Have you heard the word “Agritourism”?

               Summer isn’t only for beach but it is the season when people want a new experience, an escape from the stress of traffic jams, office cubicles and school projects.  Visiting a farm, ranch or winery is one good idea for vacation and picking your own mango or strawberry or any fruits in a beautiful orchard and knowing how food is grown and that milk actually comes from a cow, not a carton is the best and unique experiences one can undergo.

               This is when the Agritourism comes in. Many of us Filipinos do not know yet or even heard this term, although this has been going on for several years in many of our provinces. Agritourism includes a wide variety of activities, including visiting a working farm or any agricultural place to enjoy, buying products direct from a farm, picking fruit, feeding animals or simply be educated or be involved in what is happening at that locale. Agritourism provides rural experiences to visitors with the goal of producing revenues for farmers and surrounding communities. These experiences typically include a wide range of attractions and activities that take place in agricultural areas. Essential factors of these rural experiences include open spaces, minimal levels of urban or industrial development, and opportunities for visitors to firsthand experience agricultural, pastoral, and natural environments.
           In simple terms, agritourism is the crossroads of tourism and agriculture, when the public visits working farms, ranches or wineries to buy and make their own products, enjoy entertainment, participate in activities, or shop in a country store.
          With diverse conditions on different islands, the Philippines is an ideal place for visiting multiple agritourism sites or focusing on a niche product. The public and private sector should work together to make the Philippines an attraction for the agritourism. 

“You don’t have to be rude, you know?”

               I check my facebook and twitter accounts almost every day and I bet students like me even kids raging from 8 years old and up do the same. And from what I've seen in our society these kids and students are highly vulnerable to the influence of our social media celebrities.  But what bothers me is that these celebrities do not care on how they sway these minors on certain issues and acts. 

             When the last time I did check my facebook account, the photo of Carlos Celdran with a sign board of vulgar words about the issue of the Philam Life Theater being renovated was all over my news feed. I think this isn't new to his followers or even to the new media. The first time I heard Carlos Celdran name was because on his blasphemous act with his Damaso Stunt on bashing the Catholic Church. I stand for everyone’s freedom of expression and new media is exactly that but there is always a thin line between voicing out you what you believe in and being boorish on certain issues. It saddens me that influential people can do such things, and what happened to our new public sphere being the land of intelligent discussion? I think Carlos Celdran must be aware of how many followers he has and how he influences each one of them. What if minors mimic his acts, thinking that it is okay because he is only being verbal on how he feels on certain issue?

           You don’t have to be rude and do absurd things to persuade or move people, why not show us your arguments and facts? We should all figure out or understand the issues first and don’t feed us with dim-witted acts.

Oh Coffee, who can live without you?

I had read somewhere a while ago that coffee was possibly first discovered an incredibly long time ago when people watched the effects it had on animals. That’s kind of cool, because you can imagine all these people from way back in the 13th century or sometime around there being totally baffled about the seemingly magical effects of this bean on their goats and birds and stuff. How weird would it be to be in the 13th century, have no knowledge of caffeine, and all of a sudden your goat starts hopping around like his hooves are on fire?

And now we’re way out in the 21st century, and we just use this magical stuff to stay awake for midnight premieres or to finish all our homework. How weird is that?

And hundreds of years from now, what are people going to say about us when they look back? What stupid things are we already doing?

Someone asked me!

1.      How does undergoing cosmetic surgery affect the happiness index of an individual?

            Girls do not directly look on their selves but on how they are look on by other people. Almost all of us have something we dislike about our body that we magnify and exaggerate these supposed faults in our own minds and assume that other people notice and hated these flaws. Because of that, we start to focus attention on that area and become  stress, anxious and preoccupied trying to fix the defect that is why some engaged in cosmetic surgery. The feeling of changing or enhancing the dislike part gives others happiness because they think they become prettier, and it boost their confidence. They feel that they can do things that they cannot do before because of the flaws they have. They become happy when right after the surgery they will get a lot of attention from others.

2.      How does our culture define beauty? What is the distinctiveness? Give at least three and discussed each.

Living in a tropical country where it is always hot and brown, small, blunt nose and curly people are usual we tend to find unique or indifferent characteristics to others that we assign them beauty. When you are distinctive, when you are not like others just means you are beautiful. And plus being colonized by other nation where we stoop them, the one who is tall, fair, and has pointed nose. We begin to admire and value them, and started desiring their characteristics. One characteristic that will define you beautiful is the skin color. If you have fair skin then you are considered beautiful. Lot of people first impression to those who have fair skin is that they are rich and lucky for being white. That is why there are now loads of medicines that will enhance you color and make it fair. Another is having a pointed nose. Third one is having a straight hair.

