Friday, October 06, 2006 Covington: The week that was (39) By Gary Covington Looking in
RULE # 1 for would-be scribblers contributing to a local daily newspaper. Always carry a camera.
I wasn't first thing on Saturday morning and thus missed the chance to snap the opening of Buhangin's first LPG autogas service station. It was quite a show - a priest sprinkling, a taxi filling up, balloons, the whole business and here's yours truly without his camera. No, I didn't sprint home to fetch it. I'm not paid enough.
About the middle of last month I was musing on mentalities - how I'd spotted a new one, a waiting shed mentality, and didn't have a clue as to its meaning. Those in the know at the Sun.Star put me right with an afterword to my column, an afterword supplemented the next day by the Buhangin chizmis crowd who hang out at the newsstand.
"There!" they chorused, pointing across the street where stands a genuine waiting shed mentality waiting shed.
It looks a little forlorn; utilitarian uprights, a rusty tin roof and decorated with the fluttering remains of several elections-worth of flyers. At one time it might have sheltered six or eight but not anymore; a cobbler has taken up residence.
I don't know who built the thing. There's no plaque of ownership and the chizmis crowd couldn't agree - the Lions, the Rotary, this big cheese or that - but a makeover (and ejection of the cobbler) wouldn't go amiss.
Catching my eye on Monday was an item reporting on how the mayor of Zamboanga is appealing to the media to help promote his city as "Asia's Latin City."
This I'll never understand. The Filipino habit - as if you're ashamed - of promoting a place not as here and tropical but rather somewhere completely alien. Why push Zamboanga as a "Latin" city because some of its folks speak a language derived from Spanish? What's the point? Or is it another mentality - the colonial mentality - kicking in; that because it's foreign it must be better?
Upmarket subdivisions do the same thing, passing themselves off as "Mediterranean inspired" or "imagine a Caribbean resort." Do buyers really fall for this guff? Here's the same old fussy three up, three downs with maybe a bit of grass and some flowering shrubs. Is there something wrong with building a subdivision designed for the tropics and then shouting that it's so? Of being honest? Or maybe Davao's early morning golfers shoot the breeze with lines like "Hey, we just bought a Neopolitan hideaway on Times Beach."
I was thinking this week of bishop-bashing. On Thursday they were sticking their noses yet again where they shouldn't, declaring that the late Fernando Poe Jr. was swindled at the last elections. But I won't, seeing how effectively the Pope is putting his foot in it. Some European commentators reckon he's single-popedly put back Muslim-Christian relations by 25 years, others that his remarks will actually encourage inter-faith violence.
But we can't finish on such a downbeat note so here's the don't you just love it department;
# 1 "The 'How's my driving?" inquiry stenciled on the back end of taxis. Do they really want to know?
# 2-That the PCCG - the Presidential Commission on Good Governance - is being investigated for allegedly mismanaging concerns it had taken over in the name of "era" good governance. Can't trust anyone these days can you?
#3- Those lovely new crisp overalls and facemasks worn the other day by the airstrip ground crew in honor of the media jolly to the Mandug banana plantations. "Okay lads, show's over. Get those overalls back to the store, ready for the next busybody visit."
