The Wheel and Axle

My 90s experience, as with a lot of Filipinos in my age bracket, would not have been complete with the Halloween specials of Noli De Castro’s Magandang Gabi, Bayan.

Every year, I looked forward to the Saturdays just preceding Halloween. It was when the show, which was a typical somewhat square news magazine program, would switch gears and feature interviews, footage, and reenactments, documentary-style, of supposed real life supernatural tales around the country: ghosts, aswang, tikbalang, dwende, the living dead, white ladies, black ladies, possessions, ghouls, fucking floating caskets, and more.

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It’s the start of a four-day weekend (for the Philippines, anyway), so here’s to the coming holiday full of remembering our dearly departed and, of course, some halloween fun!

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Genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will always be my favorite classical musician. He is a genius who started composing at the age of five, and he has created marvelous musical works of various genres: sonatas, concertos, operas, symphonies, and more.

My love for Mozart began sometime in the early 90s when I first saw the 1984 Oscar Best Picture winner Amadeus, a biographical drama that took some liberties with historical facts and utilized some of the more legendary stories surrounding the man.

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Photo credits: Rappler

Hidilyn Diaz, Filipina weightlifter from Mindanao, just brought us a silver medal in the Rio Olympics. This is our first medal since 1996 and the first from a woman, the first for someone from Mindanao, and the first for a non-boxer since 1936.

This is what we call #PinoyPride.

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Photo credits: Gay Times

Thank you, Gay Times, for this wonderful feature on LGBT athletes heading over to Rio for the 2016 Olympics. This year, we apparently have a record number of LGBT participants in the event.

Or perhaps, this might just be a year where we have a record number of out and proud participants, for I cannot imagine all prior events have had no (secretly) LGBTs amongst the athletes.

And so this year still marks a pretty good milestone for our community – for now we are diving headfirst into the pool outly and proudly without qualms.

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Storming of the Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel

Today, France celebrates Bastille Day.

Bastille Day (which they actually call La Fête Nationale or, less formally, Le Quatorze Juillet because we non-French are just not cultured enough) commemorates the Fall of the Bastille Saint-Antoine in 1789, which signalled the start of the French Revolution, as well as Fête de la Fédération, which celebrates the unity of the French in 1790 exactly one year after the famous fortress was stormed.

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At least Gracie Hart was trying to stop a bomb.

Andre, me, Robin

My besties and I have this habit of impromptu drives out of town. Sometimes we go to places nearby, sometimes practically Narnian. One of our absolute favorite destinations is the relatively close Tagaytay.

Since the past few days have been fairly cool because of the Cthulhu-conducive stormy weather, I had a craving for some hot bulalo soup, and what’s a better way to have that than having an impromptu evening road trip with the gang as we are wont to do?

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My years serving in Days with the Lord in Ateneo High School were some of the best of my life. Some people found it strange, considering it was a Catholic retreat and I’m a Methodist Protestant, but DWTL was a different experience. It was an inclusive experience, run by one of the most popular Jesuits of the school and supported by a diverse set of students that ranged from the jocks to the nerds to the gays. It had such an impact on me that in my senior year I even became rector for AHS DWTL Batch 107. My memories of this era are largely happy and quite uplifting.

So I could not help but smile (there may have also been some slight tears) when I recently came across this video:

A flash mob in a mall in Chile is singing a Spanish version of I Will Sing Forever.

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