MEDIUM RARE It took New Yorker Lin Bildner for me to gain entry into the polish and gleam of the newly restored Goldenberg Mansion, part of the Malacañang estate, and see what a lovely gem it has been since its last glorious days under a Marcos Sr. administration. What serendipity it was, for...
MEDIUM RARE There are fair weather friends and there are friends who use friendship to feed their needs and greed. Friends, colleagues, neighbors of an enterprising ex-government employee recently found to their regret that when it comes to fueling one’s greed, friends are an easy touch....
MEDIUM RARE What the Universe lost we are keeping. Michelle Dee, a most deserving Miss U, didn’t win the crown so she won’t be touring the world as her reward (?), all the better for us oglers and fencesitters who are intent on keeping a watch on her right here, at home. Michelle, whose dad...
MEDIUM RARE Earthquake! Nine killed in Sarangani province. Heavy rain, floods as high as the rooftops in Catarman, Samar. Extreme climate. And extreme despondency: A 23-year-old housemaid hung herself after she could not explain what she did with money she was supposed to pay on her...
MEDIUM RARE Once in a while it’s great to be swept off one’s feet by a power as insubstantial as music: To lose oneself in a stream... a waterfall... an ocean of emotions that offer no definition, no description of what has just happened. Such was the experience when a 31-year-old Russian...
MEDIUM RARE Belinda, as I named her in my book, Etiquette for Mistresses, appears in the last page, not as the last of her tribe but because of her closing statement: “When he dies and turns into a corpse, that’s the time to give him back to his wife and children. It’s the only...
MEDIUM RARE As we race toward Christmas and eventually the year of the magical, mystical Dragon, it’s nice to remember November as a month with four red-letter days. Not only for November-borns but the rest of us who look forward to holy days, holidays, no-work days, whatever the time of...
MEDIUM RARE ETA (estimated time of arrival) 12 a.m. Dec. 25, 2023. But for many of those who witnessed the lighting of the tree at Manila Hotel last Thursday Nov. 9, the Blessed Day – or its Eve – has arrived already, in spirit if not in numerical accuracy going by the calendar’s 30 or 31...
MEDIUM RARE You can die of loneliness. That’s not me talking. “It’s like hunger or thirst; it’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” said US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murphy in an 81-page report as summarized by Associated Press earlier this...
MEDIUM RARE It was headline stuff, video with story that was one in a million, those television images of the close-in, face-to-face assassination of a broadcaster inside his booth, in his home in Calamba, Misamis Occ. last Sunday, Nov. 5. Ironically, “live streaming” of his own death...
MEDIUM RARE All Souls Day today is a commemoration of the rite of passage from death to eternity. Souls are not saints, not the canonized ones anyway, and according to what you may have been taught to believe, souls are a form of energy, which may explain certain ghosts refusing to leave their once...
MEDIUM RARE Don’t own an ancestral home back in the ol’ probinsiya? No beach lonely enough to be privately yours and yours alone? Ergo, no reason to join the hoi-polloi on the car trip down NLEX or SLEX, no incentive to take the provincial bus, overcrowded boat, wait four to five hours to board...
