One lucky person will win six SEAIR gift certificates to Busuanga

We are giving away not one, not two, but six SEAIR gift certificates to Busuanga to one lucky person! This is the biggest give-away of RockersWorld.com and the SEAIR Adventure Club ever! You and five friends can fly to Busuanga with six SEAIR airfare gift certificates up for grabs!

SEAIR has been providing the longest-running uninterrupted service to Busuanga, and now provides the fastest flights with its Dornier 328 aircraft.

So how do you join? All you have to do is tell us why you want to go to Busuanga via SEAIR, by Friday, 20 June 2008, at 8:00 p.m. You can use your personal blog, Multiply, Friendster, or any other social networking site, or any website for that matter for as long as your entry has a link to the SEAIR website. The entry which best captures the attention of our judges
will get the 6 gift certificates!

To let us know you joined this contest, post the link or your entry as a comment in SEAIR starts 35-minute flights to Northern Palawan. Like the previous raffle, make sure you place your full name in the name field since you will need a valid ID to claim the tickets if you win. The winner will be notified by e-mail so make sure
you double check your e-mail address before submitting your comment. Tickets will be valid from now until 15 October 2008. Good luck! )

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A Sydney Sojourn

Penman for Monday, June 2, 2008


ALMOST AS soon as I checked into my hotel in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, a woman jumped or fell into the harbor and drowned. When I pulled my curtains open—drawn to the window by the buzz of a helicopter and a speedboat casting searchlights onto the water—I saw nothing at first, and proceeded to unpack my bags.

I was there for the 11th edition of the Sydney Writers Festival, reputedly the world’s third largest literary festival (don’t ask me what the other two are—I forgot to ask), bringing together over 300 writers, some 70 of them from overseas like myself, to what had become a very fashionable corner of the harbor city. This was Walsh Bay, and our hotel, the Sebel Pier One, was, as its name suggested, a rough old 1920s warehouse on the pier converted into a posh hotel. Form a vantage point you could see both the Harbour Bridge very close by and the Opera House in the distance. The venues for the SWF were mainly the buildings on the other piers—so, as with much of Sydney, we were never too far from the water.

It was an apt metaphor—the water as our Mother, our blood, our home—underscored by the woman’s sad demise (I’m presuming the sadness; I didn’t even know it was a she, until I read the papers the next morning; when I opened my window again, the harbor police were loading someone onto a body bag and a gurney, so I knew something terrible had happened.) It wasn’t the best of omens for the week ahead, but I wasn’t about to trivialize one person’s passing into a sign; I chose to take it as a reminder of the urgency of what we artists do—to capture the passing scene and then to redraw and to frame it for others to marvel at.

Indeed, Jeanette Winterson’s opening address—delivered before a capacity crowd at the Opera House, many of them having paid good money to hear her speak (as they would all week for us writers—how amazing is that?)—dwelt on the necessity of art, on its even more vital role in a world taken over by pragmatists, corporations, governments, and Disney mania. “Festivals like this [respond] to a need, to a hunger, to an impulse in people. That tells me that people's genuine natural creative impulses, both to make and participate, are real and they want those instincts to be fed." Winterson added, quoting Susan Sontag: “Art isn’t just about something; it is something.”

And what a something it was from Wednesday to Sunday, as the SWF got into high gear and I dashed like a madman from session to session, catching up with Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis in one of the SWF’s most intriguing panel discussions, on “grit” and “gloom and doom” in literature; her new novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, had just been published by Murdoch Books. My own Soledad’s Sister had also just come off the press, rushed by Anvil Books so I could have some copies to show and sell, and a trade was quickly made. (Fellow UP professor and ANU graduate Jose Wendell Capili was also at the festival, to launch a new book on Filipino-Australian writing that he co-edited, titled Salu-Salo.)

Over the week I would make the acquaintance of writers of all kinds—subdued, funny, sensational. On the bus to the Opera House a gentle, bespectacled American in his 60s took the seat next to me and we began chatting about our daughters, both of them now in California; his name sounded familiar; he was his father’s junior, and James Reston had been a titan of American journalism, but James Reston Jr. had, I would later find, written more than a dozen scholarly books on everything from the Inquisition to the Civil War and Richard Nixon. Over cocktails at the Sydney Club, I ran into another fellow named Matt Costello, who had also written crime novels and screenplays but whose most interesting work, to me, was scripting computer games. Another man, only in his early 30s, had written and published a thick memoir—normally a presumptuous exercise at such a young age, but then Naldo Rei had joined the guerrillas in East Timor as a courier at the age of 9, and had gone in and out of prison since then, before studying in Australia and seeing freedom come to his country, whose government he now advises.

Sunday was my busiest day; in the morning I sat on a panel with Indian-Canadian novelist David Davidar and Singaporean poet Felix Cheung, for a “Spotlight on Asia” session, where we gamely took apart the notion of a single, inscrutable “Asia”, as we were as different from each other as Australians were from Americans. That afternoon I shared a session with the festival’s other big star aside from Winterson, Pulitzer prizewinner (for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) Junot Diaz; what a privilege and challenge, I thought, to be the only other one onstage with him, aside from our moderator, Australian novelist Antoni Jach. But Junot was such a warm and friendly person (and did I say brilliant?) that our one-hour conversation went by in a flash, and before I knew it the festival was over.

