Even the New York Times shares fake news. In June 2, 2019, the paper wrote, "Visa applicants to the United States are required to submit any information about social media accounts they have used in the past five years …."

Nonsense. It is all propaganda. Copies of the content of our social media accounts are already in the database of the National Security Agency (NSA). So, if we have been ruthless and unfair to Senator Leila de Lima, we have to delete our Facebook and Friendster. The best summer destinations for us are still North Korea and Antarctica. We may visit China, but the rumor is to get a Chinese visa, we have to donate a healthy kidney.

FACEBOOK LOG, DECEMBER 7, 2012. My kids are four and six.  I see strange movement, something out of Twilight Zone. When I accompany them to SM CDO, holding their hands as we walk, I sense an unusual, progressive decrease of their weight directly proportional to the distance of Toy Kingdom. About 20 meters towards this mysterious place, the kids levitate and attain total independence from external forces, moving ahead of me as if zooming to the future in a time machine.

But when I prevent them from entering this dazzling cave, and insist on going somewhere else, like the grand City Library, their weight increases a hundredfold. Their feet are magnetized to the floor, and I feel this maddening ringing in my ears as the kids open the part of their anatomy defined as "The cavity lying at the upper end of the alimentary canal, bounded on the outside by the lips and inside by the oropharynx and containing in higher vertebrates the tongue, gums, and teeth."

Any parents have the same problem? Is this behavior normal? Do I need to call a doctor?

A school child breathes the smoke from six piles of burning garbage composed of vegetation and plastic in PNR Subdivision (aka Johndorf Subdivision), Barra, Opol. The open burning of garbage is illegal in the Philippines, as stated in RA 9003, but many people still engage in this harmful activity. The toxic family of chemicals called dioxin, used in huge amount during the Vietnam War, is produced by a number of industrial processes, including the burning of garbage. The United States Environmental Protection Agency says "Dioxins are highly toxic and can cause cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, and can interfere with hormones."

TIME JUMP, NOVEMBER 2019. We are in PNR Subdivision, also known as PN Roa Low-Cost Housing. But residents call the place Johndorf Subdivision because Johndorf  sounds colonially cute than locust housing.

Ninety-nine percent of the people here are decent.  Our family have been living in this former wetland for 15 years, and have encountered only minor troubles. We can find White Rabbit candies in the next block. Caribbean halo-halo is available at Fernsan.  There are four schools. The biggest is "La Salle", which is populated by a herd of Philippine reindeers locally known as kanding.  

But a few good people are addicted to dioxin. One afternoon, I was a witness to a spectacle in the plaza. The chapel was overflowing with a large number of worshippers, some of them sitting on white, plastic chairs outside the building. But across the street to the west was a man happily stoking a dioxin bonfire, the ghastly smoke flowing horizontally towards the chapel and the faithful. So, when I looked east there was prayer and singing and celebration, but from the west came the reeking, toxic emission of hell.

EARTHQUAKES. Earthquakes. Every time an earthquake strikes us, we see the faces of our neighbors.