One day last week, I didn’t know exactly why I did it but I just picked and opened the pages of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” once more and read through it from the beginning like I was reading it just for the first time. I was traversing the length of the stairway of our house one morning and when I reached the topmost, the book just presented itself as it lay over a pile of old and dusting medical books, ruggedly stacked above an old wooden cabinet. I instantaneously decided to just pass by it, immediately recognizing it as that “one famous-book” that I have read sometime last year. However, its golden-yellow cover almost shimmered like hidden treasures amidst the aging humongous books that I went one step backward and just grabbed it almost without thought—like I was hypnotized crafty Mona Lisa smile on the book’s covering. I used to reread many of the books that I have read in the past , especially those that affected me so sublimely like Pat Conroy’s “The Prince of Tides” and Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” but I never scoured the pages of a novel that I read just about a number of months ago, like six months. It usually takes the passing of more than a year before I did any rereading. But I read “The Da Vinci Code” even though I felt that I just read it yesterday and I was a little bit amazed that despite of that, I actually enjoyed rereading it—like it was the first time all over again. This could be the reason why this book was hailed as ultimately groundbreaking and truly phenomenal. I have a feeling that there’s no serious reader left out there that haven’t got to read it.

(more…)

I see the crowds getting larger and larger along the streets of Metro Manila (The TV is on while I am blogging this at a downtown Internet cafe–about five thirty in the afternoon) and I have a feeling that President Macapagal-Arroyo must have found herself at the end of the road, or perhaps near that point of no return. This morning, newsmen stationed themselves in military camps—Camp Aguinaldo for one—reporting that a coup attempt had just been quashed and Presidential Chief of Staff Mike Defensor was calm as the morning dew when he informed the public that only two military officers ( General Danny Lim and Colonel Ariel Querubin) “withdrew support from the government” and they were already safely in the custody of military authorities. So therefore, there was no more cause for alarm according to the dutiful presidential chief of staff.

But the morning show “Magandang Umaga Pilipinas” kept running way past its runtime and so as its counterpart GMA’s “Unang Hirit” and anchormen from both programs kept on asking questions from Malacañang people the same questions over and over again, about some occurences that seems to show that the security situation must be far worse than what it appeared. If the coup attempt was already contained and succesfully foiled, why would Malacañang called-off classes on all levels in the NCR Region? Why the unusually huge numbers of military personnel and munitions scattered around Malacañang and the EDSA Shrine? When the media smell something cooking, there seems to be no denying it.

(more…)

I’ve had a case of burnout—maybe its time to call it Blog Burnout—the way Bambit also had it some months ago. It’s a kind of techno-malady among bloggers like us, where there comes that time when you just can’t get on with it, or nothing just comes up for you to blog about, nothing interesting plus,…plus that hard mix of blogging and personal duties like work and family getting in the way. And so I had fewer postings in the past couple of weeks. But now, I hope I can resume as usual.. So please be notified.

It seems nowadays that the political scene has become a children’s playground full of tots running around, playing hide-and-seek and then, when tantrums bowls over, getting at each other’s throat or armpit.

For one, I have never seen Joker Arroyo so blatantly frank and candid as he rebuked President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to “…not teach us manners because we’re well-mannered. It’s the executive that is not well-mannered.” Now that is closest to street language a senator of this country could ever get. But who could blame the fierce senator—he with the inquisitiveness of a Greek philosopher and whose tongue can be virulent to point of bile. Apparently, Senator Arroyo reacted to what could be the sharpest rebuke of the Senate by GMA, saying that senators have “the propensity to pursue investigation ‘in aid of destabilization’”.

(more…)

Last November, I had blogged about this issue, on why oil companies in this oil-starved country of ours are fast to the trigger in increasing fuel pump prices whenever world market prices tick just a little bit upward and YET companies like PETRON keep on harking (which I think is heinous) about “remarkable” increase in annual profits. (See my previous post “The Bottomline of Oil Price Increases Is Double Profits For Oil Companies”.)

I mean, the math here is so simple that what we need to ask is how come these local oil companies kept on fretting and complaining about too-stretched up profit margin (where they always aver that they are already almost on the losing end every other time world oil prices moves upward even by just a dent) WHILE the records and newspaper reports show otherwise. We kept on seeing those neat-looking oil company executives being interviewed on evening news explaining to the public that they “have no other choice left but to increase pump prices” with the rising world prices and yet the next morning we read in the newspaper how this and that oil company raked in record amount of profits. If somebody ain’t lying here, then I must have been misreading my news. I bet it ought to be illegal from now on for oil executives to play-act on television, acting so downtrodden whenever they announce an “inevitable” oil price hike and yet they would be nowhere in sight when we learned later on that the “inevitable” might not have been evitable afterall. I mean, it’s quite clear that these companies have been skinning us alive even from the beginning.

(more…)

Even if I were a staunch adherent of free speech, I wouldn’t do a cartoon depiction of a religious icon—whether from Islam, Christianity, Buddhism—or from any religion for that matter. I have learned in law school that freedom of the press—or any other freedom for that matter—is never absolute and may even be curtailed by the authorities if public interest so demands. For example, while street protest is an act of expressing one’s grievance against the establishment, and therefore a freedom of expression that ought to be allowed and protected, still when such activity becomes too unruly as to disturb the smooth flow of traffic in the affected streets or avenues, or to cause so much disruption in a public place, the police would have no other choice but to impede the movement of the protesters. In our constitutional law, rights and privileges of the individual are often weighed against public order, public interest or public welfare that numerous tests are applied (like the clear-and-present danger test and the balancing-of-interest test) to determine whether a usually allowed prerogative may be curtailed or diminished. Even without this constitutional mode of determining whether freedoms are excessively utilized or not, there are ordinary modes of limiting or checking the excessive use of freedoms like the prohibitions set by penal laws where improper use of the freedom of the press may be reproved by charges of libel. Even the every day act of playing your stereo may not be abused (like when you play it too loud in the deadest hour of the night) for this may be rebuked as a public nuisance—a tort that could make you bleed huge amount of money in the form of damages.

(more…)