ARANETA.I was going to use that title for the last column but I forgot -- one of the drawbacks of getting on in years, the old gray cells forget to remember. I also forgot to take a swing at the Davao library so I'll do it now.
For many years I've been contributing all of my read and unwanted books to the library and was quite proud to have my name scribed on a list of "Friends of the library". It was a very democratic list, not even in alphabetical order, the high and the mighty mixed up with the ordinary folks and I thought that was right and proper.
But - it looks as if one of the high and mighty didn't fancy rubbing shoulders with us commoners and so there is now a new list of gold, silver and bronze friends of the library. The gold is a roll call of all the various rotary clubs and a couple of big store foundations - the rest of us are shoveled into the silver and bronze categories.
That is wrong. The Rotary clubs and their pals the Lions and the Knights etc exist to do good works, that's their purpose and they should do it quietly and unobtrusively. It's the little guys who should be up there in the gold section -- the folks who've gone out of their way and made an effort to help the library.
There was nothing wrong with the old 'Friends' list -- the new one does what the Philippines is good at, sucks up to the big names, relegates the true worthies to the sidelines.
On Friday there was an item reporting the comments of the Macau Government Tourist Office general manager Narzalina Lim who told us how Samal could attract more tourists, how "Russian and Chinese tourists love the beach and flock to Cebu and Boracay each year."
True, but Boracay has a proper public beach, Samal doesn't. Boracay's public beach is some three kilometers long and the public is free to wander up and down to its heart's content. On Samal all the beaches are private and, as Narzalina Lim says, belong to a string of small resorts. The beachwalker has to pay an entrance fee, say P100, and can then plod up and down 50 or 100 yards of beach. To go any further he must exit the resort and enter the next, coughing up another P100.
Promenading up and down a beach is part of the beach experience. On Samal, unfortunately, greed and creative title deeds (Where two of the boundary monuments are out at sea) make this impossible. Finally, in Tuesday's entertainment pages we learnt that "(Mr) Kanye West is ready to have children." That's after some tricky surgery.