Fidelity refers to the extent to which the sound is faithful to the source as the audience conceive it. In the film “She’s on Duty”, what we see is also what we expect to hear and this makes the action movie realistic, credible and intense. In the scenes like, No-young swiftly driving the motorbike we can hear piercing sound of the engine, this made the audience feel the intense or the speedy motorbike. The scene also where the “tik-tak” of the clock was amplified gives us cues to look at the watch and lead us to its depth meaning, where Jane did not throw it and instead she fix and used it. Another scene that prove fidelity is when the Jane and No-young were talking and he ask her what is she reading a bell suddenly cling and that help her answer his question.

All told, the film has a good match between the views, the images or the action and its sound that complement both of the audience senses that made the film very convincing, accurate and lifelike action film. The viewer takes the sound to be coming from its source in the digenetic world of film, then is faithful, regardless of its actual source in production.

Noy--Review

The film was basically a product of favors: from then-presidential candidate and now-president apparent Noynoy Aquino, his family, and his campaign team, who allowed Santos and his crew the opportunity to shoot the presidential campaign from the inside. As such, it never fully acquires a voice. It relays its message. It is what it is, and no matter how it gathers every vanity in cinema like mixing documentary footage with obvious melodrama, it remains to be at most, a limp and flaccid political statement if not an absolutely helpless failure.

The footage of Aquino's campaign, integrated into the film via Noy's work-in-progress documentary, is nothing more than ornamental. Shot using murky and jerk digital format as opposed to the rest of the film's elegant film cinematography, most probably to emulate the immersive quality filmmaking, the footage is at its best, like when Aquino's discussion on the state of Cebu's power was serendipitously interrupted by a short brown-out and he bounces back with a witty retort, revelatory of some of Aquino's endearing traits. Mostly however, the footage is no different from the thousands of footage that were aired in each and every news channel during campaign season: crowds, motorcades, politicians making promises, celebrities endorsing; with only one difference, Coco Martin, disguised as a journalist, is there. There could be something to say about fact, in the form of Aquino's campaign, and fiction, in the form of the character of Noy interacting with Aquino and his team, interacting seamlessly in the documentary footage, but as it is, everything feels put-on and cosmetic at best.

Thus, Noy is nothing more than a disposable drama that disguises itself with the most current of political flavors to achieve only a appearance of relevance. It tries to walk the talk, juxtaposing a grandly operatic tragedy with the insistent promises of change of Aquino's presidential campaign, but it only succeeds in talking more talk, throwing around mere suggestions of the grey areas of Aquino's campaign without actually creating any pertinent discourse about anything. 

“Twenty-five years after Edsa, where are we on that promise?”

As the 15^th President and as the son of Filipino hero Benigno Aquino and Former President Corazon Aquino, he is not exempted to those other former President who cannot solve the main problem of our country—Poverty.

June 30th, 2011 marked the first year of President Benigno 'Noynoy' Aquino III as the 15th President of the Philippines.  His much-anticipated first State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) had been positively and negatively received by the masses.  Poverty is still existing and unfortunately escalating. Beggars and dislocated indigenous peoples are now enduring in the streets. Poor people eat, sleep and wake up in bangketas, esteros and karitons without even realizing why they are in such condition. Christian Monsod also said that “It is not only guns that kill. Poverty kills. It is slow death from hunger, from diseases that we thought no longer existed, from the loneliness of a life with an empty future. It is also the dying of dignity”. The inequality of income has not changed since Edsa and that since studies show that there is very little of a middle class to speak of, this means that 99 percent. But why are we still locked in this problem? There is nothing wrong with Politicians having wealth and power and special connections, but there is something very wrong about the great imbalances and the use of these advantages to influence the politics and policies for their own interests or deny or delay justice to the 99 percent of our country. This, this must change. Empowerment program for the poor must be called. A program designed to provide care for indigent mothers and keep malnourished children in public schools was a positive initiative to prevent the poorest from falling in society. It should also cover environment nurturing and rehabilitation, climate change adaptation, housing, rural and urban poor infrastructure, among others. Cart off also the war and conflict between regions and people. Let justice be swift and indiscriminate, especially in cases between the rich and the poor. We should also never forget the guardianship of our environment. The government has so far failed to take aggressive steps to address environmental degradation and the ill effects of climate change, including coming up with early warning systems, stopping logging, and mining.

The task today is no less heroic than at Edsa it is liberation from the yoke of poverty that would make democracy more meaningful to the poor. Mr. Aquino is too preoccupied with putting his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, to jail for alleged corruption and electoral sabotage that he has forgotten to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Overcoming poverty requires the decisive reform leadership from the center. Filipinos must join force on, calling on the President to refocus the whole governance system in support of the aspirations of the poor.