It took three months before I read an email from a college chum, now a US citizen.  I thought it not urgent for two reasons:  it came from her and the title is Why Is the Philippines Poor? “…Enjoy reading,” begins her forwarded email that turned out to be a chain. The contents are beyond refuting.  [...]

Garfield in a comic strip had it coming when he was threatened with an exile to Abu Dhabi.  The United Arab Emirates, indeed, is deemed as the world’s number one in terms of stray cat population as it is also the number one in people-to-car ratio. Here is a place where using a slingshot is considered [...]

Marco Polo came from this place that was once home to small fishermen and salt workers. Venice goes way back after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century when a Germanic tribe from northwestern Germany, the Lombards, drove mainlanders to the islands.  It later held a thousand-year economic and political autonomy, peaked as [...]

Human interaction plays out differently when one shops hereabouts.  Once, in a department store in Metro Manila, I heard a cashier asking a fellow cashier of the booth where I was lined up if she had 25 centavos.  There was a man she was serving who will not leave until he gets his full change [...]

Had my first offer for teaching here, but since I listened to a counsel of a friend to haggle and negotiate, I gave the prospective employer an “I’ll-think-it-over” goodbye. It was a bit of pride on my part. The school was offering 30 grand to white folks, and since I’m not authentic white, it’s just [...]

Long vacations are for adults to invent things to occupy bored tykes.  For our four-year-old Angel, the playground was out. There’s this neighborhood bully with whom she didn’t stand a chance. So we enrolled her in keyboard playing class. It was a comic fluke. True, Mozart played the piano when he was three years old, but [...]

We even have a quaint name for it— text, or txt, and have made current the word’s obsolete verb transitive form, complete with conjugations such as texting and texted, which are just as easily readable as txtng and txtd.  I’m referring of course to one use of the cellphone (or celfon), itself another term commonly [...]

It was in an iftar, the Islam feast at sundown after a day’s fasting, during last year’s Ramadan that I first tasted the incomparable Yemeni honey. It is the best honey in the world and has all the healing properties one can think of, our Emirati host had said.  Its kind comes only from Yemen, in [...]

This traditional diplomatic term (literally, wine of honor) is held for a country’s national day.  Ours is the June 12 Independence Day observance.  The US has its Fourth of July, Japan the birthday of its emperor, and the UAE its birth date as a federated nation of emirates. Vins d’honneur are formal receptions of foreign service [...]

It was in the early1980s when I recommended Raiders of the Lost Ark to a friend.  Since that friend taught arts and humanities at the time? indulging in details of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting? he found the movie corny so I figured he was better off watching Kurosawa artsy movies than Indiana Jones. But I’ll take [...]

Surprise, surprise.  Or is it?  Michael Jackson’s music album Thriller of the early 1980s tops the list of the 20 best-selling albums of all time.  All time here I take to mean the last three generations or so, judging from the artists that made the list as bestsellers. Thriller sold zillions, says writer Mark Edwards, [...]

There will always be beginnings. They may come like thunder. Or they may just whiff by without flourish or flame. Either way, beginnings impress. In books and manuscripts, they are crucial. In the beginning was the Word, so starts the Book of John, my personal best beginning line in the Bible. To begin at the beginning: It [...]

The thought that it’s the last month of the year had me imagine other last somethings; last stands, last words, last whatever, which are as interesting as the month’s holiday air. Surely, last stands are fascinating in that they show man’s courage and nobility in the face of unimaginable odds. The earliest known last stand goes back [...]

We have special days. We have them as tributes for tradition, for the spirit of continuity. We also observe these days for the memory. These special days, these holidays, can even give us a sense of renewal. Holidays, which began as religious commemorations, now mean either those special days of observance and celebration or a vacation [...]

Hollywood’s Academy Awards, a.k.a. the Oscars, the Rolls Royce of world movie glamour and glitter, will be the 79th today. The first awarding ceremony in 1929, two years after the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, had 250 guests at the black-tie banquet at a Hollywood hotel. The first best actor, Emil [...]

George Bernard Shaw cracked, ‘A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.  Hence, university education.’  No wonder we have the Holy Name University (HNU). HNU, the Divine Word College (DWC) then, means real friends like Bobbsey Manding Buma-at and Lourdes Angalot, Jing Saniel and Charly Holganza, among a few precious [...]

Celebrating New Year is as universal and as ancient as man’s desire for cleansing and renewal, thus New Year celebrations in the early days were in spring, nature’s symbol of rebirth. Yet today’s New Year’s Day in the dead of winter in the Western hemisphere became the beginning of the year.  This developed through an evolution [...]

Hope lies in the celebration of a Redeemer’s birth while irony lurks in the commercialism that attends the celebration. When nostalgia grips in this season of hope and irony, one can only think of home. It seems strange to know that Christmas is nigh and where I am doesn’t have much of what makes Christmas. So [...]

Lifestyle as a word first appeared in 1939, courtesy of Alvin Toffler (of Future Shock fame) who foresaw different ways of living as he noted the increase of differences in societies wrought by (as well as blamed on) modernity and capitalism. The way a person or a group lives is therefore called a lifestyle.  From the [...]