Happy year of the Monkey? Monkey business

Dear Mouse, Tok tok tok tok. These are not knocks at the door. These are the sounds of a tennis ball flying and dropping from one side of the net to the other. The moment this rhythmic recurrence of sounds stops, it indicates that one player scores over the other. This is practically what is happening between the administration and the official opposition candidates for election 2004. The ball is with FPJ now. After the fake marriage contract bruhaha, the ex-movie star notched some brownie points. The accusing finger of Sotto made him an underdog within 24 hours after the demolition job that had been initiated months ago turned nastier as family secrets were being unearthed. The friends of the administration officials are bent on disqualifying him to the point that they will get that low of coercing some temp personnel to do the “some reconstructing and restorative tasks" in archived documents. This CA t is a “forger” too but not as high tech as desribed by the Archive personnel. All I needed was my printer/scanner, cream-colored embossed paper and golden foil from the chocolate wrapper. I wanted to frame my diploma, but I wanted a copy, not just a copy but a copy that would look like an original. So I scanned the original, adjusting the brightness and the contrast until I got a perfect copy. The first looked like an old copy—the calligrapher fonts for the name of the school and my name did not look sharp. I have to re-scan and make some resizing in order to fit the document in an 8 ½ by 11 frame. It looked perfect except for the gold seal. Using a pinking scissor, I trimmed the gold foil of the big choc candy and fashioned it to a round seal. Nobody would notice that the impression in the improvised seal is not the name of a school but the print from a meat tenderizer. A thin red ribbon fringed with gold completed the “diploma”. What I did was not a monkey business. It is for my self-gratification. This year is the Year of the monkey. It started with many monkeys monkeying around with documents. Read the excerpt from the news: Archives staff: Manapat ordered Poe papers forged By Jose Rodel Clapano The Philippine Star 01/22/2004 Bolstering allegations of the political opposition, three National Archives staffers yesterday accused their boss of ordering them to forge documents to support the disqualification petition against presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. Archives employees Remmel Talabis, Emman Llamera and Vicelyn Tarin told a Senate inquiry in detail that archives Director Ricardo Manapat began work on the forgeries as early as last November, the month Poe disclosed he was joining the presidential race. The three archives staffers said they used pre-World War II birth certificates and marriage contracts, scanned them and changed the pertinent data with the use of computers to make it appear that Poe’s father was married to a Paulita Gomez. During a Commission on Elections (Comelec) hearing last Monday, Manapat attested to the authenticity of the documents stored at the archives — mainly Poe’s birth certificate, the marriage certificate of his parents and that of his father and another woman, namely Gomez. With Manapat seated only a few chairs away, Talabis related in detail how he scanned pre-war birth certificate records in November with a computer and erased the data to reproduce a blank form. "Mr. Manapat ordered me to clean the details in the birth records and asked me to prepare a black and white copy of it. I did it with the Adobe Photoshop (a computer imaging program) and Mr. Manapat also got a printed copy of it," Talabis told the Senate hearing.. Citing Manapat’s instructions, Talabis then changed the pertinent details of a 1928 birth record. Manapat allegedly told him to use the exact font or style of lettering that were then in use, Talabis said. "I couldn’t find the same font (lettering style) in the computer. So what I did was to cut and paste the font in the letters in the birth certificate," he related. Talabis said Manapat asked him in December to reproduce a blank pre-World War II marriage contract form. "He handed over to me a faxed copy of a marriage certificate and asked me to make a form of it," he said. "There are Spanish letters in the marriage contract which are fine copy. I just put a question mark on each word that I could not decipher." But Talabis went on forced leave before he could finish work on it and handed the job to Llamera, he said. Llamera, a contractual employee in the archives’ computer division, finished the job — complete with all the pertinent entries — by the time Talabis reported back to work on Jan. 5. Talabis was ordered to decrease the size of the lettering used in the entries because they did not look authentic. "When I returned on Jan. 5 for duty, Director Manapat told me to print out a marriage contract. This was the same marriage contract that he asked me to prepare last December," he said. "When I checked on it, there were already entries there of names, signatures and seals." Tarin, a records management analyst detailed at the archives’ computer division by Manapat, related how she was ordered to choose from a selection of signatures of the names Allan Fernando Poe and Paulita Gomez and affix them on the document. Talabis continued that Manapat later in January "asked me to scan a birth record of a certain Allan Fernando Poe and ordered me to print out a negative copy and another positive copy." "When I saw the Xerox copy marked as Exhibit C in the disqualification case against Mr. Poe before the Comelec, I realized that it was the same birth record that Mr. Manapat ordered me to scan last December," Talabis said. Senate President Franklin Drilon said Manapat could face charges of forgery, falsification of public documents and obstruction of justice if found guilty. The CA t