Malditang Librarian

[Note: may contain some spoilers but nothing major] The last film I saw in the movie theater was Wonder Woman , an amazing superhero movie on a character based on Greek Mythology. Marvel's Avengers franchise have produced a string of successful superhero blockbuster movies for a long time now: we're all familiar with Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and of course, the Norse god of thunder Thor and his trickster brother, Loki. I'm not a huge fan of this franchise or comic books, but I can enjoy a movie from time to time. I watched the first movie Thor in 2011, it was funny and entertaining, and I followed the storyline of Thor and Loki through the next few Avengers films I've watched. Thor: Ragnarok is the third installment of the Thor movies, and here Thor is battling a new (yet old) enemy: Hela, the goddess of death played by the superb Cate Blanchett. She also played the other-worldly Galadriel, leader of the elves in Lord of the Rings . I loved how on...

Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan is a Filipino crime novel which has won numerous literary awards: the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for the English Novel in 1999, the National Book Award 2002, and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Award 2003. It was first published by UP Press, but the edition I bought was a revised version published by Soho Press New York. It has been made to a movie with the same title in 2016 starring Nonie Buencamino and Sid Lucero. It claimed to be the 'First Filipino Crime Novel' and since that's a genre I like, of course I bought the book. The story is about a series of gruesome murders of young boys in the Payatas Dumpsite, and two well-educated Jesuit priests aid the investigations. Father Gus Saenz is a forensic anthropologist and his protege and former student, Father Jerome Lucero, helps him in solving the case. The killings have a pattern: the victims' faces are ripped off, the heart and genitals removed, and they all seem to occur the firs...

True Detective (season 1, 2014) is an HBO crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolato. It's about two Louisiana detectives Rustin 'Rust' Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin 'Marty' Hart (Woody Harrelson) who investigated a murder in 1995: A woman named Dora Lange is found murdered, her body kneeling, hands in prayer, blindfolded, with a crown of antlers on her head. Seventeen years later (2012), they found that the case isn't quite closed yet - they discover more unsolved cases of missing and murdered women and children. After being estranged for a long time due to personal conflicts, they must team up again. The story is told through flashbacks to 1995 as the estranged partners are separately interviewed for a police investigation of the unsolved cases. We see them as older men in 2012 as they talk about their story. Marty and Rust were assigned as partners to solve the case. Rust in introverted and nicknamed as the "Tax Man" due to ...

While browsing on Facebook for reviews of cafes in Megaworld Iloilo, I stumbled upon the page of Book Latte (if you like books and coffee, try it) and registered for an event that sounded interesting: Creating Stories . It was affordable and included food, so I thought I might give it a try. The event was hosted by Nile on Weekends , and there were three speakers who talked about three different topics. The first topic by the host was on blogging, and the speaker introduced what blogging is, its advantages, and blogging ethics. Interesting to note that due to current events, blogging is under the spotlight (a kind of negative one). Mocha Uson is under heat in a Senate Hearing about Fake News, and we have heard her say "Hindi po ako Journalist, I'm a blogger" and Nancy Binay saying in reply, "It’s high time for you to decide if you want to be a blogger or if you want to be an Asec." In all these, blogging seems to have gotten a bad image. However, Nile...

Photo credit: Dan Dimmock  @ Unsplash This is my last semester in grad school with regular classes. I'm currently taking up Research and Statistics, prerequisites for Thesis Writing. This is also the semester that I taught for the first time. Somehow I was 'expected' to teach - like how it was always assumed that if I excel in my grades in college, I'm also good in heading student organizations (I hated that and I wasn't!), and now it seems that since I graduated with honors and luckily topped a professional licensure examination, there was an unspoken expectation that I was to teach. I don't mean that in a negative way. I always thought that I would teach eventually. Both my parents were university instructors before their current jobs. I was also curious what it was like. As a student, I've always been an independent learner. I saw my teachers as my guides, but I set off to learn in my own way. I've always believed that I'm responsible for my...

A post by the Invercargill City Libraries and Archives  of New Zealand went viral. Six librarians posed for a photoshoot inspired by the Hollywood Reporter cover with the Kardashian family celebrating the 10th year of their reality-TV show  Keeping up with the Kardashians . Check out the photo below and the original cover: Their post caption reads: "It has been 10 years since the Kardashians first graced our screens. To celebrate, our social media team decided to have a totally impromptu, definitely not planned, photo-shoot." As of this writing, the post has about 9,300 likes and has been shared for nearly 4,000 times. The post got both positive and negative reactions but it was done all in the name of good fun. This library has also created fun content to promote the library in other ways . Its great to see librarians using their creativity and promote their libraries at the same time. I hope we Filipino librarians also get a clue from them. Even our simple posts o...

"The Archivist" art by Martin Motett Inspired by "Why I became a librarian" by Von Totanes (of the Filipino Librarian blog) from Rappler. When I was younger, I wasn't a reader at all. My grade school friends and classmates were conyo  English-speakers and were deep into reading Harry Potter before it was even a popular movie. I didn't feel like I belonged with them. I wasn't a smart student based on my average grades, but I was interested in logic, philosophy, and ideas. The first book I remember that really fascinated me was an old book, The World We Live in and How it Came to Be. I think it was my first exposure to the world as it was. It described the history of humankind from the splitting of the first cell, and all the important events (the invention of the Printing Press, the telegraph, and the telephone; the wars, plagues, and religions that have shaped history) until space travel. I somehow lost the book, but I remember that reading it a...