ON TUESDAY came the news that an enormous new mall - twice the size of Ecoland's SM Mall - is scheduled to start construction January next on the now extinct country club site.

Just what the city needs. Not more policemen. Not new roads and bigger and better canals. Not a mass transit system and certainly not city planning that works. No; let's have another mall. That'll show the world that Davao really is up and coming.

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And did you notice the rosy profit figures in the same item. Ignore them - they're only numbers. Double the space rental and income doubles. The owners pocket the profits while the stores pass on the cost to you and me, the customer.

Also on Tuesday was an item about the new Tugbok landfill site. I still think we're tackling this garbage disposal thing from the wrong end. Tugbok, as far as I know, is a hole waiting to be filled. There is not anÿon-site sorting facility. Why not?

The cost of a few screens and conveyors and tin roofs and pickers (Recruited from the scavengers who'll be setting up a nearby community in short order) would have been a tiny tiny component of the millions the landfill cost and reclaiming all the recyclables would - like the mentioned high-tech furnace - double the life of the facility.

I'm writing this because our theoretical system of garbage sorting at the household end simply doesn't work. The city bought those fancy new compactor trucks and thousands of gray and green wheely bins and the notion of segregation went out the window three days later. I know, I watched binmen chuck all the garbage - gray and green bins indiscriminately - into the same compactor wagon.

It still doesn't work. I could put any number of garbage bags outside my gate, all neatly labelled - glass, metal, organics - and they would all be heaved up into the back of the same ten-wheeler truck.

Again on Tuesday - good day Tuesday - fellow scribbler Roberto Alabado was grumbling about Davao's drivers - how they manage to pass the LTO's driver's examination without actually appearing to know the rules of the road.

I know the answer to that one Roberto as only last year I applied for a driving license. Facing the would-be drivers in the examination room, pinned to the wall, are three large rules of the road posters with all the answers. Neat or what?

Finally, what bemuses me about Davao's bi-media (Forget radio) is its lack of continuity. A new, apparently regular item will appear only to vanishÿ and then re-appear half a year later.

Take the weather forecast, Useful information. There used to be a forecast both on the local early evening TV news and on the pages of this very paper. Not any more - the only time weather catches the media attention - weather, which is all around us every day - is either when we're boiling our brains out in the heat or up to our necks in floodwater.

Pourquoi, mes amies?