This Side of Heaven... where angels love to tread!

The Regis Dance Company held their dance concert for 2007 last February 17th. My daughter, Karrol, had a good time this year even though she only had one number(a hip-hop dance number to the tune of Missy Elliot's "We Run This"). She wanted to do more dances but since her glee club is also in constant practice in preparation for their trip to Portugal this March 9th, she couldn't possiblye devote more time to it.

We did have a good time watching the girls do their thing and I am happy that Karrol has taken our advise to make the most of her college life by being proactive not only in her academics but also in her extra-curricular activities.

I believe that it is heartwarming to watch your children perform or do something creative in their lives. I notice that during the performance, there were girls(or ladies, I should say) who were really great dancers. Others were better as choreographers than performers and still some who were just there for the fun of it.

My husband and I applaud the effort and the time that these women had spent for such a memorable event in their lives. This is one chapter in their lives that would be worth sharing to the future generation.

Break a leg, ladies!!!

Corinne Bailey Rae's hit song "Put Your Records On" is one song you'd like to listen to again and again. Her song and style of music brings a freshness and pure quality lacking from other singers of her generation. It's time that we listen to soulful music once again.

Corinne's playlist: "Put Your Records On" and "Like a Star".

The day before Valentine's day, my husband surprised me with a dozen red roses and a box of chocolate. It's been awhile since I've gotten roses/flowers from him not because he's not a romantic guy but because the last time he bought me roses (yellow) on my birthday years ago he was heckled by 2 old ladies behind him on the checkout counter. One of the ladies said to the other, "Uh oh! what did he do this time?" My husband politely told them that he didn't do any thing wrong and was just buyimg flowers because it was my birthday and the old ladies started to tease him again, even getting a big kick out of it.

Flowers or no flowers, chocolate or none, dinner date or no date, one gets to a certain point in their lives where happiness is just being with their loved ones and having a good time no matter where they are or what they are doing.

The photo below is also another way my husband shows me that he cares. This was taken the day after the Valentine's day snowstorm and he did a good job of getting rid of the snow from the driveway by himself(as he always does).

Today, Valentine's Day, while my husband had to shovel snow (this is the first significant snow storm this winter), I spent my late afternoon watching a very nice "indie" movie entitled "Sabah". Though the movie's plot is a common storyline the perspective shown here is from the Arab culture.

To summarize, Sabah just turned 40 yrs. old but is very unfulfilled because though living in a Western country, Canada, the family still practices their strict culture especially under the control of her brother, Majid. Unbeknownst to Majid, his birthday gift(an old and forgotten photograph of Sabah as a young girl with her Dad on the beach) would kindle and revive her passion for swimming. When Sabah finally summoned the courage to go swimming in the local public pool, she met Stephen, who would turn her world upside down.

What I really found cute in this movie was that with the obsession for western standards of beauty, though Sabah finally relented to dying her hair, wearing red lipstick and provocative dresses when meeting with Stephen, she never pluck her "eyebrows". But nevertheless, Stephen, look past into that and loved her for who she is.

A very insightful review of the movie is given by Angela Hawkey and you can read it here.

Watch the movie if you can and hopeless romantics will be rewarded with a movie that was done with intelligence, heart, soul and humour.

• 

This week I chose Barry White for my artist because he has always been synonymous with love and other amorous pursuits what with that deep, deep voice serenading you in the background. I need not say anything more since a lot of websites out there would do more justice in giving Barry the tribute he deserves. His songs speak volumes and are now considered a classic.





Barry White's Playlist:

• You're the First, My Last, My Everything
• Can't Get Enough of Your Love Baby
• I'll Do For You Anything You Want Me To
• I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby
• Just The Way You Are
• Never, Never Gonna Give You Up
• Now I'm Gonna Make Love to You
• Walkin' in the Rain With The One I Love
  
• You Turned My Whole World Around
• Your Sweetness is My Weakness
  

This article first came out a few years ago and was published I believe in the Philippine Inquirer. The author, Mathew Sutherland, one might say really captured the essence of a true Filipino in his writings. I don't think that we Filipinos would be insulted with his observations. In fact, I believe that his article brought insight to us Filipinos that sometimes we fail to acknowledge or even observe among us because it is what makes our culture unique. And so, once again, here are the 2 articles that Mathew Sutherland wrote about the Filipinos. Thanks to our friend Hanneli David for sending this to me.

