Love wins at the MMFF
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
Love is the name of the game at this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF). This time around, the fantasies — and horror perennial Shake, Rattle, N’ Roll — which have dominated recent iterations of the film festival are taking a backseat. Instead, at the forefront are romantic comedies: My Bebe Love, Walang Forever, and All You Need is Pag-ibig (love).
Seven’s the charm for Stallone
By Angela Dawson, Front Row Features
PHILADELPHIA — It’s been 40 years since an underdog boxer named Rocky Balboa jogged up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and subsequently became an international cultural phenomenon. Now, Sylvester Stallone, the writer and legendary star of that iconic film (which has become a lucrative and enduring franchise) returns for yet another round of heartwarming drama and boxing-as-metaphor for never giving up in Creed.
Relaunched: The air up there
By Michael Angelo S. Murillo
AFTER TEMPORARILY shutting down to move to another location, the country’s only flying trapeze school is once again up, bigger and more determined than ever to showcase what the “performance-based sport” is all about.
How a bird festival changed Balanga City
THERE’S a city in the Philippines where one can see thousands of migratory birds flocking to in December. A few hours drive from Manila is Balanga City in Bataan province, an area considered to have the highest number of migratory birds in the country. In 2012, more than 25,000 birds were counted in one day in Balanga.
The Wild Bird Club of the Philippines is holding its yearly bird watching festival — The Philippine Bird Festival — which started on Dec. 9 and continues until Dec. 11. Now on its 10th year, the festival had several activities such as parades of each municipality’s bird mascot (a migratory bird that is often seen in their area), lectures on environmental issues, discussions on successful models of ecological tourism, bird-watching hikes, and more.
The focus of the festivals has always been children. By partnering with schools, the festival brings teachers and their students to the event. This young audience see no birds in cages at the festival because the club wants them to know that birds can exist freely in nature, said Gina Mapua, president of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines, said during a press conference on Dec. 2.
The Philippine Bird Festival is held in different areas every year, although this is the second time the festival is coming to Balanga. It was first held in this city in 2009 and Ms. Mapua noted that it was one of their most successful. The 2015 festival has expanded, involving other municipalities in Bataan aside from Balanga City.
Each festival location was not just chosen because it has many migratory birds, but also because of the willingness of the local government to promote conservation and bird watching, said Ms. Mapua.
Jose Enrique Garcia III, Balanga City mayor, said that before the club visited his city, residents just ignored the mudflats, almost seven hectares of worm-rich terrain that is a haven for migratory birds.
The locals responded well to the festival, said Mr. Garcia, who noted that it opened their eyes to the importance of the migratory birds that visit the area. The city started its own yearly bird festival — the Ibong Dayo Festival — celebrated simultaneously with The Philippine Bird Festival. The city was also able to declare the mudflat area a bird sanctuary, created a task force for the area to be protected and promoted, put up an information center and viewing decks at the mudflats, and train tour guides.
Mr. Garcia added that the festival also increased people’s awareness of environmental issues and has helped garner support for the passing of environmentally friendly ordinances like banning certain tricycles models that they discovered to be pollution-generating and implementing no smoking policies.
The festival’s economic impact is still building, said the mayor. From 2010 to 2014, Balanga has seen a 425% increase in tourists, but that came from a small base of less than 30,000. Also, most of these tourists are small children on organized field trips so these young ones don’t really buy much from the city. They are currently thinking of better ways to package the bird festival, maybe even bundling it with cultural and historical destinations in the province like Mount Samat (the World War II shrine on top of a mountain that has a 90-foot cross), Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar (a resort featuring restored heritage houses), and the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (now an educational site and bird watching area). — Jasmine Agnes T. Cruz
Climb a mountain, take pics, and share in real time
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
MOST FILIPINOS are currently addicted to two things. One, the lure of travel and adventure thanks to promos and sales. Second is the penchant for blow-by-blow documentation and sharing of the travel experiences, whether here or abroad, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Toil and trouble in China over Nobel medicine prize
BEIJING — China’s Tu Youyou collects her country’s first Nobel Prize for medicine this week for extracting an anti-malarial drug from a herb mentioned in a traditional text, but her award has prompted debate over the role of science in the practice.
Ms. Tu derived artemisinin from sweet wormwood, which she found cited in a 4th century traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) document as a fever treatment, developing a crucial weapon in the global fight against the mosquito-borne disease as resistance to other treatments spread.
