Pet Melliza

Wellness tourism  Today's resource persons are owners managers of spas or "wellness centers" in Iloilo city.  Ms. Beverly Lopez's Kasanag Wellness Center specializes in traditional Bisaya "hilut" that utilizes warm banana leaves and hot stone therapy. Ilonggos go to the traditional hilut to treat their fever or painful muscles and joints. Vina Hanada's Face Value and Facial Care Spa Center not only serves as massage clinic but also as beauty saloon of sort because its services include facial massage that stretches wrinkles and removes dead skin from the foot. Another resource person, Jeffrey Celiz, political liaison officer of Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog has a suggestion for city hall to help Iloilo's budding spa business by including them and their employees in its tourism promotion guides and flyers.  For one, the sector may organize and create its directory or lists of members for the convenience of their clientele. The two spa owne...

THE BEEKEEPER | By  Pet Melliza  | Definitely, Iloilo has changed. Its old domestic airport has been decommissioned and in lieu of that is a bigger one at the junction of Sta. Barbara and Cabatuan towns, 24 kilometers away from the city. The new airport is tagged “of international standards” because it can accommodate big planes used for international flights. Before, travellers walked on the tarmac to their planes. Today, there are airconditioned and lighted tubes connected directly to the doors of planes for convenient ingress and egress of crews and passengers. In Iloilo, however, those tubes are becoming irrelevant or mere decors because airlines are sadistic, they are thrilled in subjecting passengers to inconvenience in embarking and disembarking - they make them walk on the tarmac regardless of time and weather. When it drizzles or when the sunlight is intolerable, airlines don’t even have the courtesy of offering passengers umbrellas. The most notorious practicing...

By PET MELLIZA/ The Beekeeper A mini-bus touring pre-schoolers from Passi, Iloilo was blocked in Jaro and prevented from proceeding to the pier, final leg of the educational tour where the kids were booked for lunch. The kids’ guide, a pastor, was heard on air pleading for city authorities to relax  the Perimeter Boundary Ordinance (PBO) that restricted provincial PUJs  within private terminals at the city’s outskirts and in the public Super Market  area. A councilor in charge of the traffic denied their  request to get to the port. He croaked, looked and thought like a frog in invoking the “dungog” of Iloilo City; he felt insulted when outsiders “violated our ordinances”. “Ginahimu lang kita nga kaladlawan,” he croaked. A mini-busload of tourists missed lunch and proceeded to southern Iloilo. That day, a restaurant missed an income catering to the visitors. *** A traffic aide at the UPV junction flagged down an Iloilo – Leganes jeepney to help an elderly woman ...

Today's resource person at Kape kag Isyu, former justice secretary Raul Gonzalez, Sr., warned that the Aquino administration's knack to disrespect the independence of the judiciary reveals the President's tendency to be autocratic.  On local politics, Gonzalez admitted he and two other political figurres -- Larry Jamora and Rommel Ynion -- had been meeting. He admitted that the Comelec may dismiss his election protest on the basis of the technical problems in the automated elections which he alleged to have been reprogrammed to ensure his defeat and that of his son and namesake who was running for his third and final term in Congress.  Signs of manipulated counting: all PICUS machines in Iloilo City failed to transmit their result via email because there was "no signal". Remote barangays in the boondocks of Iloilo were already done by 8 pm. All thE PICUS machines were kept in the private houses of elections supervisors, instead of being kept at the school or ...

By Pet Melliza/ The Beekeeper   I  had the rare opportunity to talk with Deputy Ombudsman for the Visayas Pelagio Apostol, and he confirmed the abusive behavior of Virginia Palanco-Santiago. This woman was part of the cover-up structure put together by Mark Jalandoni to protect the crooks and plunderers in the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo government. Apostol said she is evil.” –  (Manuel Mejorada, Iloilo-based columnist) What happened to  Ma. Merceditas Gutierrez, the Ombudsman forced to resign on April 30 by an impeachment in progress? Nothing is heard from her since then. She sullied her name in the nine years that she served the Arroyo administration as the country’s top graft buster, to be more specific, as protector of the country’s top crooks like First Gentleman Mike being publicly perceived as one. Since she left, Gutierrez is literally off the hook though she ought to be held accountable as co-conspirator and coddler of prime suspects in celebrated thievery c...

When did the industrial and cultural revolution begin? Short of calling the papacy bastion of ignorance, Edwin Catacutan says: "The Pope even made the sun revolve around the earth...the Industrial Revolution, and with it, science and culture, took giant strides after England divorced from Vatican." We may also say by inference, in mainland Europe, humanity also began the Industrial Revolution and the great intellectual and cultural awakening, the Rennaisance, when the monk Martin Luther and the Germans and the rest of Northern Europe "divorced" from the Dark Age preserved by the Pope. Edwin Catacutan, a practicing lawyer based in Iloilo has dabbled into literature with his book "Creation, Fall and Redemption" subtitled "A Lawyer's Incursion into Theology" The meeting was coincidental. We both have cases to be heard at the MTCC Branch 7 that morning of December 7, 2011 when Edwin broached the fact that he has just published a book.  The ph...

Despite its beauty, Iloilo River still remains the Philippines' largest septic tank, next only to Pasig. The city has no liquid waste treatment facility. Buildings and residences along the river have no septic tank but directly empty their effluents into the river. There are at least 200 establishments to include, government buildings, hospitals, schools, restaurants and an abattoir that directly discharge their untreated wastes in the Iloilo River which is actually an arm of the sea, not a real river .