stories in my head, part two
Ernie’s story Ernie de Villa has a moniker, Bahi. Bahi is a kind of wood descriptive of its solidity approximating marble. Even a coconut tree when it is 100 years old can turn into a bahi. We in Quezon call it Kamagong. The proud Mabolo tree is a good source of Kamagong. Furniture made from...
stories in my head, part one
One distant relation told me that you’re getting old if the obituaries are filled with your friends or names of the familiar. Once his preferred page was the Sports section of a broadsheet, where victories are bannered, now he peeps first at the Obit, where defeats are confirmed (the Christians invented the afterlife), and feign...
HO-HUM….!
In the 60′s, I always heard my late father litanized that life’s hard. It’s now my turn to say that refrain over and over again. We are faced with the same ogre that never dies. Our government is an entanglement of craft and contraption. Our nation is mired in eternal search for the ideal leader....
WHAT MAC MACALINTAL WANTS TO SAY
It was the time for Malacanang to turn ballistic. The palace however has no bulldozer to heap scorn on the holier-than-thou local press. Its stable of spokesmen looks barren of the combative type. Mac Macalintal, the consigliere , was seconded to act as the palace Merlin. Macalintal was right, or so it seems. His shrift...
What a Difference a Private Funeral Makes
A private funeral for a former president? Even in death, Cory made a scathing statement against the sitting president. Her death four days after the veritable divination-of-animal-entrails State of the Nation Address, was her best riposte against the sitting President. Cory’s family declined a Malacanang offer of state funeral. Shortly before she died, Cory was...
Tax a Lot!
It feels good to be proved right. In a letter dated March 2, 2000, the Municipality of Pagbilao assessed Mirant’s real property taxes on the power plant and its machineries in the total amount of P1, 538,076,000.00 for the period of 1997 to 2000. We know there was something amiss when the provincial government under...
A CON JOB IN QUEZON, part 3
We are now also drafting another supplemental letter to the Board of Directors of DBP informing the bank that the Suarez Family is also the owner of Suarez Agro-Industrial Development Corporation. Suarez Agro-Industrial Development Corporation entered into a Contract of Lease with DBP over an acquired asset (ice plant) located in Brgy. Biyan, Calauag, Quezon. ...
A CON JOB IN QUEZON, part 2
Instances of Provisions Manifestly Disadvantageous to Quezon Electric Cooperative I under the Renewable Energy Supply Agreement. Going now to the Renewable Energy Supply Agreement, it would appear that the said agreement is unconscionably tilted in favor of the Seller, Coco Resources Corporation. The Seller is still to submit a proposal “to undertake the development, engineering,...
A CON JOB IN QUEZON, part 1
First, it all started as a simple idea. In 2005, while he was on his way to Unisan, Quezon, his hometown, Congressman Danilo Suarez saw heaps of coconut husks along Bgy. Hinguiwin and he got his epiphany. Those refuse just petrify for nothing. There has to be one utility for this abundant resource. He’s tired...
Don’t Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk
As we promised, we are going back to our godforsaken congressional districts, all the more made destitute by our honorable congressmen. We are not simply talking the talk as most of our armchair intelligentsias do within the confines of the academe or our bedfellows from Makati Business District breaking bread with their comrades in one...
GOING BACK TO OUR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS (or how to exact our pound of flesh)
In May, 2010, make no room for these low lives who approved the Con-Ass. Poll automation or not, be sure not to tick any of the names we provided here. Of course, these low lives are local supermen who feel they have the stranglehold on their constituencies. They (the congressmen or the constituencies?) go hungry...
AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. MARICAR REYES by Aila Lenard
Here’s a letter from Aila Lenard of Bayanihan Times from Down Under she sent to my sister, Judge Chona Pulgar-Navarro. Aila said “Dear Chona and Daprosa – I knew I had to write this letter in order to purge the sadness I feel for a young woman who could have been a friend, a sister,...