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White tote bag from Muji, defaced with acrylic paint by Ricky Villabona. I should open a shop called Niyurakan.

Hitchens. Photo by John Huba for Vanity Fair.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. . .

Hitch on death and denial, in Vanity Fair.

The following day we went to Malagos Farm Resort in Calinan, Davao. Malagos has a bird park, a petting zoo, a butterfly sanctuary, gardens, and a waling-waling orchid forest.

There are Abueva sculptures all over the gardens.

You can buy flowers,

fresh fruit,

and Cheese!

There’s a herd of goats on Malagos farm, and they breed fast. Olive Puentespina, who majored in Animal Sciences, thought of making goat cheese. She read a lot of books on cheesemaking and learned the process through trial and error. That was four years ago, and now her artisanal cheeses are in demand among cheese lovers.

When PAL ordered a ton of feta cheese for their business class flights, Olive figured it was time to go to cheesemaking school, so she took a course in San Francisco. It was the first time her classmates had ever heard of cheesemaking in the tropics. Now she produces a wide range including Kesong Puti, Chevre, Blush, Blue Peppato, and Feta.

Malagos Farmhouse products are the first locally-produced cheeses to have been chosen by the Cheese Club. They’re available at Wine Depot, The Market, and at the gourmet counter of Rustan’s supermarkets. I first heard of them through the bibingka waffle with Malagos cheese at Pia y Damaso in Greenbelt 5.

If the writing thing doesn’t work out, I’m moving to Malagos Farmhouse to be an apprentice falconer and cheesemaker.

Friday I was in Davao for the launch of My City, My SM. (The PAL pilot shortage had been resolved, at least temporarily, so no stress there.)

The endorsers for My City, My SM in Davao are Dr. Bo Puentespina, the veterinarian and wildlife conservationist who runs the bird sanctuary in Malagos, Olive Puentespina who makes the wonderful Malagos Farmhouse artisanal cheeses, and Margie Moran who has been a tireless promoter of Davao for many years.

Sidebar: On Thursday I saw Gloria Diaz in Greenbelt, and on Friday I saw Margie Moran in Davao. Two Miss Universes in a row—what does it mean? “It means Miss Philippines will win Miss Universe!” my gay friends declared.

Nigel, a beautiful hawk eagle, was unfazed by the spotlights. Photo by Mang Wayne Lim.

The food was by Binggoy’s—Davao delicacies, different kinds of kilawin, including a delightful kilawin with red eggs.

Whenever I’m in Davao I visit Aldevinco, the shopping center across the street from Marco Polo Hotel. The first time I went in 1999 they had mostly batik shirts, bags, muu-muus and “daster”, durian candy and souvenirs. Now they have batik items, durian candy, souvenirs, pearls and accessories—like the Greenhills tiangge, but less stressful, and a lot of clothes and bags from Thailand and Nepal.

Bag, P200.

This necklace should be presented to whoever blows up the Death Star.

Tomorrow: Blessed are the Cheesemakers.

The winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 3.1: The Staircase is noelz for the tale of the Angel Sevicent’s fact-finding mission.

Congratulations, noelz, you can claim your prize any day starting Wednesday, 11 August 2010 at the Customer Service counter of National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell. Just tell them you won this contest and give them the email address you used to register on this site.

Thanks to everyone who joined last week’s challenge. Tip: Don’t try to do too much, don’t strain for effect, and don’t be cute.

This week’s LitWit Challenge involves anthropomorphic animals.

Yes, Detective, I saw the whole thing. He asked her to cook the rack of lamb knowing full well that she will not cook, whereupon she seized the frozen rack of lamb and gave him a solid whack on the cranium. He landed on his face and never got up. No, I can’t testify in a court of law, I’m a cat. We do not recognize your jurisdiction, and besides, whacking your mate isn’t illegal in the cat world. Happens all the time.

Write us a murder mystery in which the protagonists are human but the narrator is an animal. Any animal, but you can’t ingratiate yourself with the judge by using my cats (automatic disqualification if you do). 1,000-word maximum. Deadline Saturday, 14 August 2010. Prizes:

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Emotional Weather Report
Philippine Star, 8 August 2010

Every day I visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website to look at a picture of the universe. As I write this I am looking at a picture of M8, the Lagoon Nebula—brilliant filaments of gas and clouds of dust 5,000 light years away. Before today there were photographs of constellations, planets, solar flares, eclipses, all the things out in the unimaginable vastness of space. They’re beautiful.

But there is one element missing from these photos of the cosmos—something that would make them seem more real and less lonely. There are no people. I don’t mean extraterrestrials who look like humans, I mean humans like us. Manned space flight has all but ground to a halt.

Those of us who were kids in the 1970s took it for granted that we would go to the moon and beyond. We are the children of the Apollo space program; when we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we routinely replied, “Doctor, Lawyer, Astronaut.” The direction we aspired to was Outward.

Since then, developments in digital technology have turned us Inward. For instance we don’t listen to music together anymore, we’re all plugged into our individual players; the cinema has become less and less of a communal experience. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the overall effect has been to make the world seem a much smaller place. As our world gets smaller, our dreams shrink in order to better fit in it.

What passes for dreams these days? Eight, nine out of ten people dream of becoming fabulously wealthy so they can live in total comfort and buy every luxury the mass media says they want. Quantitatively that’s a big dream, qualitatively it’s puny. It’s just an exaggerated version of survival, with designer trimmings.

Going out into that starry void, finding out what’s there and whether there are others like us—that’s a dream. Many will say that space exploration is a huge expense that will not result in practical applications. Dreams have no practical applications (Unless you paint them or make movies about them; though I heard that the double-helix structure came to Crick or Watson in a dream), but if you do not dream you literally go insane. They are for the maintenance of your mental health.

Besides, how do we know that the solutions to our current problems are not out there? Cheap, renewable sources of energy, cures for disease and aging, even someplace to move to after our planet is completely exhausted. Those are the possible tangible benefits. The real benefits are intangible. As a 2008 M.I.T. report on human space flight put it, the rationale for human space flight is exploration, which it defined as “an expansion of human experience, bringing people into new places, situations and environments, expanding and redefining what it means to be human.” In short, “We need to know.” Shorter still: The Vision Thing.

Yes, it is much cheaper and way safer to send unmanned probes out into space, and it is hard to sell and defend a vision given humanity’s more pressing needs. But when we stop dreaming, we die. The rest of our lives becomes a formality.

If you have the slightest interest in space exploration, there is a movie you need to see. Not Star Trek, you’ve already seen that. I mean a more down-to-earth view of human space flight: Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe, it dramatizes the beginnings of the space program from the fearless test pilots like Chuck Yeager who risked their lives with no expectation of reward, to the first American astronauts to go into orbit.

Sam Shepard as Major Chuck Yeager, and the actual Major General Chuck Yeager, who is still alive (and was stationed at Clark Air Base during the Vietnam War). Off-topic, Shepard in The Right Stuff had to be the hottest guy on the planet, and he was sharing screen time with the young Ed Harris and Dennis Quaid at their hottest.

The space program may have begun as a side effect of the Cold War, but it soon became more than a Soviet-US race to space. It gave a focus to humanity’s dreams.

There should be room in our mindscapes for both the dreamers and the realists. The realists keep civilization going, but it’s the dreamers who point out the destination.