Ten Thousand Things

Sharing photos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S4. Got the unit...

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:21:00 +0800

Sharing photos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S4. Got the unit from Globe! Wish I could show you everything it can do. You can take a shot and include 9 seconds of sound with it. Great when sharing a concert you watched.

You can shoot a subject and insert yourself in the pic. See the photo of me jumping around? That’s called Drama. It’s just one shot but it catches different stages of action. Uber cool! You can also take out photo bombing, do Best Faces, Best Photo, night shot, and some stuff that’s pretty hard to describe. So many more modes to shoot using its 13 megapixel camera.

Passion Dinner 4 participants

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:17:00 +0800

The following are cordially invited to PASSION DINNER 4 at Puerto Princesa on June 15.

1. bvirose bvirose@gmail.com

2. GERALDINE RAE CUENCA dincuenca@gmail.com

3. MARIEL SANDICO marielaloo@gmail.com

4. MAUREEN MANUEL Maureen.manuel@ymail.com

5. KATHLEEN JOYCE FIO kath.joycee@gmail.com

6 ANTOINETTE MACALINAO anmwahnet@gmail.com

7 ROMY ANTONETTE PENA rypena@gmail.com

8 GLEN IAN BAUTISTA glenianqbautista@yahoo.com

9 XIELA ANTONIO antonio_xiela@yahoo.com

10 ZION AQUINO zion.aquino@gmail.com

Conditions:

a) You MUST confirm your attendance by Saturday May 25th before 5PM. This is important since tickets will be booked and names cannot be changed once they are booked. The scheduled Zest Air flight is on June 15, Saturday at12:00 NN out of Manila. ETA Puerto is 1:20PM. Flight home is at 9:30AM In case you cannot go, say so by Friday since I will have to find a replacement.

2) You must be willing to share a room with someone (of the same sex)

3) The invitation is includes plane tickets, room for one overnite stay, one dinner and one breakfast. All expenses outside of this will be your own. Prepare to spend for airport tax, transportation around Puerto Princesa, and hotel incidentals.

4) You will be encouraged to tweet, write on your blogs and tell your friends about the experience.

5) Pls send your complete names, ages, addresses and phone numbers to emailjimp@gmail.com. Put ‘Passion 4 Participant details’ as title. This is required for issuance of tickets.

6) Since I am inviting you in the spirit of goodwill, friendship and mystery, I wish to ask you to agree that:

a) you will not sue me for whatever reason if unfortunate events befall you during the whole event.

b) you will not bad mouth or talk negatively about any participant, or sponsor.

c) anything intimately shared in the conversations during must be kept confidential.

7) Lastly, bring wine if you wish, and anything small that says something about yourself for an exchange gift. Don’t make it expensive. Make it creative. And most importantly, bring your good spirits, your passion, stories and your sense of adventure to share with total strangers.

Excited to meet you all!

Jim

PS. If you wrote me to join this dinner and you are not on the list, thank you very much for your interest. Also, please check this website again on Monday. If some of the participants already chosen cannot make it (and usually some cannot) , I will immediately find replacements.

Going for the Big Boys: Samsung NX 300 Mirrorless camera

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:47:00 +0800

I’ve had the Samsung NX 300 camera for some three weeks now. I first came across this camera 2 months ago in Jakarta when Samsung invited writers to view their product showcase this year. I remember being quite impressed as I held the demo unit in my hands inside the exhibit area. I wondered then how it would perform in real life situations.

Since I got it, I’ve brought it to travel abroad, and have used it for mostly outdoor locations under sunny, shady, beach, cloudy and night conditions. I have taken a few hundred shots with it.

Let me just say outright that if Samsung has been successful with smaller cameras like the NX 1000, and the Galaxy Camera, the NX 300 could possibly be their foot on the door when it comes to the booming, hot category of the mirrorless Four-Thirds format.

To start with, it definiteley has the right specs to match what’s out there in the market. The shutter opening is wide and goes all the way up to 22 just like a real DSLR. It comes with 18-55 OIS lens but it has an array of varied lenses available to choose from. It even has fixed lenses and a versatile lens that can switch to 3D! (But that is another awesome story by itself!).

The speed setting can go as fast as 1/6000^th of a second or a slow 30 seconds if you want really long exposures for night shots. It also has a bulb setting in case you want indefinite exposure. It has most if not all the other settings you will find among the Big Boys’ cameras.

