MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND?

“Money makes the world go round; however, happiness greases the axle.

Without this lubricant, life will seize.”

― Paul Van Der Merwe

The lyrics of 'Money makes the world go round' may be somewhat repetitive but ... that the speed with which the money went around would affect the economy.

"People Make the World Go Round" is a song written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed, originally recorded by The Stylistics and released in 1972 through Avco Records as the final single from their self-titled debut studio album, The Stylistics (1971). It reached #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, #25 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and #6 on the Soul Singles chart in the United States.

Some people have money to burn! Every time I observe them, I feel that their money is going down their drain. Yes, "money talks". The more money you have, the more you might become avaricious. Every time we have to dig deeper into our pockets, we might long to be like those people, who don't see the difference between a 500 or 1,000 bill.

I am really not rich! I also wouldn't hesitate to say that I would like to be so! Being rich means having wealth! Wealth is abundance, opulence and affluence. Affluences become quickly influenced. Dyed-in-the-wool millionaires or even multi-millionaires lose their view of reality many times. They can't even see the horizon, which could be the demarcation of their real estate. They don't even recognize the wonderful flowers growing and blooming in their gardens.

Money calms down! Sure. No doubts at all! We all need an income to survive for our daily needs - and, maybe, a little bit more. Many of us struggle through life and work like slaves for a pitiful daily minimum wage. If you're rich, you might be on the top. But believe me, once you are on top, you will have some unwelcome, mostly acceptable companions such as loneliness, so-called friends (!), parasites and free-loaders.

These companions will let you scream in pain, because you will start missing things you have expected from them: real friendship, love, care, comprehension, understanding, sympathy, appreciation... .Remember such things? Miss such things?

Yes, money can give you a wonderful sleep, and you might stay in one of the most luxurious beds - but being awake, while your poorest neighbor sleeps better and more peacefully on the floor. There are many sayings about money. I like this one: Money can buy books but not brains. You might study a lot and get a lot of experiences; it's just a pity, if you don't use them at the right time for the right people in your surroundings.

Money can buy food but no appetite. Who reaps the benefits of it? A full to overflowing store room will never be satisfying, if sour free-loaders join your table and push away your real friends.

Our last earthly dress has no more pockets. The remembrance of how we acted and lived together with our fellow creatures will remain forever. With money, we might be able to let the devil dance. But, money alone doesn't make us happy. Money kills more people and friendships than a cudgel.

The more money, the more problems.

The more money, the more we have to pay and the higher our bills become... .

Money makes the world go round, the world goes round ... .

LPG prices up by P3.25-P3.27/kg

by Myrna M. Velasco, Manila Bulletin

Household budget for cooking fuel will be stretched anew this April as the price of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) products have been increased by P3.25 per kilogram to P3.27 per kg or aggregate P35.75 to P35.97 for the standard 11-kilogram cylinder.

The LPG price hike took effect Friday, April 1 until end this month, based on the pricing parameter being enforced in the industry.

As of this writing, LPG firms that already adjusted their prices had been Petron Corporation for its Gasul and Fiesta LPG; Phoenix Petroleum Philippines Inc. for its Super LPG; and Solane LPG.

Of the three players, Solane implemented the biggest hike of P3.27 per kilogram, while Petron and Phoenix LPG products raised their prices by P3.25 per kg.

Additionally, Petron announced P1.81 per liter hike on its autoLPG while Phoenix Petroleum imposed a slightly leaner increase of P1.80 per liter for that alternative fuel for the transport sector.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has attributed the uptick in international contract prices that had been primarily benchmarked with Saudi Aramco, the pricing reference for Asian markets.

Prior to this round of cost adjustment, the pick-up price of LPG products in Metro Manila retail outlets had been at P880.45 to P1,140 per tank, according to the monitoring report of the energy department.

In April 2021, LPG prices ranged from P605 to P784 per cylinder as against this month’s prices of P995 to P1,175 or roughly P300 to P400 higher in just a span of one year.

Costlier LPG will further erode the purchasing power of Filipino consumers, who in several months had also been saddled with series of astronomical upswings at the pumps.

For next week, however, the general expectation will be rollback for gasoline and diesel prices.

Dagupan City sizzles at 52°C heat index

by Ellalyn De Vera-Ruiz, Manila Bulletin

The highest heat index in the country on Friday, April 1, was recorded in Dagupan City, Pangasinan at 52 degrees Celsius (°C).

The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) defines heat index as the measurement of how hot it feels when relative humidity is factored in with the actual air temperature.

If the heat index is over 52°C, PAGASA said there is “extreme danger” as “heatstroke is imminent.”

Based on its monitoring on Friday, the five monitoring stations that logged the highest heat index values for the day were:

Dagupan City, Pangasinan (52°C, 2 p.m.)

