cheaper safer healthier bras please.
and cheaper, less painful breast exams (please naman, no more scary and expensive old school mammograms)!
here’s my friend Anina, with what is fit for the Breast Cancer Awareness Month that is October.
cheaper safer healthier bras please.
and cheaper, less painful breast exams (please naman, no more scary and expensive old school mammograms)!
here’s my friend Anina, with what is fit for the Breast Cancer Awareness Month that is October.
a friend and twitter/facebook contact was asked this today. that he’s a boy apparently didn’t matter. right now of course, what we’re told is this: that what matters is love. Robin and Mariel have fallen in love and have gotten married, and as Tina Monzon-Palma attests, you can see it in their eyes.
and yes, we grant them love. that’s easy enough. do we grant them credibility? that is the question. and this is what the above question’s about.
so would i? marry Robin Padilla, i mean? well, i’d begin my answer with:
(1) that i understand his appeal, this bad boy action star dirty rugged image, the one that just works with his history as a bad boy, and the way his icon has been created/fashioned/rehabilitated/ revived so it may keep at being the quintessential Pinoy macho.
(2) which is connected to this: in the midst of metrosexuality as capital, his value as Pinoy macho has shot through the roof because there really is no one else like him. add to this the fact of a divorce from longterm wife Liezel, and tadah! binata na ulit si Robin. oh, the appeal of that! (yes, i’ve swooned elsewhere.)
but is he marrying material? interesting question. in truth it never seemed like Robin was married. ever. because when we imagine marriage, we imagine it in the sense that the husband doesn’t flirt on nationwide television with the women he’s paired with in movies and on tv. in the sense that he is loyal and a one-woman-man. in the sense that we don’t hear news of him getting it on with other girls while he’s married.
add to all this the layer of celebrity, the kind that has allowed them, the couple and their managers, to have a plan. this might be contrary to their press releases, but really, you can’t tell me that your wedding in India was a surprise even to you both, when all of it (including what I was wearing, nandon! Mariel squealed) is on the next issue of Starstudio Magazine. you cannot say that this is about a love that is private and only yours, when you were prepared for a photoshoot with obviously choreographed and staged poses at the Taj Mahal. i do not doubt that there’s love there, but also there’s celebrity. and there’s capital. there are obviously their careers, now bound together into one career that’s about the two of them.
the lowest point in all this of course, was the media’s bombardment of these images. i don’t care that the showbiz talkshows feature it again and again, or that it’s in the chikaminute segment on Saksi and showbiz news on TV Patrol. but to actually deem it as breaking news? in the midst of everything else that’s of national interest, goodness gracious, why o why?
realize that this isn’t about the public wanting to know about Robin and Mariel. it’s about news and public affairs departments deciding that this is important enough to give to the public right away.
anyone who knows me would know that i am all for love at first sight, for swift courtships and secret marriages. i am all for falling quickly and easily, because that does happen, and sometimes it does work. but to bombard us with this particular love, given the trappings it comes in? and to deem it as important and valuable as the aftermath of the hostage crisis, and P-Noy’s trip to the States.
ah, but undoubtedly the Robin and Mariel story meant ratings. the kind that P-Noy might not be getting? and in which case, good job media practitioner! good job on losing your credibility.
next time i want more relevant news, i’ll watch my showbiz talkshow.
This isn’t so much about Charice Pempengco herself, as it is about an audience in this country that’s overly critical of her by default, that obviously doesn’t care much for her. And it has to be said that it’s class, social and otherwise, that allows for this double standard when it comes to national pride, which disallows Charice from being properly celebrated as a high point in Philippine popular culture history.
Even when she’s had the song “Pyramid” on the Billboard charts for a while now. Behind her she’s got David Foster, American icon, music producer and star, who has put her onstage with international superstars. She has Oprah Winfrey as manager and modern fairy godmother. She’s got Hollywood contracts for singing and acting, has done duets with Celine Dion and Andreas Bocelli, and will be in the second season of Glee.
You’d have to be in denial to think all these to be unimportant; you’d be wrong to think that just because there’s little of Charice on TV and in the papers, she isn’t as big a star as Oprah imagines. Because whether we like it or not, Charice’s international stardom doesn’t seem like a one-time deal. In fact, it looks like she’s in it for the long haul. The world has got Charice Mania to prove it. It’s also a response to you, critical Pinoy non-fan.
because really, as far as teaching is concerned, Dep Ed‘s No Homework Policy is just unfair. to keep us from giving kids homework on a Friday, means practically starting from scratch on a Monday, difficult as it already is to make students snap out of the two-day vacay. homework is suppose to keep kids practicing what they learned throughout the week, even when it’s just a matter of doing a couple of exercises in Math and English, even when it’s only a matter of asking questions about the environment for Science. the point of homework is to have students think about your subject even when they don’t see you for two days.
now as far as parents are concerned, i don’t know that they’d like to have idle kids in front of the TV, or wanting to go to the mall, with nothing better to do over the weekend. it would be fantastic if every Filipino household was equipped with libraries, and reading was second nature. but we all know reading and books are leisure in this country, especially for public school students and parents, even teachers. i imagine that if there’s anyone who can be happy about the No Homework Policy and the bonding time it creates, it’s Henry Sy.
