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Burn, Cool, Unload, Reload

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Just as many film savants had predicted, Oppenheimer bagged the Best Picture Award in this year’s Oscars. I saw the film days before the ceremony, and I, too, made the same prognosis. It just has the making of a classic: magnificent screen performances from its lead actors (Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr., and Matt Damon), fabulous cinematography, and an innovative screenplay. The last is hardly surprising since unconventional storytelling is one of the hallmarks of Christopher Nolan’s works. But just as many people found Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk a little confusing owing to its unconventional storytelling style, some people might also be hard-pressed to fo llow Oppenheimer ’s narrative, which jumps back and forward in time. People who are not familiar with the historical events from the end of the First World War to the beginning of McCarthyism in the United States would also be at a disadvantage. In other words, Oppenheimer is a marvelous film that will remind you of the 1941 f...
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Now and Then

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  2023 has been a wonderful year for Beatle fans around the world. The year saw the release of what was dubbed “the last Beatles song.” Aptly entitled “Now and Then,” the track was originally written and recorded in demo form by ex-Beatle John Lennon in the late 1970s. More than a decade later, in the early 1990s, Yoko Ono gave a copy of that demo, along with two other unfinished Lennon songs—“Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”—to the three surviving Beatles—Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. At the time, the three were planning to embark on a major Beatles-related project that would later be known as The Beatles Anthology—a collection of unreleased demos, outtakes, and live performances of the band during its heyday— and they intended to release three “new” Beatles songs to accompany this collection by recording new instruments and vocals over some of Lennon’s unfinished demos. While the surviving Beatles succeeded in transforming “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”...
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Yoda (Part 2)

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This remark hurts me not so much for the suggestion that I and my wife are silly or childish for grieving over the death of a cat as for the implication that Yoda’s life was insignificant. I thought, “What if Yoda could hear and actually understand the insensitive remarks from where he is at present?” Whenever I imagine the hurt in Yoda’s innocent big blue eyes occasioned by these hurtful words, it was all I could to do to keep myself from crying. But whence came the idea about the insignificance of the life of an animal compared to that of a human being? I think there are three possible explanations for the prevalence of this distorted, mistaken belief in the supremacy of human life over those of the other creatures. First, it may be traced to the Judeo-Christian belief that God created man after His own image, and that He bestowed on him the power and authority to do with all other living creatures as he pleased. This belief places human beings at the center of the grand scheme o...
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Yoda

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  On this day, exactly a year ago, Yoda, our beloved cat, passed way. I will never forget that day. It was an hour past midnight when I was awoken by his intermittent crying. After observing him for a few seconds, the idea dawned on me: Yoda was in grave danger. I frantically woke up my wife and told her what was happening. I said Yoda had to be taken to the nearest veterinary clinic as soon as possible. She was understandably reluctant at first, considering that it was only 1 o ‘clock in the morning, and she probably didn’t think that Yoda’s situation was really serious. But sensing my desperation—I was panicking and shouting—she went along with me and both of us hurriedly took Yoda to the veterinary clinic two blocks away. But taking Yoda to the veterinary clinic at 1:00 AM was the easy part; waking up the veterinarian was a different matter. For almost 30 minutes, I and my wife unavailingly tried to wake her up by constantly shouting “Tao po! Tao po!” (“Anybody there? Anybody ...
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Songs We Can’t Erase From Our Heads

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After more than two years of the pandemic, our town was finally able to properly celebrate it’s annual fiesta last January. And perhaps to make up for the two years that our town was bereft of its most anticipated annual week-long celebration due to the dreaded coronavirus, the municipal government pulled the necessary strings to bring---tadahh—Ely Buendia to our town. For those who do not know, Buendia was the chief songwriter and frontman of the seminal 90’s Filipino band, the Eraserheads. To the generation who grew up during the 90’s, and were therefore able to witness the Heads’ rise and eventual demise in real time, watching Buendia perform live onstage was like meeting one of the apostles. I belong to that generation. And so braving the cold night and the traffic, and defying the doctor’s advice that I should always get a decent amount of sleep, I, with my wife in tow, put off watching The Hunt on Netflix (we were in the movie’s climax, by the way), and rushed to the show’s ven...
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Integrating Reading Comprehension in Social Studies Classes

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One of the major problems that social studies teachers often encounter in the classroom is the students’ lack of reading comprehension skills. Many students, regardless of grade level, are hard put to digest the meaning of texts that they are reading. This is a serious obstacle to the students’ understanding of concepts and skills in social studies (especially skills specific to the discipline),  inasmuch as many instructional materials in social studies are in textual form.  For this reason, social studies teachers must come up with a viable strategy to integrate the teaching of reading comprehension skills in their lessons. A Reading Teacher journal article, How to Teach Expository Text Structure to Facilitate Reading Comprehension by Masoumeh Akhondi, Faramarz Aziz Malayeri, and Arshad Abd Samad, discusses one such strategy, and this involves the teaching of the different text structures to students.  Said strategy is premised on the idea that there is a connection bet...
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The Curse of Intelligence

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Filipinos have always been known for placing a high premium on education. One does not need to be an anthropologist to know that. If one only bothers to cast a cursory glance at the facade of his neighbors' houses, one would instantly notice a common sight: a metal or wooden plate indicating that a son or daughter has made the grade by becoming a physician, an attorney-at-law, or an engineer. The Filipino attitude towards education can also be gleaned from the high respect accorded to people with long strings of suffixes attached to their names (MA, Ed.D., Ph.D, etc.). We believe that the achievements embodied in those suffixes make their owners a cut above other mortals. That is why, in addressing them in correspondences, or in introducing them during formal functions, omission of those suffixes is considered a horrible mistake.   This "fetish" for education or its trappings, however, is quite understandable. In a country where poverty is rampant, and manual labor is loo...
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