Masbate City, Masbate (41°C, 2 p.m.)

Calapan, Oriental Mindoro (41°C, 2 p.m.)

Iba, Zambales (41°C, 2 p.m.)

Zamboanga City, Zamboanga del Sur (40°C, 1 p.m.)

With heat indices between 41°C and 51°C, PAGASA said there is impending “danger as heat cramps and heat exhaustion are likely,” while “heat stroke is probable with continued activity.”

So far, Dagupan City registered the highest heat index in 2022 at 53℃ on March 17.

Heat index is at least 3 degrees Celsius (°C) to 4°C higher than the actual air temperature.

However, PAGASA said that full exposure to sunshine can increase the heat index by 8 degrees Celsius.

From March to May, PAGASA provides heat index monitoring and forecast information that can be viewed on their website.

All Fools Day in the age of fake news

by Manila Bulletin

Are you sure you’re reading this right? It’s April Fools’ Day.

It’s celebrated around the world in many different ways, but in any way it is observed, someone has to play the fool.

In the Philippines, as in Spain and Mexico, there is a Yuletide version of April Fools’ Day — Niños Inocentes, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, as we call it, or Dia de los Santos Inocentes as it is for the Spanish and the Mexicans. It’s celebrated every year on Dec. 28 in remembrance of the massacre of the newborns and the firstborns in Bethlehem by order of King Herod of Judea in reaction to a prophecy that, the King of the Jews thus born, one of those children could oust him.

Through the years, the commemoration of this biblical tragedy has not been as grim, being part of a festive season. An angel warned Joseph, who brought his family, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, to safety in Egypt before the massacre took place, so the joke was on Herod. He played the fool and so the day, much like its April counterpart, has since become a day of pranks, the day revelers try to find someone, a friend or family member, to play Herod, the fool.

Niños Inocentes is All Fools Day in December, replete with spoof reports and lots of humor in the newspapers and the news channels in most Spanish-speaking countries, where the jokes are called “inocentadas.” Until the 1980s, Filipinos would avoid lending anything, especially money, on Dec. 28 because chances were they would never get it back.

Today is All Fools’ Day in April and in most countries, this is the day to play pranks on unsuspecting folk. No one knows exactly where it originated. There have been suggestions that it might have been prompted by reactions to the Edict of Rousillon, promulgated by Charles IX in 1564, to change the date of the New Year from Easter to Jan. 1 throughout Christendom. Those who failed to see that Easter was lunar — meaning falling on “the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox” — and therefore a moveable feast were subsequently called poisson d’avril or April fools.

Once upon a time, All Fools Day was a big deal.

In 1957, the BBC played a spoof documentary of a family in Ticino in Switzerland harvesting strands of spaghetti from a tree, like grape from a vine, to which Americans reacted with as much incredulity as with great interest, wanting, as the BBC has put it, “to find out where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.”

In the mid-1990s, Taco Bell took out full-page ads in seven leading American newspapers to announce that, in the hope of helping the US reduce its debt, it had purchased the Liberty Bell and renamed it the Taco Liberty Bell, eliciting thousands of calls, many from irate citizens, for both Taco Bell and the National Park Service, before it was revealed at noon on April 1, 1996 that it was all a hoax. The ad won many awards.

Those days are gone. Nowadays, we potentially play the fool every time news on the web astounds us. The internet has ruined All Fools Day — or made it every day.

DA declares bird flu outbreak in the Philippines

The Department of Agriculture (DA) declared on Wednesday, March 30, an outbreak of Avian Influenza (AI) or H5N1 in the country.

This, as the DA reported an increasing number of avian flu cases mostly in Central Luzon.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar said duck and quail farms in Central Luzon farms are mostly affected by bird flu, which he reiterated, was caused by migratory birds visiting the country.

We need faith for miracles to happen

By Fr. Roy Cimagala *

GIVEN the precarious and wounded condition of our human life, plus the fact that we are meant to live a supernatural life, one that is simply beyond our human powers to attain without the help of God’s grace, we have to understand that many times we need to ask for miracles, those extraordinary interventions we ask of God for the simple reason that we would just find ourselves in some situations to be helpless and hopeless.

In fact, in the world today, we can detect an increasing number of predicaments that often reduce us to helplessness. This can be brought about by the new technologies that, while giving us a lot of advantages, can also cause great harm. Yes, these new technologies are a double-edged sword.

This truth about our need for faith for miracles to happen was illustrated many times in the gospel where all sorts of people approached Christ asking for some miracles. In the gospel of St. John (4,43-54) for example, we are given that episode of a royal official who begged Christ to heal his ill son. And the main factor that made that miracle take place was the faith that officials had.

“Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe,” Christ said. But the royal official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “You may go; your son will live.” And since that official believed, his son was cured.