The exposure to a foreign audience was bracing and encouraging, but the most satisfying part of my Sydney sojourn was meeting with our compatriots, some of them old friends from the ‘70s. I gave talks to two groups in the public libraries of Parramatta and Hornsby in the Sydney suburbs, and was much heartened by the attendance and their response to a kababayan most of them had never heard of, much less read. Many also came to my session with Junot, and they went home poorer in the pocket but richer in signed copies of books by the both of us. (And here go my deepest thanks to Consul-General Tess Lazaro and her staff, and to Violi Calvert, Raych Stafford-Gaffney, Vicky Manalo, and so many others whose hospitality flattered me enormously. The NCCA, I should also say, supported my travel.) I shared a very special evening with two long-lost friends from high school, Nitz Axalan and Edwin Avila, and their spouses.

Oddly enough, I hardly spent anything on this trip—my only souvenir was a $15 cap I had to buy to ward off the chill of an Australian autumn—but my homebound luggage was seven kilos heavier, from all the books and, ah, the bottles of wine my Sydneysider friends sent me off with.

My last afternoon in Sydney went to a harbor cruise; writers begin as tourists, and maybe they also end as such, ever the visitor in a mutable landscape. The water sparkled everywhere I looked; I’m not sure what drove that woman to desperation, but there was something in the water that she saw, and which I didn’t, not just yet.

POLL: Where are you from?

I have a poll for everyone, “Where are you from?” The choices are simple:

  • Asean Community
  • East Asia Community (excl. Asean)
  • European Union (EU)
  • African Union (AU)
  • Union of South American Nations (USAN)
  • North America - Region
  • Middle-East

Vote NOW!!

Poll via Vizu.com


Poll via PollDaddy.com



Yeah, I’m torn between two poll services - Vizu.com and Polldaddy.com.


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Quick Response from Entrecard’s Site Downtime

Another DataCenter outage due to accidents, this time an electrical fire from ThePlanet, that houses Entrecard.com among the other 9000++ websites hosted.

But what I want to point out here are the following:

  • Entrecard hosting their Email Database elsewhere - in this case “iContact". Thus enabling them to email blast even if the datacenter is offline
  • A quick update and response from Entrecard is a big plus

Good work Entrecard Team!

The email from Entrecard quoted below:

Greetings,

Unfortunately, there has been an electrical fire at the data center housing Entrecard’s servers. The servers have not been damaged, but the site may be down for as long as 12 hours.

Entrecard is hosted with ThePlanet, and this fire has effected over 9000 websites, as many of the world’s most popualar websites are hosted with ThePlanet. They are working around the clock to get their data center back online, and we are hoping that they get it back online fast.

Thank you for your pateince and understanding with this rare and frustrating problem. Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing we can do but wait for The Planet to get their datacenter back online.

Please check back with Entrecard in 12 to 24 hours.

Thanks,
Entrecard Team


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Jun Lozada Blogs

NBN/ZTE scam star witness Jun Lozada, with the help of the Bloggers’ Kapihan crew, launched his blog yesterday afternoon at Kape Tasyo in Anonas, Quezon City.

(But no, I was not able to attend the event, ’cause I had to visit the dentist. Sucks, right?)

Lozada posted his first blog entry directed to the youth. Questions were raised in the midst of all the controversies plaguing the Philippines:

Ito kabataang Pilipino ang tension na hinaharap ninyo ngayon, tatanggapin niyo ba ang ganitong kasalukuyan? Malulunok niyo ba ang ganitong klaseng pamumuno? Kaya ba ng konsensiya ninyo na malaon-laon kayo na rin ang ninanakawan o nangnanakaw sa Bayan? O ipaglalaban ninyo ang inyong pag-asa na may mas maayos na kinabukasan na pwede ninyong kamtin para sa inyo? Na kaya ninyong baguhin ang baluktot na sistema ng lipunang Pilipino para sa inyong mga anak? Na hindi kayo panghihinaan ng kalooban kahit kayo ay hindi pinakikinggan ng mga nakakatanda sa inyo sa edad ngunit hindi sa pagmamahal sa bayan?

Already, the blog has received a lot of flak from numerous people, commenters and bloggers alike. I’m deadpanned. It’s expected. And just imagine me grinning with undeniable glee.

It’s not even that I’m a supporter of Lozada. As I’ve mentioned a couple of days ago, I have my doubts. Ultimately, believing or not believing his statements is not the main issue here. Whether or not what he tells is true or not, we still see all sorts of corruption in our lives. But we never were the ones to stand up. We only like watching in the sidelines and bitching about everything. We’re content on being only the spectators, not the actors. (Generally speaking anyway)

Really, doing something and making a difference are what counts.

Some media reports on the event: