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...
A tour of heritage houses in Batangas, Bicol, Bulacan, and Boac Wala Lang … there’s no place like home. Most unusual was a Taal (Batangas) bahay-na-bato that was a bahay kubo in disguise. You wouldn’t notice the masquerade from outside. The home had the usual stone-walled ground floor and...
Wala Lang … there’s no place like an ancestral home. With the end of the Galleon Trade in 1815, the Spanish colonial government embarked on structural reform. Foreign trade, heretofore restricted to Spain and her colonies, was opened to other countries. Commercial agriculture was prioritized...
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 Small pieces of paper, tiny bits of metal—neither is edible nor useful but people work, fight, kill for them. Paper money and coins are the subject of Yaman: History and Heritage in Philippine Money , a weighty tome just published by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Authored by...
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 Journalist Andrew J. Masigan points out the alarming results of a survey conducted by the OECD Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) of some 600,000 15-year-olds from 79 countries. Filipino teenagers ranked last in ability to comprehend lengthy narratives, to deal with...
The eco-creative designer presents 'FLVX > LAYA > EN’COUTH' for PMFF Alodia Cecilia's works "Although seemingly irrelevant during dark times, nothing and no one can ever stop those whose talents and passions are of creating art and beauty," says Filipina fashion designer Alodia Cecilia....
Wala Lang Mactan was not an impressive place in the 16th century. As late as 44 years after Magellan’s stay, Miguel López de Legaspi found Mactan “swampy, largely inhospitable, and sparsely inhabited” by “some 300 indios in four or five small settlements.” It was strategically located...
