MEDIUM RARE What fun to reconnect with Gringo Honasan, soldier, “cashiered colonel,” coup leader, senator, cabinet secretary, now looking so relaxed it must be due to his temporary retirement from politics and public office. Is he ripe for another run come 2025? He’s not confirming, not...
MEDIUM RARE One more down. June 30 will be sign-off time for Teleradyo, ABS-CBN’s news and public affairs station on SkyCable. The network lost its congressional franchise in July 2020 after its appeal for renewal was rejected. It’s not cheap to cover an entire archipelago and broadcast the...
MEDIUM RARE You may complain and they will explain but the truth is never plain to you. Why our power bills are so high – supposedly second to an expensive city like Tokyo? — is a mystery that will remain unsolved to our little minds and shallow pockets. The more you try to read how electricity...
MEDIUM RARE Gone with the smoke, the fire, the tears of Manilans who consider the Manila Central Postal Office a part of their living collective memory. Mayor Lacuna has quickly assured city residents that the post office will stay where it has always been for the past 97 years. Not everyone who...
MEDIUM RARE Dear reader, have you ever seen a real gold bar and held it in your hands? At last I have experienced placing a gold bar between my hands, all five grams of it, so tiny the store sold them at five grams per bar, each of them one inch long, width and thickness impossible to calculate,...
MEDIUM RARE Often enough, I used to tell myself, it might be fun to be a travel writer in my next life. Just as often, I would remind myself that traveling professionally would merely buy me a lonely life. All those solo trips flying hours and hours cooped up in a plane . . . long nights alone in...
MEDIUM RARE Fast fashion. Disposable fashion. They want you to buy more, buy sooner, they don’t want you lagging behind, poor unfashionable you. Fortunately, there’s Ukay Ukay, fashion illegally sourced but who cares? Illegal maybe, but can they strip you naked for stepping out of an outlet...
MEDIUM RARE All eyes on the Office of the President: Who’re on his list of appointees who’ll make it to the cabinet? As PBBM stressed, the newcomers will mean a reorganization, not a reshuffle. Imagine the pressures bearing down on him. Whom to choose, and why? How many competent and...
MEDIUM RARE Well, maybe not 100 percent of the hump, but we’re getting there, bumps and all. After WHO’s declaration of the end of the Covid-19 global health emergency – “it’s still killing, it’s still changing” — we all deserve a pat on the back, don’t we, for surviving and...
MEDIUM RARE As the server cleared our table, I asked him how much food was being wasted at every meal by the restaurant’s patrons. His answer did not surprise me, “About 20 percent.” Next, I had to ask, “How about water that’s left in the glass?” His answer was the same, “20...
MEDIUM RARE Ninety-seven percent of the time I don’t envy the President for his perks, privileges, and power. The remaining three percent is reserved for how I wish I could, like him, zip into and out of our airport and into an airplane, skipping the hundred-and-one steps that we mortals are heir...
MEDIUM RARE In a greet-and-meet with the Filipino community in Washington, D.C., PBBM invited them to go home to a bet-ter airport, roads, government, and internet. This was after an eight-hour power outage at our airport’s Terminal 3 canceled/delayed 50 flights and pun-ished some 9,000...
