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 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 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...
MEDIUM RARE If you mix one part oxygen with two parts hydrogen, H2O, you produce water. How much? A drip, a drop, a river? Just because you can afford your water bill, you’ve no right to waste water when the dams and reservoirs are about to look like the bottom of a very dry well. We hear calls,...
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...
MEDIUM RARE To quote a balikbayan Alex-in-Wonderland, “Some of your malls are much nicer than what we have back home,” home being the great United States of America. I remembered AiW upon stepping into the mall housing Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Makati last week. Another excuse to...
