MEDIUM RARE Said the cashier to me in the bookstore last week, “That’s our last copy.” She was referring to my purchase of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel, Conclave, a work of fiction but one packed with facts, including a map of St. Peter’s Square that includes the basilica and Sistine...
MEDIUM RARE With Olive and Niwa Ang in their car, I was able to visit again Baliwag, Bulacan, home of our friend Manny Samson, interior designer who has clients, including grand hotels, on both sides of the globe. And just as I remembered, Manny’s famous white house occupies an entire block on...
MEDIUM RARE It’s a Buddhist-Hindu concept, but no one in the Philippines can say that they don’t know what Karma means. In real life (listen to your neighbors) or in soap operas (turn on your TV), Karma is a word freely thrown about between quarreling parties, words like “Ma-karma ka sana!”...
MEDIUM RARE In the month of hearts, congratulations to the Philippine Heart Center for Asia! The last time I had a chance to speak with Imelda R. Marcos, I thanked her for the Heart Center which, with the Cultural Center of the Philippines, may be said to be her outstanding achievements of the...
MEDIUM RARE As a “food-obsessed” people, is it true we eat six times a day? Which would put snacking as a national pastime. And yet we have laws against donating unconsumed food to charities like orphanages, homes for the aged and such. It’s also true that whatever food is left uneaten in the...
MEDIUM RARE Forget your K-drama. Forget the poverty porn of the last century. (I still remember how Lino Brocka said he had to “smuggle” a copy of his “Insiang” out of the country, for fear that then first lady Imelda Marcos would stop it from reaching the Cannes Film Festival for...
MEDIUM RARE Try digesting this. If you’re earning a minimum daily wage of ₱600 and you have three children to feed, the logic behind the math (or the math behind the logic) is that each child gets ₱200 of food for two meals in one day. What’s ₱200 in terms of food prices? Based on...
MEDIUM RARE Mother’s Day has come and gone, but as a mother-in-law my secret wish is that Hallmark greeting cards would invent a Mother-in-Law’s Day also. True, every mother-in-law was a mother until her daughter or son got married. That’s how families grow, and soon enough mother becomes a...
MEDIUM RARE April was International Food Month, and as PBBM pointed out, it’s good to chew on the fact that Filipino food is in a list of the top 100 cuisines of the world. How far near the top or the bottom, who cares? Filipino food, with its rich ingredients of history, culture, tradition, and...
MEDIUM RARE Dubai, in the middle of the desert, swimming and sinking in floods wrought by rain. Manila, in the middle of an archipelago of 7,600 islands floating on blue-green water, crying and praying for rain. What if we could switch places on the map? Could we use science, satellite technology,...
MEDIUM RARE As the French would say it, enchanté! On the day Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential, the President took pity – “nakakaawa” – on the riders of e-bikes and e-trikes who were being fined and arrested for using national roads. “The...
MEDIUM RARE As the man said, music shakes off the dust of everyday living. What is music? The most elusive of the arts, hard to define or even describe, yet nothing like music to touch the heart, refresh the mind, enliven the spirit. The one thing to add to the joy of performing or listening...
