The Midland Update

It's getting worse. Baguio Midland Courier, the biggest weekly in the North, was hit by a strike by its former distributors so it has to resort to other non-news outlets. Now I (and probably all the media here) received an email from a certain Warren Cristobal listed the "sins" not only of the Midland management but their reporters as well. Uh uh. Midland's publisher answered back by asking if Warren is real.

Midland and the Sunday Habit

Every Baguio boy knows the Sunday habit. It's not Mass but then, some churchgoers usually go down the steps of Cathedral and get into it. The Sunday habit is reading Baguio Midland Courier, which had been around for 60 years. In reading Midland, you have to start at the end which is the obituary. Young and old, Midland readers read about who died so they can have something to talk about. The problem this Sunday was that, suddenly Midland can not be bought anywhere. Turns out the dealers had a strike against Midland. So the newstands in Session Road and even in SM do not have Midland for sale. I bought one at a barber shop. Midland had their side on the issue in their editorial and even reserved No. 10 of their much-anticipated True of False on the issue. So they are prepared for this battle of wits. Midland increased their price to P12 and the dealers wanted to increase it further. It's a battle of wills. Don't die this week. You may not be read.

Dana Batnag: I Am But A Small Voice

Our friend Dana Batnag is now the news. She is being tagged by anonymous PNP intelligence (oxymoron!) sources as the one aiding and abetting a rebel military leader so he can escape from Manila Pen last November. She was supposed to be handing him a press ID (Aha! so we are carrying blank IDs all the while!) so he can leave the premises as a media person and escape the eagle eyes of 1,500 police officers.
Dana was tagged for having long curly hair. Ha ha ha. We know Dana for a long, long time. Sometimes I tease her by singing "I Am But A Small Voice." When she was in elementary, she composed this poem that won a UN contest. Roger Whittaker turned it into a song which he included in his Greatest Hits. I remember her being interviewed and she said she wanted to be a police detective. He he he. It was also in Channel 9. Maybe they find that old footage and use it against you. Her father was from Besao, Mountain Province and her mother is with a national language commission. Dana has a sister who was a journalist for Daily Globe. Dana worked with Philippine Graphics before becoming the one-person news agency bureau known as Jiji Press which is based in Japan. She also teaches at UP Diliman. Oh boy! Dana B, sikat ka na naman.
Part of her winning poem goes:

May ngiti sa araw
At kung umuulan
Makapagtampisaw
Malayang daigdig
Ng kawalang malay

The sun is smiling and when it's raining, we can wade on the
puddles without any care for the world. 
Yes, we knew that part of our youth

But stupid police. 

The Ethics of Book Reviewing

68.5 percent of book reviewers think anyone mentioned in a book's acknowledgements should be barred from reviewing it. 64.9 percent think anyone who has written an unpaid blurb for a book should also be banned from writing a fuller review. 76.5 percent think it's never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing. And 52 percent think it's not okay for a book-review editor, in assigning books for review, to favor books by writers who also review regularly for that editor's book section.

Yes, it's time again for "The Ethics of Book Reviewing," an old NBCC favorite. From the numbers above, book reviewers sound like quite an ethical bunch, no? Yet not everything seems clear to them.

40.1 percent think a reviewer shouldn't read other reviews of a book before writing his or her own, but 17.9 per cent think that's perfectly okay, and 33.5 per cent feel it's complicated enough to require commentary rather than a firm answer. 73.4 percent answer "Not Sure" when asked, "Are the ethics of book reviewing in the United States and England significantly different?"

Staged

How would you say that a photo is staged? What if the subjects were too willing to change locations or do their own blocking? What if the photographer made his own monster or fairies? Is this staged or is it art? These and other questions are raised in these nonetheless famous photos including "The Kiss."