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 Family bonding, a strong element of Filipino group dynamics, but not every individual chooses to have Family to live and get along with. There are those who prefer to live alone and seem to be happy doing so, a conscious and deliberate decision. They don’t need Barbra Streisand...
MEDIUM RARE Responding to President BBM‘s call to memorialize the courage, not only of saints but also of our dear departed, the brave and the bold, as we end a week of holy days and holidays, I beg the reader’s indulgence to let me pay tribute to my mentors in journalism, the only profession...
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...
MEDIUM RARE Autumn has arrived. The leaves have fallen, are falling, will fall some more, some of them gold and golden brown, some very dry, crunchy brown. It will be Halloween in a few days and before you know it, Christmas Day, in the time of Nick. Tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday, the first in a...
MEDIUM RARE Yes, please, let’s have peace on earth even if it’s in pieces. Ukraine-Russia. Israel-Hamas. In the Philippines, sporadic election violence, and all for what? Some barangay to-do and young politicians dabbling in politics. In Pope Francis’ words, “Stop, stop!”...
MEDIUM RARE Fast fashion. Disposable fashion. Wear today, trash tomorrow. If there seems to be no discernible fashion trend/s today, does it mean millennials and their kid sisters and younger cousins have found the joy of wearing clothes so basic they could almost count as classic? (Classic,...
MEDIUM RARE How often can we be thrilled at the sight and sounds of a cellist performing live, solo, with a full orchestra behind him or her? The chance came on Friday the 13th of October, when the Swiss-born Wen-Sinn Yang took center stage at Samsung theater and took my breath away. Brilliant!, to...
MEDIUM RARE When Rose Zamora, mother of San Juan City Mayor Francis Zamora, invited friends to join her at the launching of Dongfeng cars, would she have suspected that the greater incentive was to see President BBM in the flesh? First of all, our group could not be sure if Dongfeng was a...
MEDIUM RARE Military intelligence, according to the late great Rod Dula, essayist, pundit, and travel writer, is an oxymoron. Morons probably don’t know it, but an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which the words that form it are contradictory to each other, as in “deafening silence.” Going...
MEDIUM RARE Baguio, the summer capital. Why does everyone feel good when they’re in the “city of pines”? It must be the trees which, long after summer, continue to provide shade, an assurance of ever-green. Without those trees, pine or something else, Baguio would be like any other...
