Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Covington: The week that was
By Gary Covington
Looking In
QUITE a bit going on last week -- some good and some bad, like the Thursday evening shooting at the Venue compound where, reportedly, the shooter explained: "He told me 'Come on, come on, come on, shoot me.' When his back was turned, I shot him."
Speaks volumes that last sentence doesn't it -- whatever happened to guys punching each other on the nose when there were differences to settle?
Week after week, we read of folks being gunned down in restos or bars or karaokes, of grenades being tossed into salas and of liquor'd-up guys staggering home to retrieve automatic weapons or worse to prove who's the man.
Is it too much to hope that the city councilors (well, the majority bloc anyway), relaxed and refreshed after their jolly up at the Malaybalay monastery, have included a total firearms ban in their Legislative Planning Report.
Wednesday was World Water Day. Marking the event a Cebu-based environmentalist held open house at a downtown hotel and spoke of the perils of misusing what is a finite resource.
The main thrust of the talk -- and I was surprised that no attending scribbler took the opportunity to write up a full feature -- was against the unchecked proliferation of banana and pineapple plantations, which consume water at a great rate and, at the same time, pollute with pesticides and herbicides any which does manage to leak away.
The topic is vast but boils down to who gets to profit from the water: Filipinos or the anonymous and far-off shareholders of some giant fruit-processing corporation.
On Thursday there was a good idea poking its head into the Sun.Star's pages in the form of a modest feature on useful Internet addresses.
It's a good idea, which needs nurturing and so (and thanks to Webster of The Oldie magazine for pointing me in the right directions) here's a trio of sites, which have kept my nose to the screen as I've paddled about the Internet.
The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records was published in 1955 and ran to not quite 200 pages.
By comparison www.guinnessworldrecords.com is gigantic -- over 40,000 entries -- and, to a scribbler like me, a trove of information, one query tempting me on to another and another and I'm stuck for hours.
Another site I tend to lurk about is www.wordspy.com whose blurb says that the site is 'devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases, real words which have appeared multiple times in newspapers and magazines.'
Sunday's new word was "ransomware" -- malicious software that encrypts a person's computer files and demands a ransom (currently US$300) to decrypt the files. Over to you Wilson Ng.
I tried to look up Jocy So's Monday expression "fusion food" (which baffled me), got nowhere and, like a fool, became engrossed in other words and forgot why I was there in the first place.
And I must go. Mainly to the Bureau of Immigration where I hear there's jobs going that pay P90,000 a month. I could scrape by on that.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (March 29, 2006 issue)
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