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 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 At the cash counter in the little crafts shop where I bought PH-made stickers and paid ₱400 for four tiny sheets, I told the cashier, “Imagine, stickers costing ₱100 per sheet.” She said, poker-faced, “Everything’s expensive now. Transportation two-way is hurting my wallet,...
MEDIUM RARE Year after year after year, Polytechnic University of the Philippines hits the top spot as producer of the “most employable” graduates. And year after year, few bother to ask why so. After a short conversation last week with Chino Salcedo, who has been teaching in PUP’s San Juan...
MEDIUM RARE More to see, more to love. That’s what to tell tourists looking for a strange new world to visit: They should come and visit and fall in love with the Philippines, or fall in love in the Philippines? Either way, more fun. But, first things first. When the slogan says LOVE THE...
MEDIUM RARE Filipinos go to Bangkok mostly for the shopping, secondarily for the food. There’s a kind of similarity between Thai and Filipino cuisine, so much so that when Conrad Hotel brought in Chef Mink Suraraksa from Bangkok’s Waldorf Astoria for their Legendary Chefs Series with focus on...
MEDIUM RARE Does the Rotary Club of Manila have more fun? They meet every blessed week without getting bored or tired of each other’s faces, but it could also be that I happen to have more friends in this club than in any other. More likely, the truth is that their projects don’t seem to gather...
MEDIUM RARE We arrived for lunch and saw a long table all set and ready for us. What I was not prepared for was the sight of two extremely beautiful, extremely expensive cars, an Audi and a Porsche (model Taycan, spelled almost like Toycar) parked daintily in the dining area, like they were waiting...
MEDIUM RARE Fire and Ice was a new color invented for a brand of lipstick years ago, when I would’ve been too young to use it. As my literature teacher might’ve phrased it, the name was a “reconciliation of opposites”— so who wants to kiss ice-cold lips? This isn’t about lipstick. Look...
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 Meet Sassy and Kikay, modeled after the modern Filipina who wears extended eyelashes as part of her makeup, day or night. The dolls wear their hair long, like the skirts which, if you lift them a few centimeters, will reveal black silk stockings underneath. Sassy and Kikay live at #1...
Medium Rare For all our avowed love for and life-and-death attachment to our cellphones, what was so hard about meeting the SIM registration period of 180 days? As usual, the powers-that-be gave in to the clamor for an extension, so now we have 90 more days to obey a law that takes but minutes to...
