‘Kamsky clash like Pacquiao vs Cotto’

MANILA – Filipino teen Grandmaster (GM) Wesley So (with an ELO rating of 2640) advanced to the third round of the World Chess Cup by knocking out Ukrainian Super GM Vassily Ivanchuk (ELO 2739) Wednesday in Russia.

The Philippines’ very own Efren Peñaflorida, the kariton educator, has been honored the 2009 CNN hero of the year.

The recognition was given to Peñaflorida at the third annual “CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute” held at the Kodak theater in Hollywood Saturday night. The event honoring the top 10 Heroes of 2009, featured stars and award-winning actors and actresses including, Kate Hudson, Pierce Brosnan, Neil Patrick Harris, Carrie Underwood and Leona Lewis.

After seven weeks of online voting, Peñaflorida was hailed the victor with more than 2.75 million votes.

“Our planet is filled with heroes, young and old, rich and poor, man, woman of different colors, shapes and sizes. We are one great tapestry,” he said upon receiving his honor. “Each person has a hidden hero within, you just have to look inside you and search it in your heart, and be the hero to the next one in need.”

During the San Jose port Spanish colonial period, the human heart-shaped emerald isle bordered with fine, ivory beaches in the southernmost tip of Tablas Island in Romblon was called Isla de Carabao because during that time it was grazing land for carabaos and cattle.

Now called the town of San Jose, the 29 square-kilometer big island that is divided into five villages retained it sobriquet, Carabao Island. The waters that surround it are the Sibuyan Sea on its eastern coast and Tablas Strait on its western side.

Its downside is that being geographically isolated from the rest of Romblon,san Jose is one of the most depressed municipalities of the island province famous for its world-class marble. Its upside though is, due to its distance from the rest of Romblon, Carabao Island is still inits pristine condition, with powdery, white sand beaches comparable to that of Boracay’s famous west coast.

Iloilo is about food.

Iloilo as I would come to discover is really about food. The Lingoes love to eat, nay they live to eat. For them eating is a way of life. Unlike in Manila where we often wolf down our meals to get on with our other activities, in Iloilo, meals are relished and seen as a social event among family and friends — a time to catch up on each other’s lives over servings of binnacle and nasal. During our lunches and dinners, we (writers from Manila) would already be getting our desserts while our Lingo friends seemed to be just getting warmed up. Our tour guide Eugene Tamerlane shares how it is in their house during weekend lunches — they would linger on the dining table way after lunch sharing stories, that before they realize it, they’d already be having marina, then later after that supper. He adds that in Iloilo they rarely use the sala to entertain guests, instead they just whisk them off into the dining room for a sumptuous meal or maybe a marina of sumac dipped in muscovite and home-made hot chocolate (made from tableau or cocoa tablets and endlessly stirred with a batgirl).

There’s a fine line separating hero and martyr. From a macro view, overseas Filipino workers are indeed “unsung heroes” but look micro, at individuals, and you find silent martyrs.

Some nine million Filipinos work overseas, annually sending home about US$17 billion, just a bit smaller than the value of our agriculture and fishery industries output. Thanks to worker remittances, Balance of Payments, Gross National Product, income and employment, exchange rate, prices—all economic indicators in fact—are in fine shape. Our unsung heroes keep the county’s economy afloat.

Of late, we have all witnessed nature’s onslaught – raging floods that killed thousands and left many homeless, tons of mud that buried people alive, catastrophic landslides and erosions, heavy winds that uprooted trees and toppled homes. All of these are Mother Earth’s response to the abuses we have made, and a very portentous and apparent caveat comes with this: We will all perish lest we do something about it.
This seems to be the message that the University of the Philippines (UP) Alumni Centennial Artists are trying to get across in their last exhibit at the Trade Hall of the Gateway Mall. The group exhibit is still part of the continuing art education of the UP Alumni Association. Although not entirely an offshoot of the Ondoy and Pepeng typhoons, the show dubbed as ‘Kalikasan’ hit home and came out very timely.