We have to have a strong faith for miracles to happen. If we have this kind of faith, we know that we always need to go to Christ, like those many helpless characters in the gospel who approached him for a cure. In other words, we cannot anymore rely on our human natural and human powers alone to handle our extraordinary predicaments. We have to beg for miracles!

Miracles are certainly part of what God has made available for our problems. When St. Paul said: “God will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it,” (1 Cor 10,13) he must have included this extraordinary recourse to miracles as one of God’s ways for us to endure any temptation or predicament.

And so let us go to Christ like the blind man Bartimaeus (Mk 10,46-52), the woman with the flow of blood (Mk 5,25), the 10 lepers (Lk 17,11-19), the man born blind (Jn 9,1-12), the man possessed by a legion of devils (Mk 5,1-10), and many others. Let’s go to him without delay, without hesitation.

We can also help others go to Christ if they themselves cannot do it, like what the father of a possessed boy did (Mk 9,17-24), those who brought a paralytic to Christ (Mk 2,4), the centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant (Lk 7,1-10), etc. We can do a lot of good to others if we do this.

What is important is that we approach Christ with deep faith. In those miraculous cures Christ did, he always referred to the great faith of those who asked for those miracles.

Let us humble ourselves so that that faith can grow and show itself in deeds, like intense prayers and sacrifice. Remember what Christ told his disciples why they could not cure an epileptic boy. It was because of their little faith. (cfr. Mt 17,20)

* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

How will you preserve the traditional dances in the Philippines?

 

Ben Haryo

12+ years of working in International sports

2,431 followers

84 following

Not a historian, not a vegetarian, not cultured and not known for having high IQ.

The preservation of traditional dancing in ALL Southeast Asian countries will follow the same pattern. Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand etc is the same.

Most important is to raise the awareness and interests of the young generation of the dances, and get them to learn and enjoy such activities. With a new generation of dancers, the art will survive to the next era.

To achieve this, The Government should actively promote Filipino traditional dances. These folk dances should be performed on every opportunities such as community events and in every cultural program.

Regional and National competition should be organized which helps to preserve and promote traditional dances.

It is very advantageous to recruit popular young celebrities to become the ambassador of traditional dances. They will inspire children and teenagers to take up traditional dancing. Or at least to appreciate the culture and not seeing these traditions as “not worth my time”.

Here is an interesting article in a scientific journal about traditional filipino dancing.

Strengthening and Preserving Practices of Philippine Folk Dances in Relation to Cultural Awareness of Secondary Students of Davao City

Cultural awareness is the foundation of literate national communication. It involves one’s ability to stand back from where he or she is to become more aware of cultural values, beliefs and perceptions. Strengthening and preserving these values, beliefs, and traditions can pose a great challenge especially today when culture has become vulnerable because of globalization. It is on this ground that this study was conducted to determine the levels of practices in strengthening and preserving Philippine folk dances and general knowledge of folkdances as a measure of cultural awareness of secondary students of Davao City. The respondents of the study were the 37 MAPEH teachers and 1,896 secondary school students of School Year 2011-12 teaching or enrolled, respectively, in public high schools in three congressional districts of Davao City. The mean was used to describe the levels of practices concerning the strengthening and preserving of Philippines folk dances and Pearson-r was employed to test the relationship between each of these variables and cultural awareness. A researcher-made survey questionnaire was constructed and tested for validity and reliability. A 20-item multiple choice test was also administered to the student respondents of the study. Findings revealed that there is a high level of strengthening and preserving practices for Philippine folk dances with an overall mean of 3.69 and 3.64, respectively, and level of cultural awareness of students is good as quantified by a mean score of 11.03. Further, strengthening practices, such as being careful but allowing students to explore Philippine folk dance, was encouraged while preserving practices, such as resisting any alteration of folk dances and reading literature before the dance, are also prevalent among MAPEH teachers. On the other hand, students are more knowledgeable of the dance literature than about folk dances. However, strengthening and preserving practices by the MAPEH teachers have no significant relationship with the general knowledge as a measure of cultural awareness of the student of Philippine folk dances.

https://ejournals.ph/article.php?id=2151

I hope this answers your question!

God will always forgive us

By Fr. Roy Cimagala *

NEVER doubt this truth of our Christian faith. As illustrated in that beautiful parable of the prodigal son (cfr. Lk 15,11-32), God is always ready to forgive us, no matter what sin we commit. All we have to do is just to go back to him in repentance, just like what the prodigal son did.

In life, anything can happen. We try to do what is good, but sometimes our idea of what is good can actually be bad. We just have to remember that even in our worst possible scenario, we can always count on God’s ever-ready mercy as long as we decide to come home to him.

We should always strengthen our faith in God’s mercy and compassion. Of course. We should also try not to abuse God’s goodness, even if we know that despite our best efforts we may end up abusing it just the same. But whatever happens, we should come home. Just come home to our Father God. That’s what matters in the end.

