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 [...]

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 [...]

The Larks are all males, remember? But I also heard female nightingales, I said. They were church singers supporting The Larks for the mass hymns. Thus did Bobbsey a.k.a. Melba R. Manding Buma-at explain a detail of her silver wedding last December 14. Pilo, Bobbsey’s husband of 25 years and father to her two great kids, [...]

Angeli Marijopaz has the face of Gong Li, that leading Chinese actress famous for her unusual appeal. She was appropriately dressed in a red silk cheongsam for the special occasion. It was her fourth birthday party. The venue was a fastfood restaurant with a party package that saved lots of headaches for adult party-givers and was [...]

It’s not every day, or every night, that the young and old can let their hair down in the same place and time.  But Pabibo may happen only once. As in all good things, a repeat next year may mean a repeat of the activity only but the ambience, the surprises or the collective vitality [...]

Pairing timelessness and pop may sound like an oxymoron, yet most of that evening’s repertoire was timeless pop music just the same; timeless, because those pop greats of yesteryears have withstood the test of decades. Dubbed ‘As Time Goes By,’ the night’s musical numbers were offered by a veritable who’s who in the country’s music [...]

Their day was set aside for shoots of some swell sites and places in the city and nearby towns that can be featured in lifestyleBohol. Come along, Sonya (my chosen nickname with the Russian spelling for Sonieta L., the editor) offered. I imagined the team’s energy and my backache and how the twain shall never [...]

No, I didn’t learn the truth at seventeen, but ten years later, when I found three long-stemmed red roses on my table one Valentine’s Day.  There was no sender’s name. A few tables away were similar bunches for two officemates, two of my three close friends. At lunch with the group, we got to talk about [...]