the Dep Ed memo says that this was borne of parents’ complaints that homework was robbing them of quality time with their kids. the response to these parents should be: homework and education is quality time with your children. and how many parents actually complained about homework being too much, versus being difficult?
because the issue of homework is in fact tied neatly together with the problems of public education in this country, with the low pay of teachers that keep them from being more involved in students’ learning, given the civil service code that allows tenured and regularized gov’t employees and teachers to stay on in positions regardless of bad teaching habits, or not teaching at all. this means that many teachers have the freedom to make life difficult for students, by giving them homework they can’t answer, by piling requirements on as if the students can understand, or afford, it.
now this the parents would have difficulty with, and can complain about. but homework per se?
homework, regardless of what day it’s given, is NOT a bad thing. in the hands of good teachers, homework that’s given on a Friday sets the tone of the Monday discussion, and the rest of the following week. putting together a lesson plan requires that a teacher also thinks about what post-lesson exercises to give, and these necessarily happen at home.
now if the issue is that teachers don’t give relevant homework or tend to pile it on as a matter of powertripping, then a No Homework Policy won’t solve that. in fact, this only means that they will give more homework throughout the week, which means students will suffer the backlash of a Dep Ed decision that’s supposedly for them to begin with.
and really, this doesn’t help the morale of teachers who still care about teaching and their students’ learning, despite the lack of security of tenure, the little pay, and how they suffer in the hands of those older than they are.
if there’s anything that the No Homework Policy reveals, it’s that Dep Ed needs to do its homework.
It seems fitting to write this now that Noynoy has finally taken responsibility for the August 23 hostage tragedy. And yes that is what it was, in fact it was a crisis, by 12 nn, if you were watching it from 9AM, like I was. In fact if you were watching it from the very beginning, when all it was was a minor news report, with no live footage yet, you’d know (1) to thank media, for once, and (2) that it was always Noynoy’s call, always Malacanang’s call, and it was obvious that here, the call was to NOT do anything other than watch local officials, who is now apparently only Isko Moreno for the City of Manila. in fact, we saw him so much during the hostage crisis, that I almost forgot Mayor Lim was, in fact, Mayor.
I also forgot we had a president. Pramis. Early in the day, the question was which action star cum senator would come to the rescue, my bet was Jejomar himself, though he ain’t action star or senator, but you get my drift. Over lunch, I wondered what was taking so long. By meryenda, my question was WTF?
But of course the past month also meant many things other than the hostage taking that was allowed to turn into a tragedy. At the end of month two there was sudden silence about Hacienda Luisita, after all that noise in the beginning of the month, with Christian Monsod calling the HL lawyer out on what it was they were actually doing to farmers, that is, making them believe that what they were getting was all they were due. There too, were press releases on the plan to reconfigure basic education into 12 years, which of course the Magsaysay Awardees have said is beside the point, and really seems to be a decision that’s without common sense. Any sane person can see that it isn’t quantity, it’s quality. This is even more true for the public school system, but how many of the higher Dep Ed officials have entered a public school in the past two years? That is the question. An even better question? Why aren’t relevant organizations and partylists, teachers and parents, being consulted about, and listened to, in relation to this major change in a system off of which they live and have been created? And let’s not forget that fab moment when P-Noy said that at the end of the day, he is the commander in chief, and therefore Rear Admiral Feliciano Angue had no right to question the demotion he had been given. Well.
Ah, but then these things have been overshadowed yes? By the aftermath of the hostage crisis and the death of innocent foreigners. Suffice it to say that we deserve it all, everything the world has to say, and even more so after the bungled reaction(s) of government, including P-Noy’s post-crisis. And while I agree with de Quiros that it’s better late than never, goodness gracious, that can only be true if the late reaction is in fact the correct one. It is beyond me how a president with a communications group could be so messed up in, well, communicating.
But maybe it’s no surprise. After all, we have media that can barely survive the aftermath of the hostage tragedy, too. Yes, there should be a lot of shame here, flunking the test and all. At least GMA 7 turned upon itself and chose to be reflexive right away, though it’s difficult to forgive Mel Tiangco for asking about P-Noy’s love life at the presscon. ABS-CBN 2’s Maria Ressa was on a roll on Twitter the whole time the hostage taking was going on, and it was clear that she wasn’t going to be apologetic. Instead, she is going to burn bridges, and put salt in HK Chinese wounds. And now that Pia Hontiveros has written about her experience on the ground (we saw Pia on TV when there was talk that Mendoza wanted media people to go into the bus), and Patricia Evangelista too, on her take about P-Noy’s handling of it, this becomes the easy question: pray tell, ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs, was there a memo?
Are the Lopezes finally burning that Aquino bridge?
Abangan.
*because if the Aquino sisters are already counting down the months to their brother’s and family’s freedom from us all, seeing us as the burden in their lives as if their brother didn’t run for office, well, this honeymoon’s obviously over.