Adrian's Possibilities

Ang Huling Laro ng Aking Anak by Joseph Adrian A. Maramba Have a long time playing computer games in a lifetime? How can persistence be done because of playing games with another one? The story has no glaring loopholes but the plot itself has a tendency to turn mawkish. It takes an excellent actress to astutely manage to hurdle the maudlin elements of the story. The story can touch on a timely concern among the youth - the seeming addiction to online games. But the story wisely does not just gloss over the issue but goes beyond the surface, presenting one poor lad's story as a microcosm that mirrors the many ills of modern technology and modern life, the consequences of video game gambling, how it almost breaks a family apart but in the end, gives that every family a chance to start over after a significant bump on the road. In effect, the episode also pays tribute to the resilience of most Filipino families. And I am talking here of the regular families that fight to s...

The Cool Story of Chinese Fans “Shaken in hand and a cool breeze embraces you,” this is one description of the cooling power of the delicate Chinese fan. The history of Chinese fan can be dated to over 3,000 years ago, around the Shang Dynasty (C.16th-11th BC). The first type of fan, known as Shanhan, was tied to a horse-drawn carriage to shut out the strong sunshine and shelter the passengers from the rainfall. The Shanhan was a bit like today’s umbrella. Later this Shanhan became a long-handled fan made of thin and tough silk or birds’ feathers, called a zhangshan fan, which was mainly used by the emperor’s honour guard as decoration. In fact, the fan was not used to help cool people until the Zhou Dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago. At that time, fan was usually made of feathers and called “feather fan,” which was only popular among the noble class. The fan was popularized during the Han Dynasty (206BC-AD220) when the simple bamboo fan and the cattail-leaf fan were inven...