LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Sometime in 2018, the Office of the President issued Executive Order (EO) 55 which had a rather quirky title: “…constituting a steering committee for the commemoration of the Quincentennial of the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines, the victory of...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Two decades ago, when I had a business of my own, I realized that my 13 employees had no idea of time. Although I had taught them to arrive punctually at work, none of them gave time an economic value since its only manifestation was the intensity of the sun, scorching...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta You are cordially invited to join the webinar “The Aromas and Flavors of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Route” this evening at 6 p.m. Kindly look for the link online. I lived in Mexico for 18 years, the longest I have been away from the motherland. Except for the...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta In a recent palaver (via Zoom) my friends and I were wondering about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the educational system, now that private and public schools are closed and distant learning, the alternative, is not available to the majority. When that spirited...
Gemma Cruz Araneta LANDSCAPE From Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, my mother: “I asked (Imelda) whether she and the President watched Ninoy’s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they’d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they’d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing...
Gemma Cruz Araneta LANDSCAPE At low tide, a sliver of white sand appears where Manila Bay meets the American embassy. In a wink, it is filled with naked street children and their scantily clad elders — dwellers of parks and sidewalks who want to escape the heat. They have probably heard of...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta While we were talking about unscrupulous people who steal ideas with impunity, I asked Atty. Daniel Hofileña, expert in the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, about the fate of the HOCUS paintings. None of these are for sale and the next best thing to...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta During a weekly zoom session with former classmates, one of them complained that she saw an almost exact copy of a Manansala she had inherited, in an on-line catalogue of an auction house. Another one detected a perfume of fraud when a copy of her own painting was for...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta At this writing, the venerable Senate of the Philippines and the House of Representatives are about to have a bicameral meeting about what to do with the P162-billion pandemic fund provided by the Bayanihan 2 bill. I was informed that P10 billion has been earmarked...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Very few remember that he went rogue during People Power 1 – he disobeyed the orders of the Commander-in-Chief and found ways to divert the menacing army tanks from entering EDSA where thousands were already gathered to protest against the dictatorship. When he was...
LANDSCAPE Pandemics like COVID-19 are nothing new. Through the centuries, humankind had gone through a number of episodic plagues and virulent pestilences that only the fittest survived. European archeologists have found evidence that the first pandemic sprang...
LANDSCAPE I know it is none of my damned business to comment on what is going on in the United States of America. I have kept my thoughts to myself and have been careful not to share them with former classmates who have made...
