WALA LANG Founded in 1892 by Andres Bonifacio, the Katipunan was betrayed by Teodoro Patiño and fighting began with the Cry of Pugad Lawin (a.k.a. Balintawak) in August 1896. The brutal Gov. Gen. Camilo Polavieja (called “Butcher”) fought back with reinforcements from Spain, arrests and...
Wala Lang PARIS IN THE EYES OF FILIPINO REFORMISTS La Vie Parisienne, Juan Luna (GSIS Collection, National Museum). The impression one gathers from textbooks is that ilustrados in Spain were one in advocating reform in the motherland. This was apparently not the case. The Filipino community was...
WALA LANG THE RELUCTANT POLITICIAN Dr. Galicano C. Apacible Demosthenes would have been speechless over democracy Pinoy style. Our founding fathers set the tone. Members of the Malolos Congress (1898) were theoretically from everywhere but it’s strange that Pedro Paterno of Manila...
WALA LANG The man embarked on his career as a U.P. law professor, numbering among his students three who rose to be Chief Justices of the Philippines. Now at age 91, Estelito P. Mendoza continues in the practice of law. In between, from 1972 until 1986, he served as solicitor-general, minister of...
WALA LANG Robert Louis Stevenson narrates the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, a talented and sociable doctor who concocts a serum that transforms him into the malevolent Mr. Edward Hyde. An updating could be on Netflix, the strange case of the DBM Procurement Service and Pharmally Pharmaceutical...
WALA LANG …there’s no place like home. Still on a Virtual History Trail I don’t know where the Pact of Biak-na-Bato was actually signed, but negotiations took three months (September-December 1897) with negotiator Pedro A. Paterno shuttling back and forth between Manila and San Miguel de...
Wala Lang … there’s no place like home. Coconuts Just as sugar built palaces in Negros, Pampanga, and elsewhere, Quezon, Laguna, Batangas, and Northern Mindanao can thank copra for theirs. I haven’t been inside any Sariaya, Pagsanjan, or San Juan (Batangas) homes, but photos of vanished and...
Wala Lang Join this author check out homes humble and grand whenever he can, wherever he goes. He’s been at it for over 50 years and his tally is close to 100, from Batanes down to Mindanao. … friends like to visit each others’ homes. Once or twice when I was about age five, Nanay gave in to...
Wala Lang A survey conducted by the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) of 15-year-olds from 79 countries revealed that our youth are at the bottom among other things in comprehension and reasoning ability, meaning that their decisions tend to be based on personalities and...
Wala Lang Neither Wall Street nor PSE can beat the Manila art auction record. I watched on Facebook live the other week’s Leon Gallery auction and record after record toppled. At prices in the millions (P7.5 million per basket of Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s painting, Women with Baskets, Fish and...
Wala Lang THE IMPORTANCE OF TREES Geff Cedeño amid kalumpit trees that he planted in 2012. The internet is a marvelous invention and I learned a lot in just a few days of texting and emailing with Gerardo “Geff” Cedeño, the man behind Facebook’s Philippine Native Hardwood Tree Seedlings...
Wala Lang I received a message after my article last week hit the streets. On collectors feeling rich while tracking auction results, Jayson Ong texted, “It’s really very joyful to compute for the present estimated value of our collection but it’s also very hard for us to let go of pieces we...
