MEDIUM RARE Once in a while it’s great to be swept off one’s feet by a power as insubstantial as music: To lose oneself in a stream... a waterfall... an ocean of emotions that offer no definition, no description of what has just happened. Such was the experience when a 31-year-old Russian...
MEDIUM RARE Belinda, as I named her in my book, Etiquette for Mistresses, appears in the last page, not as the last of her tribe but because of her closing statement: “When he dies and turns into a corpse, that’s the time to give him back to his wife and children. It’s the only...
The Philippine government maintained that it will not seek permission from China to conduct a resupply mission to a grounded ship in the Ayungin Shoal despite Beijing’s protest that such missions infringed into its territory, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Thursday, Nov. 16. BRP...
MEDIUM RARE As we race toward Christmas and eventually the year of the magical, mystical Dragon, it’s nice to remember November as a month with four red-letter days. Not only for November-borns but the rest of us who look forward to holy days, holidays, no-work days, whatever the time of...
MEDIUM RARE ETA (estimated time of arrival) 12 a.m. Dec. 25, 2023. But for many of those who witnessed the lighting of the tree at Manila Hotel last Thursday Nov. 9, the Blessed Day – or its Eve – has arrived already, in spirit if not in numerical accuracy going by the calendar’s 30 or 31...
MEDIUM RARE You can die of loneliness. That’s not me talking. “It’s like hunger or thirst; it’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” said US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murphy in an 81-page report as summarized by Associated Press earlier this...
MEDIUM RARE It was headline stuff, video with story that was one in a million, those television images of the close-in, face-to-face assassination of a broadcaster inside his booth, in his home in Calamba, Misamis Occ. last Sunday, Nov. 5. Ironically, “live streaming” of his own death...
MEDIUM RARE Family bonding, a strong element of Filipino group dynamics, but not every individual chooses to have Family to live and get along with. There are those who prefer to live alone and seem to be happy doing so, a conscious and deliberate decision. They don’t need Barbra Streisand...
MEDIUM RARE Responding to President BBM‘s call to memorialize the courage, not only of saints but also of our dear departed, the brave and the bold, as we end a week of holy days and holidays, I beg the reader’s indulgence to let me pay tribute to my mentors in journalism, the only profession...
MEDIUM RARE All Souls Day today is a commemoration of the rite of passage from death to eternity. Souls are not saints, not the canonized ones anyway, and according to what you may have been taught to believe, souls are a form of energy, which may explain certain ghosts refusing to leave their once...
MEDIUM RARE Don’t own an ancestral home back in the ol’ probinsiya? No beach lonely enough to be privately yours and yours alone? Ergo, no reason to join the hoi-polloi on the car trip down NLEX or SLEX, no incentive to take the provincial bus, overcrowded boat, wait four to five hours to board...
MEDIUM RARE Autumn has arrived. The leaves have fallen, are falling, will fall some more, some of them gold and golden brown, some very dry, crunchy brown. It will be Halloween in a few days and before you know it, Christmas Day, in the time of Nick. Tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday, the first in a...
