MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Or, as former colleagues in TV used to say, “in the time of Nick.” The more you think about it – nine months after the first ECQ – the more you realize we need Christmas now, in the year of Our Lord 2020. St. Nick couldn’t be coming at a better, more aptly...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Months before the pandemic shut down our social lives, the loudest whisper was about politics and not your usual society scandal. Whispered or rumored, the talk was to the effect that THE tandem for 2022 was already in the works. The names being dropped were not those of...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza If the Toll Regulatory Board’s RFID system – cashless but equally brainless – was meant to speed up the flow of traffic if not the cash flow, how did they explain the 5km traffic jams that got Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian’s goat? Likewise, how was it that...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Before President Duterte showed up to participate in PDEA’s burning of P7 billion worth of drugs last week, a previous total of P13 billion was confiscated. On Dec. 5, in Bacnotan, La Union, PDEA destroyed P60 million worth. November’s hoard was valued at P345...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza On his 96 th birthday last Thursday, novelist, essayist, social critic and commentator, bookstore owner Frankie Sionil Jose reported for work as usual, once a week, at his office atop the shop in Ermita. How does he do it, looking the same today as he did 10, 20 years...
“Chinatown is not a place,” declared journalist-author Jullie Yap Daza to her friends. Now that sentence is the title of her latest book. Technically, Chinatown is only one square kilometer in size, an area surrounded by streets whose real estate values rival Makati’s. If it’s not a place,...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Pandemic, word of the world in 2020. Following close behind at second spot would be, I guess, “protocol”. Not new or strange, as we’ve been using “protocol” in relation to diplomatic affairs, but since COVID-19 happened along we’ve been using the word as...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Christmas is bustin’ out all over, but nowhere as robustly as the malls have it. I promised I’d visit every SM mall in sight and compare how each tries to outdo the other, only to retreat at the first wave of traffic jitters. In any case, where some malls pull out all...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Them were the days. And nights that lasted until the dawn. To Ado Escudero, they were glory days to mount religious festivals, the more sumptuous and spectacular, the better. On Good Friday he’d invite outsiders – outside his beloved Villa Escudero in Tiaong, Quezon...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. An easily quotable line that’s also the figurative and literal truth. More than a million customers of Maynilad still have no water. Neither do thousands of other victims left high and dry and mud-wrapped by typhoon...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Suddenly it’s the end of the year -- the liturgical year, that is. It came to a close last Sunday, and suddenly it’s five days before Nov. 29, start of the four-week season of Advent leading to Christmas. Merry Christmas, all! Christmas too soon? One lady started...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza You’ve come a long way, Babe! Not a line from a song but my compliments to our man in Washington, D.C., Ambassador Babe Romualdez. One of the first things you learn about His Excellency is that his nickname is not Babes but Babe. And if he looks and sounds like a real...
