MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Them were the days. And nights that lasted until the dawn. To Ado Escudero, they were glory days to mount religious festivals, the more sumptuous and spectacular, the better. On Good Friday he’d invite outsiders – outside his beloved Villa Escudero in Tiaong, Quezon...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. An easily quotable line that’s also the figurative and literal truth. More than a million customers of Maynilad still have no water. Neither do thousands of other victims left high and dry and mud-wrapped by typhoon...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Suddenly it’s the end of the year -- the liturgical year, that is. It came to a close last Sunday, and suddenly it’s five days before Nov. 29, start of the four-week season of Advent leading to Christmas. Merry Christmas, all! Christmas too soon? One lady started...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza You’ve come a long way, Babe! Not a line from a song but my compliments to our man in Washington, D.C., Ambassador Babe Romualdez. One of the first things you learn about His Excellency is that his nickname is not Babes but Babe. And if he looks and sounds like a real...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza It was the first day of my friend’s retirement as a banker, after 35 years. Sol is only 55. Selfishly, I thought she deserved a thank-you from me, in the form of lunch with her at a five-star hotel. Afterwards, on our way home, she guided me on my first trip down the...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Short of building a contemporary model of Noah’s Ark, listen to Jun Palafox on building homes in the post-Ondoy, post-Ulysses chapters of our history as a resilient people, but enough of that adjective -- we’re suffering from exercising too much resiliency already....
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Does it have to be a recurring nightmare? Every time it rains, tinted with yellow and red alerts, it’s no longer just another season. It’s history in the making, carrying a load of painful memories that will be repeated and passed on to the next generation. After...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Is the President mellowing? After promising us bread and circus by forcing the “pastillas” gang of bribe-takers at Immigration to eat their pastillas, PRRD had a change of heart. Still, it was quite a show, watching how a Palace usher moved among the President’s...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza This is the pause before the crunch. If I were you, I’d do my last-minute Christmas rush before December sets in. This is a good time to go malling, before the hoi polloi and elite decide they cannot postpone window-shopping, price-canvassing, shopping and gift-wrapping...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza When super typhoon Rolly came bearing down and made landfall in several provinces last Sunday, Metro Manila was warned to expect signal-4 winds and rain, next only to the highest category of 5. The warning was issued just in time, alerting optimists, pessimists, and...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Or should that be red my lipstick? After months of no-going-out and mask-wearing (which abhors the use of lipstick) and thanks to Angel Locsin, I remembered I had a little carousel of lipsticks in different colors. But no red. It used to be the convention that red...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza “I’m shaking the tree!” announced typhoon Rody, but unlike the real typhoon Rolly where real trees were shaken and toppled, the great wind was not contented with being one typhoon, it had to be three in a row. Quinta was not the fifth (as its name implied) but the...