Matter of Taste
By : Matthew Sutherland


I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one key step on the road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take, and that's to eat BALUT.



The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg.

It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus...excuse me; I have to go and throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat. They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are called, in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, merienda ceyna, dinner, bedtime snacks and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn't-count.

The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from food in the Philippines . If you doubt this, next time you're driving home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food and I don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls,
or a man walking through the traffic selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute.

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines :


Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK , I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's impossible to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn't the same without gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house without baon (food in small container) and a container of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking their baon, they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's eat!").

This confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit down and start munching on their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be even hungrier. I think that's great!

In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general greeting, irrespective of time of day or location.


Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to beat the sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON de leche (roast pig) feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your arteries constricting with each
successive mouthful.



I also share one key Pinoy trait --- a sweet tooth. I am thus the only foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup, the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER FIVE"
(I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister, PATIS.

Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like Australia and the USA , which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces.



Then there's the small matter of the purple ice cream. I have never been able to get my brain around eating purple food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me cold.

And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)...

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food. Here's a typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet.

"What's a seafood diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals --- the feet, the head, the guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken wings); HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and BETAMAX" (video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood). Yum,yum. Bon appetit.


WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since. The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put it.

Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell names". These are nicknames that sound like -well, doorbells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding , and Dong are some of the more common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding -Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping . None of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and hence sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless logic.

Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where come from "dong" is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best Tagalog equivalent!!!

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.

More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the more kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy).

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver.

That's another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila -- taxis with the driver's kids' names on the trunk.

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like me being called something like "Engscowani" (for England , Scotland , Wales and Northern Ireland ). I'm glad I'm not.

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names like John Smith . How wonderful to come from a country where imagination and
exoticism rule the world of names.

Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the
world could that really be true?

Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin? Where else but the Philippines !

Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.

A young woman was filling out an application for college when she
came across the question: Are you a leader? She thought she had
better be brutally honest, so she answered, "No." She was convinced
when she sent the application in that she'd never hear from them
because of that answer.

But she received a letter back from the school that read: "We have
reviewed numerous applications and, to date, there will be some 1,452
new leaders attending school next year. We have decided to accept
your application because we felt it was imperative that they have at
least one follower."

One man bought a sign and put it on his office door. The sign read:
"I'm the boss." The next day he came to work he noticed that someone
had put a post-it on his sign that said, "Your wife called. She wants
her sign back."

We can't all be the boss. And what good are leaders without
followers? In actuality, we need to be both.

Sometimes we lead, sometimes we follow. We lead by example, but we
still follow role models. We lead by sharing our expertise, but we
remain open to the wisdom of others.

There are numerous courses and lessons on leadership. Yet the best
leaders are also excellent followers. They know how to listen, they
respect and follow great ideas from those around them, and they are
humble enough to seek help when it's needed.

You may be the boss, but do you know how to follow? This world could
use a few good followers.


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*Cartoon courtesy of http://www.minerva.unito.it/Humor/Boss.htm

Lily Allen debuted her first USA performance last Saturday (February 3, 2007) at SNL (Saturday Night Live's). With the proliferaion of new female singers in the music industry, she is one who can attract a good following later on. Funny though, 2 of her songs sound like tropical island music (Smile and LDN) but the lyrics are downright trodden. Is this a way to tell us that we can still be happy in our misery?

She wore a nice black baby doll cocktail dress with her hair in an updo style. From what I've seen so far of her photos, she likes to wear these baby doll style dresses, almost like summer clothes, too. I wonder if this trend is making a comeback now? Lucky me!!!! I like wearing babydoll dresses. It's so comfortable and most of all, it hides the tummy.




Songlist for this week from Lily Allen are the following:

• Smile
• LDN
• Littlest Things

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http://omiru.com/index.php/2006/05/11/trendscape-the-babydoll-is-back/

Saw this first at the Kapamilya One site. If you haven't seen it yet, watch it... this is so hilarious. The guy (Pooh) is a natural. Sorry only for Tagalog speakers... if you also know how to speak Cebuano or Bisaya, the better.