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THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ITS ORIGIN IS WESTERN. Al Gore’s film, Our Film, directed by David Guggenheim, has just won the Oscar for ‘Best Documentary’ as I revise this 26 February 2007, at high noon Manila time. An inconvenient truth is that it is high time we revise everything we have on our hands that has anything to do with polluting the physical environment, not to mention polluting the psychological, spiritual, political, economic environments, not necessarily in that order. The Inconvenient Truth  as documentary also won the Oscar for ‘Best Original Song’ with the one written by Melissa Etheridge, ‘I Need To Wake Up.’ We need to wake up to the reality that we have to have faith in whom we can’t see, such as God and gravity, and to believe in the things we can’t touch, such as the ozone layer above our heads and the bottom of the iceberg beneath our feet. A crewman said of the Titanic: ‘God himself could not sink this ship’ ( National Geographic  quoted in Next...

Global warming is heating up the thinking of the world about an inconvenient truth:   FIRE & ICE . Except that of the Yankees, the Rip Van Winkles of the Millennium. Remember Washington Irving? You will also remember The Legend Of The Sleepy Yankees a hundred years from now. I certainly hope the world is still around  around  that time. One hot little verse written by my favorite Yankee poet Robert Frost, ‘Fire And Ice,’ published in Harper’s Magazine  in the winter of 1920, has been inflaming the hearts of many a reviewer of poetry. I like what Katherine Kearns says of it: ‘Like ice shrieking across a red-hot griddle, his poetry does, indeed, ride on its own melting.’ I like best how Jeffrey Meyers describes it (1996, english.uiuc.edu/): ‘concise, laconic, perfect and perfectly savage.’ Fire And Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I thi...

Management: Relating Is Everything.  HIS NAME IS LESS IMPORTANT HERE THAN HIS WORLD-CLASS ACHIEVEMENT IN MANAGING RICE PEOPLE. HOW IMPORTANT IS THAT? RICE IS THE FOOD OF MORE THAN HALF OF THE WORLD’S 6,500 MILLION HUMANS. IN ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE, I GET 200 MILLION ENGLISH PAGES FROM GOOGLE IN 0.50 SECONDS SEARCHING FOR RICE. In case you wanted to know: The actual search entries I typed were: rice -condoleeza -“rice university” -tim -anne -“edgar rice burroughs” – the minus sign (not hyphen) means ‘by all means exclude in the search.’ And the search results were only the pages published in the Internet. Here’s a comparative data on the importance of subject knowledge based on Google search in number of English pages: 81.2 million, Shakespeare 79.2 million,  Lost  TV Series 55.3 million, Al Qaeda 33.8 million, Beatles 31.7 million,  Da Vinci Code 31.0 million, Bill Gates 22.3 million, Albert Einstein 19.4 million, Tiger Woods 17.5 million, Britney Spears 02.3...