Traditional medicine is a source of cultural pride in some Chinese quarters, with Beijing planning to expand its provision, and even Premier Li Keqiang seized on the Nobel award, hailing Ms. Tu’s discovery as “a great contribution of TCM to the cause of human health.”
But Nobel committee member Hans Forssberg was adamant: “It’s very important that we are not giving a prize to the traditional medicine,” he said, stressing that the award was only for scientific work that had been inspired by it.
TCM practitioners say her recognition could encourage similar research that may sideline the underpinnings of their theories.
TCM is based on a set of beliefs about human biology, including the existence of a life force, qi, and that illness is the result of “imbalances” between the five elements — fire, water, earth, metal and wood — in the system.
There is no orthodox evidence for such concepts, and the respected scientific magazine Nature has described TCM as “largely just pseudoscience, with no rational mechanism of action for most of its therapies,” calling them an “arcane array of potions and herbal mixtures.”
In contrast, Ms. Tu chemically extracted the active ingredient of a single plant in isolation.
“Many fear that the recent Nobel Prize, which celebrates westernized Chinese medicine, will end up doing more harm than good for authentic traditional medical practice,” said Lan Jirui, who has a booming TCM private practice in Beijing.
Describing her research as a victory for TCM was “reckless,” said the state-run China Daily, arguing that would encourage westernized reforms that ignore traditional theories about the body as a holistic system.
“You should not use Western science to ‘cure’ Chinese medicine,” Mr. Lan said, calling the study of TCM from a rationalist perspective “essentially hopeless.”
“The human body is very complicated — you cannot see it only as a machine,” he added. “The scariest thing is to lack confidence in your own traditions, to allow others to ‘update’ you, and then destroy what you had.”
Rhino horn
Many mainstream medicines were originally derived from plants, and some researchers are looking for active ingredients in TCM components, even though Ms. Tu failed to find other such drugs despite years of efforts.
“It’s good to look into ethnopharmacology,” said Fan Tai-Ping, head of the Chinese Medicine Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
“Medicine has evolved since the dawn of humanity, and science,” he added. “We need to have evidence. But there’s the possibility now, thanks to science, to begin to discuss this problem, how we can see East and West come together.”
With no standardised guidelines, TCM can offer radically different diagnoses — based on observation and pulse-taking — for the same symptoms.
Similarly, prescriptions are highly variable, made up of multiple herbs, minerals and animal parts — sometimes from endangered species, now officially banned — along with massages, acupuncture and other treatments.
“I think it’d be quite good really to find out what is there in rhino horn instead of throwing it all away,” said Mr. Fan. “Those that have been confiscated can be sent to laboratory and analyzed and synthesized.”
National health
TCM is an enormous industry in China, with a total value in excess of $91 billion in 2013, a third of the total output of the country’s medical industry, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
In recent years the government has upped funding and support, even though most health facilities use orthodox medicine, and national health care guidelines released in May said every county and municipality should seek to have a dedicated TCM hospital by 2020.
“TCM should be China’s solution for improving its medical care,” especially as it was “relatively cheaper than Western medicine,” Wang Guoqiang, director of the State Administration of TCM, told a conference last year.
“TCM is a form of heritage passed down from our ancestors that can offer an instructive approach to modern medical reform,” he added.
But specialists say there is an internal contradiction between the nationalism implicit in such assertions and TCM’s claims of universal applicability.
“It is essential to keep the struggle for cultural identity separate from actual medical practice,” said Volker Scheid, an anthropologist at London’s University of Westminster who has studied TCM for 30 years.
“I’d say 95% of Chinese would think that I cannot be a very good TCM practitioner because I’m not Chinese, but at the same time, China wants to make Chinese medicine global.
“If you want to make it truly global, you have to take it away from China.” — AFP
Ligo Tuna sings sexy
Ads & Ends — Nanette Franco-Diyco
THERE IS A TRULY entertaining and unique television commercial that was launched a fortnight ago to trumpet that Ligo now has great tuna! Ligo, after all these years of solely being identified with sardines, has now expanded its offerings to include tuna.
Your tablet screen is brought to you with the aid of… carrots
DARMSTADT, GERMANY — This Christmas, as consumers around the world hope Santa will give them a smartphone, TV or tablet computer, few people know that the lowly carrot inspired the liquid crystals at the core of such hi-tech gadgets.