From Earth to Universe: Celeste Cortesi is new crossover queen

 Celeste Cortesi was crowned as new Miss Earth Philippines in 2018 (left) and as new Miss Universe Philippines 2022 (right)

By Earl D.C. Bracamonte - Philstar.com

MANILA, Philippines — Celeste Cortesi was crowned Miss Universe Philippines 2022 at the close of glitzy rites in the Mall of Asia Arena today.

The representative of Pasay City bested 31 other hopefuls to wear the newly crafted "La Mer en Majeste" crown. Celeste was also adjudged Miss Photogenic and Best in Swimsuit earlier in the evening.

Her court is composed of:

Michelle Marquez Dee, Miss Universe Philippines Tourism 2022 and Best in Evening Gown;

Pauline Amelinckx, Miss Universe Philippines Charity;

Annabelle MacDonnell, 1st runner-up;

and Katrina Llegado, 2nd runner-up.

Ghenesis Latugat (Baguio), Vanessa Ann Caro (Iloilo Province), Lou Dominique Piczon (Cebu Province), Julia Calleja Saubier (Albay, Best in National Costume), and Chantal Elise Legaspi Schmidt (Cebu City) completed the Top 10 finalists.

The other lucky ladies who made the first cut were Gillian Katherine De Mesa (Nueva Vizcaya, winner of the online poll), Jona Sweet (Aklan), Angelica Lopez (Palawan), Jewel Alexandra Palacat (Ilocos Sur, voted Miss Friendship), Sonja Jeyn Tanyag (Laguna), and Dorothy Gemillan (Iloilo City).

This year's selection committee included Atty. Francis Papica, Atty. Margarita Gutierrez, Arch. Richelle Louise Singson-Michael, Engr. Sam Versoza, Bb. Pilipinas Universe 2006 Lia Andrea Ramos, Dr. Jennifer Olay, Dr. Joshua Sorrentino, and reigning Miss Universe Haarnaz Sandhu.

The evening's commentators at the Kumu lounge were Bb. Pilipinas International 2014 Bianca Guidotti, Carla Lizardo, and last year's Miss Universe Philippines semifinalist Roussane Marie Bernie.

Cortesi is not the first crossover queen to win another national title. Carlene Aguilar, the first Miss Earth Philippines national winner in 2001 joined the Binibining Pilipinas in 2005, aiming to win the national Universe title but ended up with the national World crown instead. Cortesi, therefore, holds the distinction of being the first national Earth warrior to win the national Universe title.

Hosted by Miss Universe 2015 Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, Miss Universe 2016 Iris Mittenaere,vand Miss Universe 2017 Demi Leigh nel-Peters Tebow, the three-hour long extravaganza was beamed to a global audience through the iWantTFC, ABS-CBN Entertainment, and TFC channels on YouTube. Those who missed the final show may catch the television broadcast on May 1, 9 am, on the GMA network.

Our limited time on earth

My column in Mindanao Daily, BusinessWeek Mindanao and Cagayan de Oro Times

---

SHARE

Like

Tweet

MOST of us tend to think of time as linear, absolute and constantly “running out” – but is that really true? And how can we change our perceptions to feel better about its passing?

While becoming 66 already, I use think about my age. Yes, it's only a number. I know.  “Time” is the most frequently used noun in the English language. We all know what it feels like as time passes. Our present becomes the past as soon as it’s happened; today soon turns into yesterday. If you live in a temperate climate, each year you see the seasons come and go. And as we reach adulthood and beyond, we become increasingly aware of the years flashing by.  

While keep on thinking about age and its consequences, I came along with Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped: Unlocking The Secrets Of Time Perception.

She wrote that although neuro-scientists have been unable to locate a single clock in brain that is responsible for detecting time passing, humans are surprisingly good at it. If someone tells us they’re arriving in five minutes, we have a rough idea of when to start to look out for them. We have a sense of the weeks and months passing by. As a result, most of us would say that how time functions is fairly obvious: it passes, at a consistent and measurable rate, in a specific direction – from past to future.

Of course, the human perspective of time may not be exclusively biological, but rather shaped by our culture and era. The Amondawa tribe in the Amazon, for example, has no word for “time” – which some say means they don’t have a notion of time as a framework in which events occur. (There are debates over whether this is purely a linguistic argument, or whether they really do perceive time differently.) Meanwhile, it’s hard to know with scientific precision how people conceived of time in the past, as experiments in time perception have only been conducted for the last 150 years.

Physics tells a different story. However much time feels like something that flows in one direction, some scientists beg to differ.

In the last century, my very favored Albert Einstein’s discoveries exploded our concepts of time. He showed us that time is created by things; it wasn’t there waiting for those things to act within it. He demonstrated that time is relative, moving more slowly if an object is moving fast. Events don’t happen in a set order. There isn’t a single universal “now”, in the sense that Newtonian physics would have it.

It is true that many events in the Universe can be put into sequential order – but time is not always segmented neatly into the past, the present and the future. Some physical equations work in either direction. Here, I strongly agree with Claudia Hammond.

One aspect of time perception many of us share is how we think of our own past: as a kind of giant video library, an archive we can dip into to retrieve records of events in our lives.

