JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Wait, let’s start with our six finalists:

Entry #8. Boat Boy by Charlemagne Fernandez

Entry #27. Sunset, El Nido by Abraham Toribio II

Entry #18. Helicopter Island at Sunset by Suzanne Rona O. Bermudez

Entry #18. Morning Ritual by April Galang

Entry #37. El Nido by Mateusz Dolega

Entry #24. Siete Pecados by Lilian Bartolabac

The winner is Suzanne Rona Bermudez for Helicopter Island at Sunset, a haiku in the form of a photograph.

Congratulations! We will email you your prize, a Tigerair Philippines voucher worth Php5,000 that you can use to book a round-trip ticket to Kalibo, Puerto Princesa, or any Tigerair domestic destination.

Get your tickets here.

This contest is sponsored by Tigerair Philippines. To find out more about Tigerair deals and promos, follow TigerAir Philippines on Facebook and Twitter.

The next Tiger Traveller contest is coming up.

Read How To Use An Apostrophe in The Oatmeal.

I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar.
by Kyle Wiens in the HBR blogs
(Please, we don’t even admit their comments. Fine, most of their comments.)

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin.

Thanks to Ricky for the link.

Badil: Democracy for Sale

Elections are the pinnacle of Philippine political life—so emotional and all-encompassing, everything that follows is practically negligible. Every effort is exerted and no resource spared in order to win the vote; by the time the winner is proclaimed, there is nothing left.

During election season, we make stirring declarations about truth, justice, change. “Vote wisely.” “Be guided by your conscience.” “Don’t sell your vote.” We mean what we say. The problem is that we know nothing.

Democracy is founded on the principle that the citizens have the right to choose their own leaders. Badil (“Gun”), the gripping political thriller by Chito Roño, shows us a system that has perverted this principle.

Read the full article in our Anti-MMFF festival at InterAksyon.com.

We’re giving away a round-trip Tigerair ticket to Kalibo, Aklan; Puerto Princesa, Palawan; or any Tigerair domestic destination in this month’s Tiger Traveller contest. To join, read this.

Entry #27. Photographer: Abraham Toribio II. El Nido, Palawan, March 2009. Taken with a Canon PowerShot G10. “I always take pictures of sunsets wherever I go. I find the deep orange colors of the sky and the surrounding landscape breathtaking. I especially like this photo because it captures a fisherman walking towards his boat at the end of the day. It’s so casual and ordinary.”

Entry # 28. Photographer: Frencel Tingga. Manoc-Manoc, Boracay, December 2011. Taken with a Nikon D3100. “Tulubhan, Monoc-Manoc of Boracay has a stunning view of Bulabog Beach, the rugged, windy side of the island and haven of wind and kite surfers. This is where I go whenever I want to avoid the crowded White Beach. The view here is equally beautiful and panoramic, and the strong sea breeze is invigorating.”

Entry #29. Photographer: Marianne Elize S. Suba. Bacuit Bay at night. Photo taken last August 2012 at El Nido, Palawan with a Canon EOS Kiss X3.

Entry #30. Photographer: Ryan Machado. “Most island-hopping tours in El Nido end at 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Seeing the shore of Bacuit Bay lined with hotels and inns signals the end of the day’s tour, and in this case our El Nido 3-day getaway.” Taken in April 2013 with a Canon EOS 1000D.

Entry #31. Photographer: April Galang. “My morning ritual in Boracay consists of getting strong coffee and calamansi muffins then eating them by the beach. This was the view that morning—calm sea, saturated sky, light not fully set in. I was only framing the lifeguard station and the kid walking then the bird decided it wanted to be in the picture.” Taken in Boracay, October 2011, with a Nikon D40.

Entry #32. Photographer: Ruddi Chris Caintic. Taken on Banana Island in November, 2013 with a Nikon D90.

Entry #33. Photographer: Ruddi Chris Caintic. The Banul Island Totem taken at Banul Island, Coron, Palawan in November, 2013 with a Nikon D90.

Entry #34. Photographer: Roselyn Bilog. Willy’s Rock from below. Taken in Boracay 2012 with an iPhone.

Entry #35. Photographer: Roselyn Bilog. “Early afternoon, rain looming on Malcapuya Island, Coron, Palawan.” Taken in October 2012 with an iPhone .

Entry #36. Photographer: Ramzen Guison. “Traveled to Boracay alone to celebrate my 30 years of existence. I always wanted to go to this heavenly place by myself and it was by far one of the best travel decisions I have ever made.” Taken in September, 2013 with a Nikon D60.

Entry #37. Photographer: Mateusz Dolega. Taken in El Nido, Palawan in December 2012.

Entry #38. Photographer: Joyce Clemencio. “The best place to get a full view of Boracay Island is Mt. Luho.” Taken with a CD-R King film camera loaded with Superia 400 film.

Entry #39. Photographer: Naomi Fontanos. “The sign of what is presumably a fish ball stand in Boracay, taken in November 2012 with a Casio Exilim camera.”

Entry #40. Photographer: Naomi Fontanos. “The sign to Diniwid Beach in Boracay, taken in November 2012 with a Casio Exilim camera.”

Thank you for sending in your entries. The winner will be announced on Monday, 30 December.

This contest is sponsored by Tigerair Philippines. To find out more about Tigerair deals and promos, follow TigerAir Philippines on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo from the Portfolio of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

2013 was a great year for Philippine cinema, though you wouldn’t know it from the box-office numbers or the TV coverage. You would know it from the excitement among ardent moviegoers: the people who believe in Filipino Cinema, who kept on watching Filipino films in the truly bleak times when Tagalog movies had become an open insult to their intelligence and a threat to their sanity, who braved the derision of their more practical friends and tried to give rational answers to the question, “Why do you even bother when you know you will be disappointed?”

We mean the people who feel despair and then outrage at how the studios use marketing and media noise to swindle casual viewers into thinking that crap looks good. Paradoxically they continue to pay the price of admission, knowing there is a 98 percent chance they will be screwed by the production companies, but pinning their hopes on that remaining two percent. These are the lovers of the moving image, devotees of the church of the waking dream, the Dreamers. Because if the Cinema can’t bring in the Dreamers, it has no right to exist.

This was the year we took a chance on filmmakers we’d never heard of and found ourselves rewarded, the year we overloaded on movies and stayed up half the night arguing about what we just saw. Even when we didn’t like the movies we couldn’t stop talking about them; we could tell that the filmmakers were dreaming the same dream that has haunted us since we sat in a darkened theatre for the first time. We rearranged our schedules so we could chase the movies, figured out the quickest routes between theatres spread out across the sea of traffic (“How do I get from Mandaluyong to Chinatown and then Cubao in three hours?”) so we could catch everything. It was exhausting, it was aggravating, it was exhilarating. 2013 was a year for Dreamers.

We saw a lot of wonderful Filipino films this year. They should all be showing at the Metro Manila Film Festival. Of course they’re not, and snow will fall on the gates of hell before intellectually demanding, ambitious, risky non-star vehicles that aspire to the level of Art will be admitted there. But climate change is on the rise, and stranger things have happened.

We’re tired of bitching about Tagalog movies. This year, we don’t have to. In this series, we salute the Best Filipino Movies of 2013.

Opening tomorrow at InterAksyon.com. Who knows, maybe we’ll even screen them.

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Post your own tributes to your favorite Filipino movies of the year in Comments.

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