MEDIUM RARE Not a full moon, only a half-moon. It was a romantic enough touch to make Symphony at the Terrace memorable and, truly, one of a kind. But then Ed Yap, who deals in currency rather than music, is used to producing out-of-the-box events. A Christmas choral concert inside a church. Music...
MEDIUM RARE It’s a small world with big players and extensive influence. And not all that democratic. At their last election recently, 830 delegates cast their votes to represent 168 chambers. Cecilio Pedro of Hapee toothpaste smiled all the way to the top as president. He ran unopposed, which...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza To say that it began as a dream is to make the story sound like a fairy tale. But the rise of hybrid rice is a true story, as real as food for the stomach. As told by the man whose advocacy is to plant the right kind of seeds to make millionaires out of farmers, Henry Lim...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza What a grand gathering of politicians and apolitical civilians, newsmakers and photographable, photogenic people — a convention-size party to mark JPE’s birthday, his coming-out party, so to speak, on his 99th Valentine’s Day! KPE, aka Katrina Ponce Enrile,...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza One letter spells the difference between “zealous” and “jealous.” Would it be safe to assume that more people have died because of jealousy? Happy Valentine’s Day!, a national lovefest that has not yet been proclaimed a public holiday throughout a country whose...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Between the President and his Vice President, this is how they summed up the state of education: We have failed our teachers. We have failed our students. Might we assume that the two highest officials of the land were referring to our public school system, not the...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza To cap her graduation from the House of Representatives, Rosemarie (Baby) Arenas received the ASEAN Interparliamentary Service Award last November in Cambodia. No similar award in the Philippines, where we have more than 300 members sitting in the Lower House? Baby’s...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In onion there is strength. It was a good ploy of President-Secretary of Agriculture Marcos to import onions when the local supply was going at ₱600 to ₱700 a kilo, a matter of supply and demand. Now, with the arrival of imported onions and their being pitted against...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In my book Chinatown Is Not A Place (2020), I tried to explain why Chinatown is not a place. It’s many things and not just one place. (For one thing, as pointed out by a worldly-wise friend, every other country in the world has a Chinatown.) The celebration of Chinese...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In the standard greeting “Kung Hei Fat Choi” (Cantonese) or “Kiong Hee Huat Tsai” (Fookien) with which to welcome the Chinese New Year, not a single one of those four words says anything about happy or new or year. In fact, the first two words mean...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Jun Palafox, urban planner non pareil, has seen the future and it reads 2050. Twenty-seven years from now, there will be 150 million Filipinos. What are we doing now to prepare comfortable, safe, and secure airports for them? “The cities of this century will be...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Back in the day, a Hollywood movie called Crowded Skies was dubbed a flop, a disaster movie that turned out to be a disaster. Today, after what happened on the first day of the new year to our air traffic system and then on Jan. 12 to a similar failure in the US, could it...
