Philippine Blog Awards Sept 21 2008 at One Esplanade!

After months of planning, we finally have a date for the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards. Yesterday, Noemi sealed the contract with One Esplanade finalizing our beautiful venue this coming September. With a little cash - and a lot of help from the SM group we were able to secure the Coral B room of One Esplanade for the better part of the 21st.

Philippine Blog Awards
When: September 21 2008
Where: 1 Esplanade (website and directions)

Registration starts 5:00 PM with the awards to commence at sunset.

The Philippine Blog Awards runs entirely on sponsorships and volunteer work. We will be calling our first volunteers meeting very soon to do a second ocular and delegate tasks. If you wish to be included in the volunteer group email, please send a message to Gail Villanueva at kutitots at gmail dot com and she will get back to you. It would be great if you can also list some of the “talents” which you can contribute to make the event really kick ass!

Expect an email from Gail announcing the first volunteers meet up in the next few days.

What if you can’t volunteer but want to help out in some way? Well, the biggest help we need right now is spreading the word about the awards through word of mouth, your blogs, Plurk, Twitter, and your other effective social tools.

If you are a corporation that wants to sponsor this event, you can do so by filling up this form and we will get back to you immediately.

Oh and lastly, we are sifting through a pile of nominations — we are officially closing nominations on August 10 2008 so if you have a blog or blog entry which you think is worthy of being notable in the blogosphere, you can nominate a blog(s) through this form.

MEETING RICK ASTLEY - and how my manhood failed for one night! :P

I’d been ignoring my phone for the better part of the day as I was preoccupied over finalizing the venue for the blog awards and making my way through press conference after press conference. It was only a few seconds - but when Alora asked me if I had gotten her plurk, I had to reply saying no I haven’t, please text me instead since I’m out.

“You can go to Alchemy later at 10PM. Rick Astley launch party will be there.”

OHGOD. Couldn’t bring anyone. Guest list only. So I had to make some change of plans for the evening because, well, I learned in school that urgency takes precedence over importance (”in matters of prioritizing, what needs to be done immediately always supercedes what is seemingly important.”) Rick Astley was only here for 2 nights and this was probably the only night I would be able to meet him in the flesh.

The first thing I did upon arriving at Alchemy was to text Marcelle as I knew he really wanted to meet him and a few texts later, Marcelle popped into Alchemy (he’s famous - he got in despite the tight security … so girls ….. *ahem* …..). Turns out there were so many other closet Rick Astley fans - a friend from grade school and even Vespinoy was there with his wife.

So not only was I able to shake Rick Astley’s hand once. I was able to shake his hand three times (!!!) and I remember clearly on the 3rd time I just had to scream “I’M A HUGE FAN!!!!!!” And there it goes. Manhood Fail.

OK now came the part where the host starts playing parlor games. Kel, myself and two other guys are pulled “on stage” for a Rick Astley lookalike contest. Yes dear friends, before you laugh, it apparently seems that aside from Mr. Bean, I also have a vague resemblance to Rick Astley - move over Roderick Paulate!!. So then comes the question and answer slash talent portion - Kel did some magic in front of the audience (it wow’ed as usual) and when the host asked me what my talent was, I just had to blurt out …

“I’m never gonna give you up.”