Mushrooms and chickens
Posted by: Fats in: Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > Wala langA very productive day Sunday - we managed to go to the Quezon Memorial Circle again to visit our favorite AANI Herbal Garden and Livelihood Center, and to meet a friend of mine from the old BBS days. A very late lunch at Cafe Kalinga, a bit of a chat with Ven Abalos at the mushroom cultivation center, and we did finally get to see the grass-fed free range chickens and chicks, although they were already placed inside the cardboard boxes for transporting away. 
We also saw Desiree again at the Ala eh Cafe Amadeo, too. So it was a very pleasant afternoon.
And from Neal I got to borrow two books that will help a great deal in my work on computer programming languages - More Programming Pearls (by Jon Bentley) and Programming in Prolog (by WF Clocksin and CD Mellish). Finally, a good book on Prolog! Neal also advised me to consider Python instead of Turbo Pascal in my efforts to understand procedural languages. (See Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language by Kernighan). Well, I do have a small web tutorial for Python (by Alan Gauld).
And also finally, Trevor borrowed from Neal a copy of an old book that he’s read ages ago - Tracy Kidder’s, The Soul of the New Machine.
Goodness, so many interesting old books to read.
It is absolutely amazing how differently people thought before 1984 (the dreaded Orwellian year …), and how mushroom management* managed to overrule the world post-1984.
And now, as if aligning with the events of 9-11, there is going to be a rally at the NCCA in support of the struggle within the institution where an election scheduled Sept 11, at 11AM, will take place to put a new chairperson into the NCCA, subjecting it to full centralized government control. The situation at the NCCA for the past couple of years has been, as Peque Gallaga just described, “In total contradiction with its founding vision, the NCCA under the GMA (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo)-appointed Executive Director Cecile Guidote Alvarez is in grave danger of becoming nothing more than a huge piggybank for her ill-considered personal projects as well as a sinecure for government appointees fielded by officials and other bureaucrats of the present government.”
And come Sept 12 will be the verdict on the Erap plunder case. Because of a prior appointment, we might be right in the middle of the blockages and the demonstrations following the verdict … It will be yet another very interesting day.
* Mushroom management: Keep people in the dark, feed them shit and then chop their heads off. (At least the Sunshine chkickens at the AANI Center are fed fresh grass and are free to run about under the sun before they get their heads chopped off).
September 14th, 2007 at 8:32 am
The day’s report on the NCCA crisis last Sept 11. From ABS-CBN Interactive.
Artists and cultural workers want Alvarez out of NCCA
By BOY VILLASANTA
Cultural workers and artists expressed indignation over what they allege to be irregularities at the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA)even as they seek the ouster of NCCA Executive Director Cecille Guidote Alvarez.
In a pocket rally Tuesday morning in front of the NCCA office in Intramuros, Manila, the group called Reform the NCCA Movement Now condemned, among others, the termination of 22 national committees and the extention of terms of offices of four private and elected representatives of the SubCommission to the NCCA Board without a constituency to represent; and the election of the Board of DepEd Undersecretary Vilma Labrador as new NCCA Chairman purportedly under Malacañang’s pressure
The Reform the NCCA Movement Now reiterated the reinforcement of a consultative process among the members of the artistic community especially
from the ranks of the national committees and subcommissions before the Board acts on the revision of the IRR and other decisions that will affect
artists and the cultural communities.
Cris Rollo of the Visual Arts Division said the termination of the 22 national committees created a vacuum in the organization because the artists and cultural workers are divested of major representation in the country’s premier cultural agency.
“We need to be represented so that the voice and the will of the marginalized artists and cultural workers be heard,” Rollo said.
Writer and environmentalist Sylvia Mayuga, one of the organizers of the protest action said the consultation must be applied to the democratic processes in government including cultural agencies such as the NCCA.
Mayuga believed that there are still people in the NCCA who belong to the most enlightened progressive block who could lend an open mind to the libertarian discussion of a pro-people stance of the cultural agency.
The group also opposed the election of Labrador as the new chairman of the Board which, the group belives, is an act based on Malacanang orders.
According to Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera, National Artist for Literature, the NCCA should be a mouthpiece of the interests and aspirations of the majority
of the Filipino people.
“Ang artista ay kailangang magtaguyod at kumatawan sa kagalingan at kapakanan ng taumbayan. Ang artista ay dapat hinahayaan na maging malaya. Hindi siya dapat ginagamit ng gobyerno sa pansarili nitong kapakanan. (The artist should support and represent the rights and welfare of the people. The artists should not be used by the government for its own interests.)”
Alvarez faced the protesters and invited them to a dialogue.
“We need to see and prove to ourselves the existence of proofs before anyone accuses somebody of anything,” Alvarez said, adding the group shouldn’t believe everything her critics say.
Aside from playing politics in a cultural institution, Alvarez is also being charged of using the NCCA funds for her own projects “which flopped” according to her detractors.
These projects include a TV show “Sining Gising,” and a theatrical presentation entitled “Something to Crow About.”
“We have to sit down and solve all these. Don’t say lies without basis. I am inviting all of you to a dialogue so that we thresh out differences. We are
all artists and we can be one in our vision by dialogue,” Alvarez convincingly said.
“Just resign,” retorted back Elmar Ingles, an independent theater artist and one of Alvarez’s most vocal ardent critic. At this point, Guidote lost her cool
and challenged Ingles. “Ang buhay mo, itapat mo sa buhay ko. Magsukatan tayo (Compare your life to mine, measure for measure.”)
It was the intervention of Commissioner Rose Beatrix Angeles of the Subcommission on Cultural Heritage that pacified both camps. “We can talk about this very professionally,” Angeles asked Ingles and Alvarez.
The artists group refused the dialogue.