We need to strengthen our spirit of divine filiation—that God is our father who is all merciful and compassionate, who is all willing to do anything for us just to get us back to him. He knows that even if he has made us to be his image and likeness, that dignity often spoils us, and so we get into trouble.

This truth about our divine filiation is worth reiterating. It is what truly grounds us to the foundation of our life and nature, giving us the meaning and purpose of our existence. It’s a source of joy, confidence and serenity. It tells us what our filial rights and duties are.

More importantly, it tells us who we are and gives us an abiding sense that we are never alone, or worse, just on our own. It fills us with the conviction that we are children of God, that no matter what happens, God will always be with us and for us unless we reject him.

We have to be wary of our tendency to think that we are just on our own. That would be an attitude that can be suggested only by the devil who will always tell lies. Sad to say, many people are succumbing to this trick of the devil. That’s why many now fall into some deep despair when misfortune comes their way. They feel there’s no one else to run to anymore. We should do everything to strengthen our spirit of divine filiation.

Let’s always remember that God “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they return from their ways and live.” (Ez 33,11) And as shown by Christ, God does not wait for man to turn back to him. He takes the initiative to reach out to us, sinners.

In all the miracles that he performed, Christ was more interested in forgiving the sins of those involved than in healing them of their infirmities and predicaments. His love and compassion went beyond the concern for the bodily health of those characters. He focused more on their spiritual recovery. 

We have to see to it that in proclaiming the gospel to the others, in our effort to present Christ to the others, we should not simply talk about the strictness of God’s demands and expectations from us, the high standard that he is setting for us. This will scare people more than attract them to Christ. We should always include God’s mercy in all our preaching and counseling.

 God will always forgive us.

* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

Deutschland – ein Frühlings-Märchen! Germany - a spring fairy tail

 

Deutschland – ein Frühlings-Märchen!

Endlich! Auch wenn der Wind noch vielerorts kalt ist – der Frühling lässt sich nicht mehr aufhalten. Überall in Deutschland blühen wie hier im Düsseldorfer Hofgarten schon Bäume und Blumen. Am Wochenende erwartet uns allerdings ein Mix aus Sonne und Regenschauern. Die Temperaturen reichen von neun Grad im Erzgebirge bis zu 22 Grad am Oberrhein.

(C) 2022 BILD

ASSERTIONS TO BEAR

We love to complain! Many times we don't have reasons at all to do so - but, we love to complain. Especially nowadays. Our world is full of mess - isn't it? Of course, somehow it is indeed if you look around.

We bring many more assertions to bear: first, in the past we have been thriftier and economical, more religious and devout, more patriotic, industrious, more hard-working, keen and obedient. And, second, above everything and all: in the past we had more idealists. Third, nowadays we have (mostly?) material things in mind - what a disgrace. 

Materialists or idealists? Materialism or Idealism? Whom or what do you love? Love most?

I just quoted Vox Populi... .

A "materialist" has indeed become a swear word. I don't mean with "material" the accumulated data out of which a writer creates a work of literary, historical, or scientific value. A materialist is being easily described as someone with an attitude, who ignores spiritual values, compared with an idealist, who has the tendency to seek the highest spiritual perfection.

Idealism means the doctrine that appearance is purely the perception, the idea of subjects, and that the world is to be regarded as consisting of mind. The coquetry of higher philosophy makes it difficult to bear the ups and downs in our daily life.

Sure, we all know that "our last earthly dress has no pockets  any more". Striving for earthly and terrestrial possession, property and estate might be the hit-man of idealism. That's how we have been taught. "Wine, women and song", having the unpleasant feeling of fullness, egoism and bragging as well as showing-off - are these the materialist's real attitudes?

Is the idealist, many times not being able to stand on earth with both feet, the only one who occupies himself with religion and virtuousness - so to speak, with celestial and heavenly things? Is that really so? Can we make such a distinction? Sure, it's easy to do so: it's manageable and comfortable. But well, why is the enjoyment of having a tasty meal BAD, and listening to a recital composed by Johann Sebastian Bach BETTER? Why should art be better than roasted pork and a bottle of wine? Value judgements and moral concepts... .

Owning a house and lot and a car  - or even more then one - are earthly properties, as well as bank saving accounts, profitable insurances, and invest advantageously in stocks. Is a terrible underpaid nurse or a book author an idealist, because he or she doesn't work for the filthy lure but for higher values? 

Has Jesus been an idealist, because He accepted renunciation and died without terrestrial possession? Has Jesus been a materialist, because He fed thousands of people on the breadline? Are we idealists, if we bequeath nothing to our families and might die without a single centavo, because earthly things are bad?

Worth to think about it ... .