MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza If 50 percent of Filipinos wore and threw away a face mask during the 365 days of 2021, you’d have had to dispose of 18,250,000,000 masks. Even at 10 percent of those soiled masks, where would they have landed? Luckily or unluckily by chance, because ignorance is its...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza It’s hard not to find a Manny Pacquiao interview interesting, whatever point of the compass you may be at. He doesn’t use big words and frankly, he looks too nervous to be telling a lie. His artless style sounds appealing, coming from the man of the masses that he is....
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza The first day of the calendar year arrived on Jan. 1. Came Jan. 9, the first of many Sundays in what the Church calls “ordinary time.” Today, Feb. 1, is the first day of the Lunar New Year. Fr. Francis Alvarez, SJ, puts it succinctly: “So many starts.” Going by...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Just because there are 12 senators to be elected come May 9, the race has not attracted or generated half the excitement, the noise, or the scrutiny that’s its due. The senatorial candidates come from the ranks of reelectionists, returnees, and new faces. It’s the...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza After the noise and buzz over BBM’s nonappearance on a TV show, the flak was quickly followed by a fluke. On TV 5’s Frontline newscast immediately after that no-show on GMA 7, netizens polled for their reactions to the day’s most newsy event (or nonevent) showed an...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza On one of my rare visits to the supermarket, a display of garbage bags – not in black – attracted my attention. They stood out because they were packaged in sunny colors and labeled as pleasant-smelling garbage bags, thanks to the added value of fruit and flower...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Take it from the experts. Those seat warmers in MWSS predict a water shortage in summer, two months from now. They’re paid to say that? Just by asking the weather bureau how much rainfall to expect or not to expect? After all the rain dropped by Odette – typhoon...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza This time it’s fear that’s fueling the surges. Fear is good if it keeps parents from taking their tykes out for a walk in the park along with 20,000 other people. Fear is good if it pulls us back from going out for the sake of going out. Fear is good if it keeps us...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Christmas ends on the 12th day, two days from now, with the Feast of the Three Kings. Looking back, it was the second half of December that put us in the merry mélange of a near normal season of anticipated joys, gift-giving, family bonding and hopefulness. Now look...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza A memorable experience was what I packed into my 2021 valise of moments to keep, maybe not for keeps but at least for the first few months into the new year. A pandemic year deserves a pandemic adventure. Sandy told Penny, and Penny told me, that the good people of Pasig...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In her 2021 book, The Madness of Crowds, the novelist Louise Penny writes: “What’s a year? Why do we need a new year? Is the old one broken?” Not all memories are good, but the following list shows that as in using a stairway, there’s always an upstairs and a...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Word of the year 2021, according to Oxford Dictionary, was “vax” – not “vaccine,” just vax. Vaccine is an old word whereas vax is a pandemic-2020 invention, shorter to pronounce and spell, especially for headline writers. Word of the month of December 2021 based...
