Seven million friends
My “seven million friends” is a hyperbolic reference my daughter coined while I was working around my schedule for possible get-togethers with friends in between the primary purpose for my homecoming.
POINT OF VIEW latest news
With personal data, there are no ‘nobodys’
A friend recently commented that hackers won’t benefit from getting access to his email account. “There’s nothing there,” he laughed, “it’s a waste of time for them. I’m a nobody.”
PBBM’s narrative trap
“Unity is our ideology,” declared President Bongbong Marcos in the recent signing of a coalition agreement between his Partido Federal ng Pilipinas (PFP) and the National Unity Party (NUP). This declaration of political alliance (re-)building comes in the wake of the apparent break up of the UniTeam coalition that catapulted him and Vice President Sara Duterte to record victory. On the eve of the President’s third State of the Nation Address (SONA), the populist’s daughter appoints herself as the government’s “designated survivor.” So, whatever happened to unity?
Reflecting on the pandemic and Philippine IT security
It isn’t difficult to recall how the pandemic shook our lives. The images we likely would conjure would be how we enclosed ourselves in our homes, decked ourselves with masks and face shields and constantly practiced quarantining.
Is it art?
As a young Fine Arts student in UP in the early 80s, my understanding of art was turned upside down when one of my early professors said that art was anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. He said and I quote: “Oh, it’s the shoes you wear and the ad on the bus and the chair you sit on right now.” For one whose idea of art was something hung on a wall or put on a pedestal, the mind shift was difficult and long and it took me years, decades in fact, to fully embrace what my professor said. Today, of course, I take on the same view that everything is art.
In praise of Pacita Abad
Once I had a lingering encounter with a painting at the home of Ambassador Sonia Cataumber Brady. I stood before a frame of dominant shades of baffling blue, motifs of the sea accented with sparkling glass shards and bursts of colors that cheered the entire montage. The enigma of the tableau never left me. “It is a gift from the artist, my friend Pacita Abad,” Ambassador Brady told me. At the bottom of the artwork, which I eventually learned is called trapunto, is the noticeable autograph of the artist.
Asia-Pacific’s alarming loss of biodiversity
In recent months, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and others have pointed to an increase in food insecurity and “hunger hotspots” in various parts of Asia and the Pacific. While conflicts and climate crises can carry some of the blame, we must acknowledge that the slow but steady erosion of our region’s biodiversity is an equal or even greater threat to our future food security.