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...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In the US where he practiced law before returning to the Philippines, Rep. Paul Daza was more than familiar with the common usage of “deadbeats” to refer to useless members of society who live off other people without paying their dues, do not meet their obligations...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza It’s a good habit to remind oneself that breaking a bad habit or habits is a positive way to start the year. Better yet, to begin by cultivating a good habit. “Save” is the first commandment. Save for a rainy day, a stormy day, a sunny day with LPA. With inflation...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza It’s sooner than you think, Jan. 1, 2023. Now’s the time to clear out the junk, to unclutter and declutter, out with the old, the useless, the dust-covered, and make room for new acquisitions, possessions, treasures. Most Filipinos hope their lives will be better next...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza With a snap of the fingers, Christmas Day has come and gone. It has always mystified us professional revelers if it was God’s plan to decree Christmas and New Year as a series, one following the other in a span of seven days to the dot. What would earthly time be like...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Stealthily, as if no one’s watching, it’s arriving, tonight. Christmas Eve, the magical moment of midnight signaling the arrival of the Baby who was born that he might die 33 years later, a common criminal condemned by the very people who had hailed him as their king....