao's mother to the People's Champ finishing his prayer in the gym was beautifully done. I haven't enjoyed a boxing doc this much since When We Were Kings.

A Slate.com reviewer wrote that De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 lacked "what When We Were Kings had in spades: historical importance to match the spectacle... the stakes of the fight are much lower than the promotional bluster would lead you to believe."

But the stakes are incredibly high with this fight, for both the 35-year-old, over-the-hill De La Hoya and his younger, shorter and faster opponent, whom I'm rooting for and whose triumphs in the ring have uplifted "an entire anguished nation," to borrow Geologic's words from his review of the docu-show. If Pac-Man wins this fight, it will uplift us even more. Filipinos everywhere will not show up for work on Monday. If you run a hospital, you can forget about those bedpans being emptied on Monday because your nurses will be out celebrating.

(*) Funniest line from the PinoyLife recap: "Buboy, Buboy, Buboy. You have the wackest name in the history of Filipino athletics. I'm sure that Manny appreciates all you do being his confidant, his friend, and cornerman. To most of the Filipino Americans reading this site, you're kinda like Too Big MC with Manny being MC Hammer."

Minority Militant header sketches

Below are my sketches for a header I designed for the Minority Militant, a Laotian American blogger and activist from Chi-Town whose posts I've enjoyed reading. He riffs on Asian American-related topics ranging from the ugly racism that's often on display on reality TV to President-Elect Obama's Asian staffers.

Props to TMM for giving me my first job--even though it was a small one--after I lost my regular job earlier this year. TMM has been digging my black-and-white webcomic, The Palace, which I created to keep myself busy (I've been posting the comic here on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog), so he asked me to draw a new header for his blog.

The sketch of the Asian brother in the hoodie emblazoned with "TMM" is the final version of the image on the header, which can be seen on TMM's blog in all its fully inked, cleaned-up and Paint Shop Pro-and-Photoshop-enhanced glory.