It is called ‘supplement shock,’ this latest thing about vitamin pills.  This, after world citizens have spent zillions for decades swallowing pills that are supposed to make them healthier and therefore live longer. Vitamin pills increase rate of mortality, says a headline of a few days back datelined London.  Research has suggested, the news says, that [...]

Oh, what a revelation.  I open the business page of a UAE national paper and was stumped over a matrix of the world’s top rice exporters and importers.  The Philippines is the number one importer, with 1.9 million metric tons sourced from different countries.  Indonesia and Nigeria follow.  The top exporters are Thailand, Vietnam and [...]

South Asians, such as the Indians, Southeast Asians like the Filipinos, and Eastern Europeans like the Romanians and Czechs are more likely to be left-handed.  Western and Northern Europeans and Africans are less apt to be left-handed, so went the conclusion on the demographics of left-handedness. Here’s more on this left-handed incidence- it is more likely [...]

What do Julius Caesar, Paul McCartney, Marie Curie, Nicole Kidman, Albert Einstein, Rafael Nepomuceno, Prince William, Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Leonardo da Vinci, the husband, and our tyke have in common?  All are left-handed, and all have managed very well or are managing just fine, thank you, in a world designed for the right-handed. Time was [...]

Appearances deceive.  One can insist that a person matters more than what he wears, but in a world of strangers, it takes a dress to approximate how one would be initially treated. Think of a man of the cloth, with a clerical collar and a small cross pin, beside a shabbily dressed chap with uncombed hair.  [...]

Deciding on a school for an early grader took me a year.  In the UAE where classes start in August, I’ve done my share of searching on the internet highways and byways, phone calling, studying a potential school’s curriculum, observing how its students behave, asking around about religious instruction and school discipline. Our tyke, who has [...]

This piece may as well be entitled  ‘Why We Need to Go to a Doctor.’  There’s always a lesson to be learned about self-medication.  Somehow I never learned it well enough until it’s too late.  It started with just one little skin eruption on my upper lip, the kind that one mistakes for a pimple [...]

It wasn’t the voice of love calling to me…  It was a chance to temporarily change my daily housewifely routine.  So I bragged to the husband that I was going to have a job. The job (or the deputized volunteer work) turned out to be far from being a lark. There was the three-day training-seminar by [...]

Said to stretch back more than a thousand years, losing weight is a sporadic fad because there were periods when it was hip to be fat.  Paintings by old masters show women veering on the fat by today’s standards.  Doesn’t Mona Lisa look well-fed? In the 1600s, diets to trim the body saw print.  A Scottish [...]

Corazon Zaldivar is dead.  After her cold-bloodied murder, conjectures on motives, perpetrators, and the standard conspiracy theories came in heaps.  Sometimes, though, the most obvious isn’t always what it is.  Too many convolutions attend life and murder. The assailants had the essentials of hired killers.  They had an alibi for Cora to open her door.  The [...]

Murder most foul. That early evening of February 10, Corazon Zaldivar was stabbed 13 times after she opened her door to two men whose supposed business, as a neighbor heard them, was to deliver a letter from lawyer Aster Piollo. Cora’s landlady next door went out to check when she heard Cora shout for help, only to [...]

Her story is of a woman who sought love, and hope, but failed. And yet she found, in a hapless sort of way, some solace in a city that became the mute witness to her ghastly end. Corazon, or Cora, came to Tagbilaran a total stranger.  She had neither close friend nor known relative to speak [...]

Those who have gone through relocation share the experience.  It begins with anxiety and ends in acceptance.  Different, but not much so, from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s classic denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in the case of grief, though the comparison is obtuse because relocation doesn’t really entail that much grief.  Still it disorients. We lived in [...]

Millie came from somewhere in Mindanao and spoke Cebuano mixed with Ilonggo.  When I met her, she could count her stay in Dubai at three years, with the same employer, the same household, and the same pay. I happened to meet Millie at the Philippine consulate where I found myself one day for one reason or [...]

In a manner of speaking, humdrum human activities often taken for granted entail socially acceptable good behavior called proper, pleasing or good manners. Manners may vary from every country and culture.  Take burping.  The adult kind, I mean.  For the Chinese at feast, burping is a sign of appreciation and satisfaction.  For Europeans, it’s simply gross. Another [...]

The child of woe, Wednesday’s child, tosses and turns with life’s storms.  He may be called the unfortunate, different from his more severe cousin, the misfortunate who whips up the storms himself. Unfortunates are said to be those that are not favored by destiny or fate or fortune, that hypothetical, fickle force that determines events or [...]

‘Auntie, I didn’t pass the board.  Don’t worry, I’m feeling guilty but fine.  I’ll try again this May.  Thanks for your prayers.’  It was a bittersweet message on the mobile phone that I received from a niece some months back.  She happens to be the niece I have always regarded as someone who’s keeping a [...]