Jesus Villamor: Probably The Greatest Filipino Pilot

Jesus Villamor

The date was December 7, 1941. Hawaii woke up at the sound of death. For some reason, the Japanese decided to go Rambo on them. Carrying their Samurais, bayonets, and then state of the art fighter planes, they went on an all gangsta mission to totally annihilate the Americans. Body parts flew, red rain started pouring, and the air was filled with screams that could have easily passed as a sound effect on a Kevin Smith Slasher film. 

Americans were like, ‘mother fu…’ then died.

While Americans were running low on their wits, five Filipino pilots were chillin’ in their kitchen cutting up the tomatoes to go with their deep fried tinapa, garlic rice, and kapeng barako which they just scored from another Filipino soldier from Batangas. Okay, that breakfast part is fictional but the point is that there were five Filipino soldiers who were overflowing with awesomeness that they went to their commander and promptly reported for duty and said they can probably do something about the Japs.

These five were Capt. Jesus Villamor,  Lt. Geronimo Aclan, Lt. Godofredo Juliano, Lt. Jose Gozar, Lt. Manuel Conde, and Lt. Antonio Mondigo and it is important to note that they weren’t even in Pearl Harbor, they were in their base in Batangas.

Dado Bonatao: Filipino Billionaire in the U.S.

That computer or phone or tablet which you are now looking at, 30% of that is made of a Filipino invention.

Just in case that wasn’t clear enough, I’ll rephrase it. Thirty percent of every computer’s make up - whether it was made Apple, IBM, Samsung, Neo, or whatever  -ever manufactured in the whole damn world was invented by a Filipino, Dado Bonatao.

Dado Bonatao’s dominance is Silicon Valley actually started before Silicon Valley started. He shook the computer world so hard with his chip inventions, the intergalactic God of all computer hardware puked his intestines out and still hasn’t quite recovered to this day. Dado Bonatao is the man responsible for making the graphics on your computer look good.

Before we get into the details of his brilliance that catapulted him to being a legitimate billionaire complete with his own jet and brushing elbows with the likes of Bill Gates, let’s first get to know the amount of badassery he needed to show just to get to where he is now.

Jess Espanola: First Filipino Emmy Award Winner

[originally posted 2010]

Jess Espanola is hardcore.

He won an Emmy Award back in 2008 for his work as an Assistant Director for the Outstanding Animated Program (for programming less than an hour) Simpson’s Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind.

He never allowed anyone to stop him from pursing his goals, did not permit life-threatening hunger and exhaustion to stop his hands from drawing, and has ten million layers of padding to protect his spirits from all the failures a poor Pinoy could ever encounter in that big bad world of Hollywood.

Jess is a poor boy from Kalookan and when I say poor, i mean f***in’ poor. No one is considered an illegitimate child nowadays. The law pretty much declares every child ever born with equal rights. That’s cool but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, the law was a d!ck to give only 50% of the rights of a legitimate kid to an illegitimate one. Jess knew it all too well. When his father learned his mother is pregnant with him he said ‘i’m sorta outta here’ and he bounced on them. Luckily, someone was kind enough to adopt his mother.