MANGKOKOLUM!

MORE of whiner than winner he is. He was reported to have stoked flames with five or six comely maids all in a row— and if it were a game of marbles, lose all his marbles he did. He made out on a lawn a lot of love, or in tennis, a score of zero. Zilch, nada , nothing. In a recent discourse to his Ateneo schoolmates, he bellyached anew about his lack of a love life that must have caused some bouts of earaches from listening to love songs a British singer belches aplenty. The numero uno resident of the Palace by the Pasig River even confessed he now prefers listening to classical music.  The audience was at a loss as to what his idea of classical music is. Hazard a guess, maybe the four B’s—Bach, Beethoven, Bolling and Beatles. Then again, Paul McCartney’s ‘The Long and Winding Road’ is not exactly an allusion to “ daang matuwid ,” the arrow-straight road paved with good intentions that an AC/DC seven-time platinum album howls of, yeah, ‘Highway to Hell.’ A rece...

My beloved daughter, Podying: In 1983 that segment of C-5 between Tandang Sora and Road 20 in the vicinity of Bahay Toro was a howl of grass and carabao wallows. Back then, we appropriated that stretch of space on weekend mornings for such silly joys as angling for edible frogs (your mom had no inkling of such culinary yummies as frog legs fricassee or batuteng palaka so we had to free ‘em frogs right in our wee yard, hopping frogs were promptly pounced on and gobbled up by our pet cat), getting bareback rides on grazing cows, mushroom hunts and gadabout interface with the area’s humblest denizens. Say, I took a snapshot of you and your kuya Bilog wading among clumps of kalug-kalog bushes, intently tearing up stems and flowers, probably wondering whether kalug-kalog is an estranged kin or a remote relative of soya bean. You caught butterflies, scaly wings still wet as they eased out of cocoons latched on stems of balatong aso (dog bean) or kantutay (lant...