BAHA! Get them animals in the ark, the city is underwater! Pasong Tamo Extension is now a lake. Even if we could get to Whitespace we’d be marooned. Aaaaaaaaaaaa!
Stay indoors and stay dry. Read a book. Those Russian doorstops and the Proust you’ve been hoarding for an emergency? This is that emergency. Unless you’re in an actual emergency, in which case we hope you are safe.
Photo: Albert Einstein when he was a clerk at a Swiss patents office. Later he was offered the presidency of Israel. He refused.
Here’s a great wish: May your year be as good as Albert Einstein’s 1905.
In 1905 Albert Einstein had a miraculous year. . .he wrote four papers which revolutionized our understanding of the Universe. The papers outlined; the idea that light could behave as a quantized particle (a photon), an explanation of the thermal motion of atoms and molecules (at a time when atoms themselves were just theories), a theory reconciling motion and the constant speed of light (Special Relativity), and the idea of mass-energy equivalence (E=mc²). Virtually every facet of our modern exploration of the Universe is touched by his now century old insights, along with his later theory of gravity and space-time – General Relativity.
For the 10th Birthday Field Trip: The Dunes of Mars, from the NASA APOD archive. Before you get overexcited that’s not Shai Hulud, that’s the shadow of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.
The winners of our 3rd Birthday Field Trip raffle are stub_born, gylaya, dancingnancy727, sapsap, eNTeNGs MunchTime, saintbarry, Darnapinoy, halfdeafthinker, driftwoodgiuditta, and eilish. Congratulations. Please post your full names in Comments. You can claim your tickets starting Tuesday, September 29 Thursday, October 1, at the Information Counter in the lobby of the Ayala Museum. The tickets will be under your real names. The museum is open daily from Tuesdays to Sundays.
Enjoy the field trip. Could the space program please hurry, we want to do Mars on our tenth year.
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Winners, please post your full names. We need them so you can claim your tickets (How will the Information Counter at the museum know whom to give them to?). Thanks.
Photo: The Carina Nebula Panorama from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.
Last night as we were leaving Silk in Serendra we beheld a sight that caused our heads to do the Linda Blair 180-degree spin from The Exorcist.
Seated at a table outside Mamou’s were BB Gandanghari, Gretchen Barretto, and Chavit Singson.
It was mind-bending, like seeing a year’s worth of tabloids take human form and order drinks. In the general stupefaction no one thought to take a picture.
Admittedly fear was a factor. You know what one of them is capable of. Yes, Gretchen is terrifying.
What could they talking about? If there were four of them I’d be worried about the Apocalypse. More likely they were discussing something innocuous like kitchen tiles or sunscreen, but we’d like to think that the lives of the. . .famous are so much more exciting than ours. In this case we are absolutely certain that the lives of the. . .famous are so much more exciting than ours.
I reported this cosmic occurrence to several friends. Bernard-Henri noted that the three of them together is perfect casting for the next movie by the National Artist. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Apat Na Alas Sa Taguig (Oh God, You Must Be Kidding!)
When I was in grade school we all looked forward to the annual Field Trip. We would visit the same places—Rizal Park, the Manila Aquarium, the Magnolia ice cream plant, a candy factory, the planetarium—but the unchanging itinerary did not dim our excitement. We looked forward to not being inside the classroom: it was just like a holiday, but with our classmates. Snacking was allowed on the bus, so we could try every variety of chips, candy, and chichirya until we threw up.
One year we had lunch at the CCP complex, and the nuns were worried because it was built on reclaimed land and might sink into the ocean. At the exact time that we were visiting. It struck me as weird that nuns who kept going on about eternal bliss were not excited about the prospect of going to heaven.
The high points of these field trips were the Manila Zoo, where the masturbating gorilla seemed to know that the teacher was the best target to spit or throw…stuff at, the ice cream plant because we got free samples, the aviary at Greenbelt park, and the Ayala Museum with the dioramas. The exotic birds are gone—I was told they were donated to a wildlife preserve in Quezon City—but the dioramas are still around. Not the exact same dioramas from my field trips, but bigger ones with better production design.
After visiting the dioramas you can go to The Ring of Fire, an exhibition of ceramics by contemporary Southeast Asian artists. Then you can proceed to the fourth floor for the Crossroads of Civilizations exhibition featuring rare Philippine costumes from the 18th and 19th centuries, Chinese and Southeast Asian trade ceramics from the 9th to the 19th century, and golden ornaments believed to date back to the pre-colonial era.
Today is the third birthday of JessicaRulesTheUniverse.com, so the field trip’s on us. I’m giving away ten pairs (So you can bring someone to discuss the artifacts with) of Ayala Museum tickets. To get a chance to win a pair of free tickets, click on the logo of the Ayala Museum on the left sidebar and find the answer to this question:
Who are the Filipino potters featured in The Ring of Fire exhibition? Name one.
Post your answer in Comments. All entries will become eligible for the raffle to be held at midnight tonight. Winners should be able to claim their tickets at the Ayala Museum, Makati Avenue corner De la Rosa Street, Greenbelt, Makati, starting next Wednesday. The 3rd Birthday Field Trip is brought to you by the Ayala Museum.
This would not have passed the inspection of my second grade teacher. There is a gap on top of the “a”. However I’m probably the only person in my second grade class who still in cursive.
In The Guardian: Umberto Eco regrets the passing of good handwriting.
Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it’s well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters.
In an interview, a teacher said that students also make lots of spelling mistakes, which strikes me as a separate problem: doctors know how to spell and yet they write poorly; and you can be an expert calligrapher and still write “guage” or “gage” instead of “gauge”.
I know children whose handwriting is fairly good. But the article talks of 50% of Italian kids – and so I suppose it is thanks to an indulgent destiny that I frequent the other 50% (something that happens to me in the political arena, too).
The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone. . .
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