By Pablo TarimanInquirerFirst Posted 12:42:00 02/05/2007Filed Under: Arts, Culture & EntertainmentTHE SAN MIGUEL Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorale are dead.Late last month, instrumentalists of the only corporate-supported orchestra in the country were summoned one by one by the big bosses who informed them of the non-renewal of their contracts. Same thing happened to the members of the San Miguel Chorale.Many of the orchestra and chorale members did not get separation pay. It’s not known what happened to Ryan Cayabyab, the executive and artistic director of the San Miguel Foundation for the Performing Arts.Insiders say that San Miguel Corp., the biggest food and beverage company in Southeast Asia, was “more inclined” to support basketball. San Miguel has four basketball teams in the professional league - San Miguel, Ginebra, Coca-cola and Purefoods.The latest income statement by San Miguel shows the conglomerate in the utmost pink of health. In November, it reported that its nine-month net income grew 18 percent, to P6.17 billion from P5.22 billion in the same period last year, boosted by its strong local and international beer operations and strong sales by its Australian dairy unit, National Foods Ltd.Both founded in 2001, the highly promising San Miguel Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorale were suddenly disbanded while no one was looking. No one is expected to drink to that.
“Tropical Storm Ondoy (International Code Name Ketsana)
It kept raining last night up to the early hours of this morning, but there wasn’t anything about it that could have warned us of what was to come today.
Heavy rain started to fall at around 9:30 am or so (I was already at the office at the time) and I thought it would last for only a brief moment as rain as hard as that usually does. But I was wrong… very wrong. It lasted for more than six hours non-stop.
It was my first time to see rain falling as hard as that last that long.
I have been told that there’s a section in Araneta Avenue where all the cars left on the street were submerged and that only their roofs were showing!
Sadly, our house was not spared. It’s currently flooded inside to almost knee deep."
"To my deepest regret I have to inform you that the PST server had a major hardware failure and everything on the hard drive was wiped."
Dictatorship!
Now the black foul deed is out.
Absolute power—not just decree making power—but ABSOLUTE UNLIMITED POWER was after all the final objective.
This was the ultimate sordid plan after all.
Blacken Marcos. Destroy him with propaganda. Even having won the elections push him out from the beginning with charges of hidden wealth and massive fraud.
Falsehoods and fabrications to immobilize him from using the military power under him.
Simple scenario enough.
Then drive him out or kidnap him from Malacañang Palace, the seat of power.
Hidden wealth, torture, insurgency.
Thrive after grabbing power to steal both government and private wealth.
So today the unabated looting of both public and private wealth, each one pointing to the other as the culprit.
Looting by the rich and powerful. Looting by men in uniform. Looting by hoodlums. Looting by the poor.
For the dictator who is no less a looter protects her kind.
The dictator is in full control and the dictator has unsatiated appetite not only for private vengeance but for sheer viciousness and masochism--inflicting pain on others to soothe her poor troubled mind and conscience.
Cry my beloved people. So easily and quickly did we lose the freedom, justice and dignity or self respect for which so many millions of our lives had been sacrificed.
Now we must war again against the monster who imposes slavery anew.
Death, yes—perhaps.
Slavery—never—
I cry for my people and country.
Diaclone was a toyline by Takara Toys launched in 1980. It consisted of transforming vehicles and robots piloted by miniature, magnet-shoed figures spun off from the prior Microman toy line that were in turn called an Inch-Man.
The toys in the 1980 line were designed by future Macross designers Shoji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake (both contracted from Studio Nue), who designed the mecha and the figures respectively. Unlike Microman, which featured "full-scale" toys of its 10 centimeter tall alien cyborgs, the figures in Diaclone represented full-sized human (and enemy alien Waruder) pilots, and were in approximately 1/60th scale.
In 1982, the line later featured the Car-Robots set of transforming robot toys, invented by Koujin Ohno with some initial designs by Kawamori and others. While the original series featured fanciful robots and vehicles, Car-Robots added the feature of the robots being able to disguise themselves as various late 20th century-era contemporary vehicles. In 1984, Hasbro licensed the Car-Robots toyline along with the Microman "Micro Change" toyline from Takara and merged the two series of toys to create the Transformers. Most of the original Autobot vehicle-based characters came from the Car-Robots set of Diaclone robots. Other Transformers characters that came from the Diaclone line included the Dinobots, Insecticons (from the enemy Waruder toys), the Decepticon planes (originally from 2 "JetRobo" toys, produced in the colors of future Decepticons Starscream and Thundercracker) and the Constructicons, who also came from the Car-Robots set. The Constructicons came from near the end of the series, at which point Takara was starting to abandon the Inch-Man pilot figures and being limited to the 1/60th scale. The 6 TrainRobo were also produced in the same sub-line as the Constructicons, but would only become Transformers (as the Trainbots) in Japan's 1987 line.
Takara eventually discontinued the Diaclone and Microman toylines in 1985 in favor of the more successful Transformers rebranding.