But psychologists have demonstrated that autobiographical memory is not like that at all. Most of us forget far more than we remember, sometimes forgetting events happened at all, despite others’ insistence that we were there. On occasion even the reminder does nothing to jog our memories.

Several years ago, I started writing my biography. With Beethoven under palms. The great German composer and me under palms. Wow.  Meanwhile, I found out: as we lay down memories, we alter them to make sense of what’s happened. Every time we recall a memory, we reconstruct the events in our mind and even change them to fit in with any new information that might have come to light. And it’s much easier than you might think to convince people that they have had experiences which never happened. The psychologist Elisabeth Loftus has done decades of research on this, persuading people they remember kissing a giant green frog or that they once met Bugs Bunny in Disneyland (as he’s a Warner Bros character, so this can’t have happened). Even recounting an anecdote to our friends can mean our memory of that story goes back into the library slightly altered.

So we shouldn’t curse our memories when they let us down. They’re made to be changeable, in order that we can take millions of fragments of memories from different times of our lives and recombine them to give us endless imaginative possibilities for the future.

Thank you very much Claudia Hammond. I changed my opinion when it comes to time. My limited time on earth.

Our future on Earth

My column in BUSINESSWEEK MINDANAO and MINDANAO DAILY NEWS.

Yes, it's again the topic, we should really think about. Our future, but especially our children's future. Also here in the Philippines. Here's anew string of examples, my dear readers. But, don't expect only good news. 

We're experiencing in the Philippines a mild El Nino right now. "Mild" - because we might not be able to the see the end of the tunnel. Yes, it's summer - but... .

Greenland, the great island is being called already the 'Land of Ice on fire'. Why? A recent report says the Arctic may be ice-free by 2040. The Antarctic is also melting, albeit far slower, and in a less regular pattern. 

Yes, the Arctic is melting much faster than expected, and could even be ice-free in summer by the late 2030's, a report from the Arctic Council's Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program suggests. Previous studies had forecast an ice-free North Pole in summer by mid-century. Wow.  Different reports - different views.

While the outlook is bleak for the Arctic, there is a silver lining for the Antarctic: As I said before, the ice is melting at a slower rate than previously thought. Although glacier flow has increased since the 1990's, scientists from University of Leeds have found the melting rate to be only around a third of what was previously projected. A section of a glacier in Greenland was seen from NASA's Operation IceBridge research aircraft along the Upper Baffin Bay coast on March 27, 2017.

Operation IceBridge studies the processes that link the polar regions with the Earth's climate system. Rapidly changing polar ice means researchers need to use highly sophisticated airborne technology to measure annual changes in thickness and movement - on board a retrofitted 1966 Lockheed P-3 aircraft.

But the Antarctic is still melting. And a rapidly advancing crack in its fourth-largest ice shelf could soon see one of the largest icebergs ever recorded in human history break off into the sea.Scientists agree that global warming causes both the ice in the North and the South Pole to melt. Air temperatures are climbing, and so are water temperatures. This makes the ice melt faster. The period of winter, where the water is actually cold enough to freeze, is getting shorter, which means ice floes are getting smaller.

Greenland, home to the world's largest permanent ice sheet outside Antarctica, was being swept by wildfires already two years ago.. Yes, the land of ice was on fire. A really breath away taking situation. Scientists are keep on saying global warming and increased plant cover are likely factors. 

Honestly folks, it really scares me although experts say it is too early to draw firm conclusions linking the wild fires from all over the world to climate change because no long-term data is available to put the blaze in context. However, unusually warm and dry conditions  could have been a factor.

Although the origin of the global blaze (especially Australia or California) is unclear - with lightening and a stray cigarette as possible suspects - what is clear is how it has been spreading across remote areas of grassland and low shrub.  And Greenland's is indeed getting greener and greener. It conjures images of white, frozen expanses. But Box says global warming means it's getting greener all the time. "There's a shorter snow-cover season, and that allows the plant life to expand," he explained.

The Arctic is heating up around twice as fast as the global average. At the same time, rainfall around the world is also increasing - and that trend as well is more present in the Arctic. "More rain is a widespread symptom of climate change," Box said. "You get more precipitation - and where you get the biggest increase is in the Arctic."

Fact is: Greenland's ice sheets melt, that contributes to sea level rise. And if we add North- and South Pole and their vanishing ice and snow? Then yes, also the Philippines are in danger. 

One EARTH - our EARTH

As Philippine writer Ida Anita Q. del Mundo confessed: "With the formation of Earth Day Networks, people around the world have recognized the importance of taking care of the Earth. Now on its 40th year, countries all over the world will be clebrating Earth Day on April 22!"

Earth Day is indeed an example of the power of one - as Bebet Gozun, chairman of Earth Day Network Philippines and 2007 Champion of the Earth awardee of the United Nations Environment Program voiced it out several days ago.

In 1990, Earth Day went global, with the Philippines becoming one of 144 countries that joined the celebration. Since then, the Philippine branch of Earth Day Network has established itself as an active supporter of the cause. I really love to publish this also here on my website. During the last two years the Philippines placed first in the world when it comes to Earth Hour participation. 

This is the way for people how to show they care!

And, how DO YOU care?