As we speak, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has made pronouncement on how his country would take further actions into Iraq in the coming days as nearly 100,000 Turkish troops have already been deployed near the border it shares with Iraq—reinforced by attack helicopters and warplanes.

Just about a week after the Turkish parliament had authorized military incursion into northern Iraq, PM Erdogan has not been satisfied by merely bombarding Kurdish rebel positions from within its own field down south and now plans to actually march its troops into another country’s territory, breaking sovereignty in the process. Some 3,000 Kurdish militants are suspected to be holed-up in the northern Iraq and are mainly blamed for a spate of deadly attacks in several locations in Turkey; the most recent and bloodiest of which was the death of 13 Turkish soldiers in one of the southeast regions there.

Prime Minister Erdogan wants to crush the Kurdish insurrection once and for all and wants to decimate the entire PKK (or the Kurdish Workers’ Party) by intruding into Iraq and sending its troops across the border.

This is purported to be the military solution.

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If cars would run with water as fuel, then every motorist would be transported into his or her own dreamworld. Imagine running around uninhibited by the amount of gas one has in his/her fuel tank. That would just be sublime.

Researchers in Japan have most recently pronounced that in the future, cars would be running on water…no not exactly…. on water-components to be exact, with highly pressurized hydrogen firing up the car engines.

This would result in radically lessened expense on fuel and in fact would be so clean that it would boasts of zero rate emission of carbon dioxide. With the issue on climate change and global warming at the forefront in recent times, this hydrogen fuel prediction is none lesser than what could be termed as timely.

An executive of Mazda Corporation had boldly announced how his company foresees “The Hydrogen Society”, explaining how a rotary engine would make hydrogen fuel fully viable fuel for cars and other road transports. He said that the rotary engine would resolve the problem of abnormal combustion that common-type internal combustion engines poses when using highly-pressurized hydrogen gas. Apparently, hydrogen burns faster than gasoline and at a much lower temperature thus common engines would not be able to function efficiently on it. Mazda had found a solution to this problem by using the rotary engine technology and it is applying it now on its latest RX-8 Hydrogen RE model.

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It was late afternoon yesterday when the wife had hollered from the kitchen on what we’re supposed to eat for dinner. I was at the computer vehemently doing something at that moment that I just told her succinctly —nearly shouting at the top of my voice—that we’d just better buy some fish available just across the street and have them fried or open up some canned goods if there was any. I was in a state that I wouldn’t care anymore about what I am about to gobble up since there was just a bounty of food over the weekend, Friday being Fiesta Pilar where Evelyn (the wife) had prepared some special food, like pancit (I wonder why there should always be pancit on special occasions) and a horde of fruit salads—hordes because my Mom bought more canned fruit salads when she had arrived and everyone here seem to adore fruit salads that we keep on eating it even till the day after. And on Saturday, me and the kids were at my Uncle Mameng’s house for the Eid’l Ftir celebration and lots of very special, spicy food over there, like chicken curries and this black beef soup known simply as tiulah itum (black soup).

And mind you the city mayor was also there as Uncle Mameng works for him at the City Hall as an adviser and it’s probably the only time of the year where Mayor Celso Lobregat would alight from his government-provided service vehicle and walk-in just like any ordinary invitees, with no armed bodyguards at that, and with just a few companion, including a city councilor who is a fraternity brod of mine.

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This must be the sweetest moment for former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, winning the world’s most sought after award with the Nobel Peace Prize that was just handed to him hours ago on TV, sharing it with the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It feels so much like the accumulation of all his efforts to bring towards general awareness the climate crisis that once everybody thought to be just mindless rhetoric and nothing more. Thanks to Al Gore, every thinking individual is more aware now of global warming than ever before, and every aggregation—from APEC to ASEAN to EU—sees this issue as very urgent and ultimately significant.

Right about the time he had made and released the highly-acclaimed documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, he was just then merely seen as one among many who has something to rant about, a voice in the wilderness, and were it not for his stature as a man formerly holding a very high position in the most powerful country in the world, he would have not had a reasonable audience, for by the way, what’s global warming? What’s the meaning of greenhouse gasses? What’s the fuzz about carbon emissions? It was such a boring and tedious topic to discuss and be interested in at that time.

But now, things have changed. Everyone’s talking about climate change and in fact it’s one of the most talked about issue in the international socio-political scene nowadays. And Mr. Gore had been the one single force that drives this great progress in environmental awareness.

Once, he was like Noah hearing God’s voice to hurry up and build a very huge boat. Now everyone listens to him. And perhaps, if every soul takes the warnings with enough seriousness, then we may not need another Noah boat.

“When the music’s over…Turn out the lights.”

— Jim Morrison, The Doors, in the song “When The Music’s Over”

When Prince teamed-up last June with UK’s The Mail newspaper in releasing his Planet Earth album for free to millions of fans, Time Magazine considered it a very good ploy. Good to whom or to what, it is not exactly clear. For certain, record companies were not happy with the Prince move and in fact, one record company executive was so pissed off that he had warned (and perhaps wished) that one day, Prince might just end up being known as “The Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores”, referring in half-jest to the American rockstar’s all too all-too-well-known ploy in the past of not using his known screen name in referring to himself but merely by a symbol he had designed himself and thence was referred only to as “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince” for some time about a decade ago.

Now comes Radiohead with it’s new album release “In Rainbows” being made available online before copies of it would hit record stores shelves (if it would ever will), and guess what, digital version of it could be downloaded starting tomorrow, for everyone to get for “an open price”, where the online customer r customers could decide for themselves on what price to pay. So it’s not so free like that of Prince’s Planet Earth, you might want to ask. It is not. But you got to choose the price, which could be as low as two cents. And that’s virtually free, if you ask me.

Why would a big rock band like Radiohead would do such a thing?

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Today is October 7, 2007, a day with two sevens on it. While the number “7” is mostly associated with luck (as in Lucky 7), this date is not about luck or being fortunate, it is about being “super” as in “super sports Sunday” as Manny Pacquiao would once again battle Mexican living legend Marco Antonio Barrera in a grueling 12-round fight. Manny Pacquiao appears to be the strong favorite not only here in his own country but also even in Las Vegas and that’s understandable. The 5-year difference in their ages would for certain show and be telling in this fight. It had in fact showed when they first boxed in Texas and the older Barrera just couldn’t take the Pacquiao rock solid punches into the body and head. Maybe he was just unprepared at that time to face a virtually wet-in-the-ears young boxer that Manny was then. And maybe Barrera comes into the ring this time more prepared than before. And maybe, a miracle would happen in Las Vegas today.

But in general, this fight is over. Manny is just too strong a puncher for an old horse like Barrera.

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