The ISO range is just as astounding. It starts at the usual 100 and goes all the way up to 25,600. It also has 1/3^rd incremental increases if you so wish.

To operate it is so simple. If you wish to shoot on manual as I do, speed, f-stops and other controls are conveniently accessible through a wheel at the top of the cam. Or if you wish to use the touch screen, you can also access a lot of the other functions.

In truth, it has all the functions you want that are available on the big DSLR including various picture size choices, quality, white balance modes, etc. It has a lot of calibration capacity for almost all features of the camera.

And it has more things most DSLRs can’t do!

For example, you can send and share your pics through wi-fi and autoshare (a function exclusive to Samsung). While it also has the usual presets you find in big boy cameras like aperture priority, time priority, manual and auto settings and more, you can also have other presets under ‘picture wizard’ such as portrait, landscape, macro, night shots, light tone, etc..

Want instant edit? You can conveniently crop, color, temper the brightness, contrast, switch to gray scale, saturation, etc. in a whiz.

The back screen which is also its viewfinder is moveable and can be held at an angle which is just fine when you are holding the camera over your head or down to your knees. It makes framing the subject the subject easier.

What I wish it had though was a built-in diopter or a normal viewfinder. I still am not too comfortable looking at the back screen to compose my subject. And it is quite difficult to look at the screen especially when it is an extremely sunny day.

But overall, the NX 300 is a great camera and I am quite surprised that it is still largely underrated considering its capabilities.

If you are thinking of buying a ‘prosumer’ camera that doesn’t come on as too intimidating, I suggest you take a look at this beauty. It’s easy to use and it won’t take long before you will be taking great shots!

Here’s a few shots for you to enjoy!

By using 8000 ISO or higher , you will have no problem with dark settings.

By changing your settings easily with a simple turn of the wheel, you can create drama and intensity with clouds, etc.

A Night of Passion 4

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:18:34 +0800

I am looking for 10 people to have dinner with in a resto @ Puetro Princessa. I have done this 3 times before but it is the first time we will do so outside of MetroManila. What exactly happens during these dinners? We have dinner and we talk and listen to each others’ stories and thoughts and ruminations. It should be fun. There is nothing more exciting being bold and talking with people you do not know.

1) I will give you a round trip ticket free

2) Free delicious dinner and hopefully interesting conversation

3) will try my best to get free accommodations as well. Will announce more about this.

Qualifications:

1) You and I must have never met

2) You must not be a stalker or carry firearms during the trip and dinner

3) You must be over 21 years of age

To Join

1) Please write me an email at emailjimp@gmail.com and tell me about yourself and what makes you feel alive. Tell me what you are passionate about!

2) Tweet me when you have sent an email and hashtag it with #FlyZest and #Jim1Night

3) I will read and screen all letters. After I do that, I will randomly choose.

4) I will inform you about it.

If for some reason you cannot make it, pls let me know ASAP. Tickets will be issued and so you must be sure to go!

4) All email must be submitted by May 21, 2013

Good Luck!

I have always loved this song. This time, they made a version...

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:11:28 +0800

I have always loved this song. This time, they made a version actually shot in the space station..

"As long as you regard yourself or any part of your experience as the “dream come true,”..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:29:30 +0800

““As long as you regard yourself or any part of your experience as the “dream come true,” then you are involved in self-deception. Self-deception seems always to depend upon the dream world, because you would like to see what you have not yet seen, rather that what you are now seeing. You will not accept that whatever is here now is what is, nor are you willing to go on with the situation as it is. Thus, self-deception always manifests itself in terms of trying to create or recreate a dream world, the nostalgia of the dream experience. And the opposite of self-deception is just working with the facts of life.””

- ― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Samsung S4: So cool, so loaded

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:31:19 +0800

By Jim Paredes (The Philippine Star) | Updated April 28, 2013 - 12:00am

They pulled out all the stops at the Radio City S4 launch.

MANILA, Philippines - It was love at first sight for many in New York two months ago. I was there with hundreds of people from all over the world to attend the launch of Samsung’s S4 Smart phone at Radio City Music Hall. It was a big, impressive presentation where they pulled out all the stops. Every prominent techie blog and site was there to witness the debut of the smartphone that was hyped to be “The Big One for Samsung for 2013,” and was touted to be the newest, best, smartest mobile phone to date.

After watching the presentation, I went to one of the demo kiosks and had about 15 minutes holding the phone in my hands and trying some of the functions and getting the general feel of it. But too many people were in line and wanting to have their turn. Alas, I had to give way.

Right now as I write this, I am holding the S4 once more in my hands and using it the way it was intended to be used — as a phone, camera, online device, video and music player, and all the other functions modern smart phones should be capable of doing.

And more! Much more!

I’ve had the S3 for a few months now and I have been very impressed with it. So when I heard that Samsung was coming out with the S4 barely nine months after S3’s launch, I was quite skeptical. What could Samsung possibly offer that would top it? Is the S4 much better than the S3? After having a hands-on experience with it however short, I would have to answer the last question with a big solid “yes!”

The basic features alone are really impressive. The phone is the same size as the S3, but it has a bigger five-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 full HD AMOLED. The screen is clear in every detail. It runs on the latest 4.2.2 Android software. It has a quad-core processor and is LTE capable. It means it is really fast in all ways. The back camera has 13 megapixels and the front has 5 meg. The phone has a much bigger 2600 mAh battery that will certainly outperform the S3 and much of the competition.There are just too many things to like with the S4. For its camera, Samsung borrowed heavily the features of its winning Galaxy Camera and added a lot more which makes the S4 camera experience a squealing delight. Here are some:

• You can have front and back cameras on at the same time. This means you don’t have to be the photographer who doesn’t have any pics of himself in the event. You can now include yourself in the photo.

• Sound and shot: This allows you to attach nine seconds of sound to your photo. Imagine sending a photo with a short voice greeting, or having the ambient sounds of the moment included. Imagine sending a concert pic? What a delight.

• Drama: Imagine capturing a series of various shots during one sweeping movement. Great for showing or analyzing action.

• Eraser Shot: This is THE photo bomb solution. You can now remove unwanted elements from your photos by simply touching it and replacing it with another shot taken while on this mode.

• Cinema photo or animation shot: You can shoot a photo with a still image but with moving objects around it. Simply select which objects you want animated or frozen. Send it as a GIF file.

• Live Filters: You now get a get real-time preview of the effects for photo/video before capture.

There are a whole lot more goodies to crow about with the camera both for photos and videos.

Samsung has been adding newer kinetic features on its latest products. The S4 has Air View, which allows you to peek into certain apps without your finger touching the screen. You merely hover over the screen and, voila, texts and gallery pics pop out for a sneak view. It also has Air Gestures where you literally just wave a finger or hand over the S4 to change or advance to the next screen. This is useful if your hands are dirty for example. You can actually take a phone call by simply waving your hand and diverting it to speakerphone, or change the music playing by advancing to the next tune.

Did I mention that you can use the S4 as a remote control? That’s because it has IR (infrared) capability. It’s called Samsung Watch On. The only problem is, the Philippines is not one of the countries listed when you set it up. But you can use it to control various Samsung products like speakers, cameras, etc. It is among the arsenal of interconnectivity apps such as All-Share, or Wi-Fi Direct, etc., which you can use with your laptop, printers, tab, camera, other Samsung phones and devices

The S-Translator is a very useful feature that will help travelers navigate a foreign country since it translates eight languages easily. You can use both the spoken and written word to communicate.

One of the unique features Samsung has integrated into its recent products is eye-detection capability which means the S4 can be enabled to pause a playing video if you move your eyes away from it, and resume it when you look again. It is called Smart Pause. This is true innovation.

There is just so much more to experience and get wowed about with the Samsung S4. That could be a problem for some since it will take time for you to master everything the S4 can do. It’s a problem many would not mind, I suppose.

I have yet to talk about Group Play, Knox, Story Album, S-Travel, S-Health and so many other apps and features that will surprise and delight you. But I will leave all that for you to discover.

It is not a perfect phone. Some apps work easier than others. The gesture apps take some effort to learn but not much. Despite that, Samsung S4 deserves all the respect and admiration it is getting. It is the phone that everyone has been waiting for with bated breath, and as the unofficial hype goes, it is the smartest phone today that surpasses the iPhone and all other rivals.

A Samsung executive in NYC told me that in today’s world, smart companies like Samsung are learning that more than responding to the market, the market is becoming more eager to respond to technological breakthroughs. That must be the reason why they didn’t wait to too long to come up with the S4.

Neither should you. You will not be disappointed.

Two rich kids in the US decide to live in poverty in India

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:36:05 +0800

Two rich kids decide to leave their comfortable lives in the US and live on an Indian poverty budget. See what they learned.

Late last year, two young men decided to live a month of their lives on the income of an average poor Indian. One of them, Tushar, the son of a police officer in Haryana, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and worked for three years as an investment banker in the US and Singapore. The other, Matt, migrated as a teenager to the States with his parents, and studied in MIT. Both decided at different points to return to India, joined the UID Project in Bengaluru, came to share a flat, and became close friends.

The idea suddenly struck them one day. Both had returned to India in the vague hope that they could be of use to their country. But they knew the people of this land so little. Tushar suggested one evening — “Let us try to understand an ‘average Indian’, by living on an ‘average income’.” His friend Matt was immediately captured by the idea. They began a journey which would change them forever.

To begin with, what was the average income of an Indian? They calculated that India’s Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150 a day. Globally people spend about a third of their incomes on rent. Excluding rent, they decided to spend Rs. 100 each a day. They realised that this did not make them poor, only average. Seventy-five per cent Indians live on less than this average.

The young men moved into the tiny apartment of their domestic help, much to her bemusement. What changed for them was that they spent a large part of their day planning and organising their food. Eating out was out of the question; even dhabas were too expensive. Milk and yoghurt were expensive and therefore used sparingly, meat was out of bounds, as were processed food like bread. No ghee or butter, only a little refined oil. Both are passionate cooks with healthy appetites. They found soy nuggets a wonder food — affordable and high on proteins, and worked on many recipes. Parle G biscuits again were cheap: 25 paise for 27 calories! They innovated a dessert of fried banana on biscuits. It was their treat each day.

Restricted life

Living on Rs.100 made the circle of their life much smaller. They found that they could not afford to travel by bus more than five km in a day. If they needed to go further, they could only walk. They could afford electricity only five or six hours a day, therefore sparingly used lights and fans. They needed also to charge their mobiles and computers. One Lifebuoy soap cut into two. They passed by shops, gazing at things they could not buy. They could not afford the movies, and hoped they would not fall ill.

However, the bigger challenge remained. Could they live on Rs. 32, the official poverty line, which had become controversial after India’s Planning Commission informed the Supreme Court that this was the poverty line for cities (for villages it was even lower, at Rs. 26 per person per day)?

Harrowing experience

For this, they decided to go to Matt’s ancestral village Karucachal in Kerala, and live on Rs. 26. They ate parboiled rice, a tuber and banana and drank black tea: a balanced diet was impossible on the Rs. 18 a day which their briefly adopted ‘poverty’ permitted. They found themselves thinking of food the whole day. They walked long distances, and saved money even on soap to wash their clothes. They could not afford communication, by mobile and internet. It would have been a disaster if they fell ill. For the two 26-year-olds, the experience of ‘official poverty’ was harrowing.

Yet, when their experiment ended with Deepavali, they wrote to their friends: “Wish we could tell you that we are happy to have our ‘normal’ lives back. Wish we could say that our sumptuous celebratory feast two nights ago was as satisfying as we had been hoping for throughout our experiment. It probably was one of the best meals we’ve ever had, packed with massive amounts of love from our hosts. However, each bite was a sad reminder of the harsh reality that there are 400 million people in our country for whom such a meal will remain a dream for quite some time. That we can move on to our comfortable life, but they remain in the battlefield of survival — a life of tough choices and tall constraints. A life where freedom means little and hunger is plenty…

Plenty of questions

It disturbs us to spend money on most of the things that we now consider excesses. Do we really need that hair product or that branded cologne? Is dining out at expensive restaurants necessary for a happy weekend? At a larger level, do we deserve all the riches we have around us? Is it just plain luck that we were born into circumstances that allowed us to build a life of comfort? What makes the other half any less deserving of many of these material possessions, (which many of us consider essential) or, more importantly, tools for self-development (education) or self-preservation (healthcare)?

We don’t know the answers to these questions. But we do know the feeling of guilt that is with us now. Guilt that is compounded by the love and generosity we got from people who live on the other side, despite their tough lives. We may have treated them as strangers all our lives, but they surely didn’t treat us as that way…”

So what did these two friends learn from their brief encounter with poverty? That hunger can make you angry. That a food law which guarantees adequate nutrition to all is essential. That poverty does not allow you to realise even modest dreams. And above all — in Matt’s words — that empathy is essential for democracy.

Words from Pope Kiko (Francis)

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 16:46:00 +0800

Sorry for Filipinizing his name. I just like him and feel comfortable with him this early. He is certainly NOT your regular church bureaucrat! Here’s something I saw posted on the net! If you want to know where it came from, click http://opinion.inquirer.net/51071/church-navel-gazers

“We priests tend to clericalize the laity,” Francis said. “[We] focus on things of the clergy, more specifically, the sanctuary, rather than bringing the Gospel to the world… A Church that limits herself to administering parish work experiences what someone in prison does: physical and mental atrophy.

“We infect lay people with our own disease. And some begin to believe the fundamental service God asks of them is to become greeters, lectors or extraordinary ministers of holy communion at Church. Rather, [the call is] to live and spread the faith in their families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and beyond.”

The reform that’s needed is “neither to clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layperson is a layperson. He has to live as a layperson… to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself…. [He] is to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life. And like all of us, the layperson is called to carry his daily cross—the cross of the layperson, not of the priest.” - Pope Francis

Call it serendipty, call it a love story

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 09:44:10 +0800

Call it serendipity, call it a love story

HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE By Jim Paredes (The Philippine Star) | Updated April 7, 2013 - 12:00am

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where everything seemed hopeless, where you had actually given up on life itself, but then help suddenly came along?Call it the answered prayer, a miracle, serendipity, a lucky break or whatever else. When it happens, it can be completely life-changing.

I had a friend who left the Philippines before he finished high school to migrate to the US. I actually knew him for just about three years. We were year mates and it was that time in our lives when we were going through a lot of formative experiences — our first drink, prom, date, girlfriends, teenage angst, fights, and a lot juvenile high school discoveries and craziness.

A big part of our life then revolved around the barkada. Our peer group was our support system in almost all ways. We ran to our friends when we were in trouble or even just for company. We shared our experiences and secrets with our mates. We all asked for each other’s advice in many matters and ways. We also laughed, cried and did a lot of things together.

My friend came back to the Philippines to visit a few years ago. We had more than a great time. But it was only yesterday that I found out how terribly important his visiting the Philippines and seeing all of us again, were to him. It was much more than I, or he, had imagined.

My wife saw him on her trip to San Francisco recently and he narrated to her what it all meant from his point of view.When he left during high school, we had almost lost touch completely. It was some six or seven years later when we heard from him. He was in Washington in 1974, and it so happened APO was touring the US at the time and so we got together but very briefly. After that, he had disappeared completely — or so we thought.

Time marched on, and since ‘74, we had all gotten married, had children and built careers and gotten older with the passage of time.When he came back to the Manila for a visit a few years ago, he had just been through a divorce. He had also lost his job, and was suffering from a bad back injury. He was also broke. He had told us that much. But I learned from Lydia, my wife, that he had come back to literally say goodbye to his past, and to everything else that meant anything to him.

He was down and out on his luck. As far as he was concerned, everything in his life had bottomed out and there was really nothing to live for. He was here to take a last look before he was to bid life farewell.He came here not knowing whether we would even remember him. He had no great hopes about that. After all, in his mind, he felt that we may have forgotten him completely, or would vaguely remember him if at all, or worse, not even care to see him. He had only spent three years with us, and high school seemed eons ago, he thought. From a distance he may have imagined that we were all successful and happy with our wives and families and doing well career-wise while he was down in the dumps with no sign of recovery. And that of course gave him all the more reason to be pessimistic about how this visit would go.

This was his last trip “home,” if he could even still call it that. But aside from seeing us, he also came for another reason, and it was to meet a child he had inadvertently fathered before he had left which he only heard about or discovered a few months before he decided to visit.But he had a few things coming that he wasn’t prepared for.

To his big surprise and delight, when he came him, we greeted him with open arms. We all went out of our way to throw him a party, and spend a lot of time with him. We even went to Bagiuo. We talked about old times, drank a few, laughed a lot, teared up a bit while remembering the past. He was so happy to know that he had not been forgotten, that he was part of our individual and collective memory, and that the place he left a long time ago had actually not just recorded but treasured the times he was here.

On that same visit, he had asked about his previous high school girlfriend who happened to be my wife’s cousin. To make a long story short, even that turned out extremely auspicious. Meeting again brought them together in matrimony after a few months. They now share a happy life in San Francisico.

That visit which was supposed to be his goodbye to things that mattered to him actually became the turning point where he felt he had rediscovered the important elements in his life — friends, family, and love.Narrating all this to my wife, he said he saw the hand of God rescue him from his pitiful, sorry state of despair and deliver him to a state of new chances and opportunities for meaning and happiness in life. He felt he had been gifted with grace that was completely undeserved. It must have felt like winning some sort of lotto where the prize was something beyond any material value. He had a brand new lease on life itself.

How many of us have experienced something like this? I guess one can only come out of it with, at the very least, an optimism about life, but most likely with an unshakeable faith in a God who loves and cares for us.In life, the cavalry does show up occasionally. In my own experience, God, through many forms, has also intervened for my own good. Life is full of surprises and wonder. At the very least, we can’t write anything off. Anything can happen, and it usually does.

* * *
Capture your great times this summer. Join me in my only summer Basic Photo Workshop on Saturday, April 20. Call 0916-8328088 for reservations and queries, or write to jpfotojim@gmail.com. Log in or register to post comm

Ok.. I’m proud of this . At my ageI can do 80 before a...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:45:56 +0800

Ok.. I’m proud of this . At my ageI can do 80 before a workout at the gym. This is after!

A joke from Ronnie Quizon

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 22:33:45 +0800

Sa bus (Nagpapadede ang babae sa anak, pero ayaw dumede ng bata)

BABAE: (galit) ayaw mong dumede? Ibibigay ko toh sa lalaking katabi ko..

20mins na pero ayaw p din dumede..

BABAE: (lalong nagalit) ayaw mo talagang dumede ah.. Ibibigay ko talaga to sa lalaking katabi ko!

LALAKI: mam, magdesisyon na kayo.. Dapat kanina pa ko bumaba eh :)

Mother Dolores Hart - Cloistered Benedictine nun attended the Oscars last year

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:36:07 +0800

Looking back: Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley promoting Loving You; Hart went on to become a nun.

The speculation will continue until the last minute about the fashion parade in store for us at the Oscars this weekend, but we can be sure that at least one of the actresses trooping into Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre will be wearing black — the black habit of the Benedictine order of nuns. The last time Dolores Hart walked the Academy Awards red carpet - in 1962 - she was the blushing starlet who had given Elvis Presley his first screen kiss. After a whirlwind rise to stardom, the 23-year-old beauty had secured a $1-million contract and roles opposite some of Hollywood’s leading men.

But then she gave it all up - disappearing from public life so completely she might have been a figment of some movie mogul’s imagination. But this Sunday she will finally return as the woman she chose to become - Mother Dolores, prioress of a cloistered nunnery in rural Connecticut, a Benedictine nun who has spent the past 50 years living a life of hard manual work, contemplation and prayer.

Now 73, she has agreed to make a rare foray from her isolated life at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in order to celebrate an Oscar-nominated documentary, God Is The Bigger Elvis, which has been made about her life. She says she is enormously excited about the biggest night in the showbusiness calendar - even if she has to go up on stage. And while the Oscars may not be used to people who dress in plain clothes and walk with a stick, this is a woman who’s already experienced the sort of movie star adulation about which many of today’s preening, pouting actresses in their megabucks designer gowns can only dream.

Mother Dolores still has the piercing blue eyes and demure, flawless beauty that once made Grace Kelly comparisons inevitable. She was just 18 when she made her screen debut, co-starring with a young Elvis in Loving You. The 1957 film was only his second movie, and his lingering kiss with Dolores Hart made her the envy of women everywhere. She is still asked what it was like and her unexciting, if rather sweet, answer is that they both blushed so much that filming had to be stopped while their purple ears were swathed in make-up. “If there is anything I am most grateful for, it is the privilege of being one of the few people left to acknowledge he was an innocent,” she said of Presley 10 years ago.

Devoted: Actress turned Benedictine cloistered nun, Mother Delores standing on the grounds of the Abbey of Regina Laudis

The film made her name and she swiftly made two more, starring alongside Montgomery Clift and Anthony Quinn, before teaming up again with Elvis in King Creole in 1958. She was to pack in nine films in five years, including the cult comedy Where The Boys Are with George Hamilton. All the time, she remained a devout Roman Catholic, getting up at 6am for Mass each day and praying before every audition. In what was to be her last film, 1963’s Come Fly With Me, she played a beautiful airline stewardess looking for romance and excitement.

But in real life she was gravitating towards something very different. The only child of two good-looking, bit-part Hollywood actors who separated when she was young, her lonely, unsettled childhood was split between the glamour of Los Angeles and a Catholic school in Chicago, where she lived for some of the year with her grandparents. After she left school, she moved to Hollywood, and in 1957 was signed up, aged 18. Fame came quickly, but she found the emotional side of film-making unsatisfying. “You worked intensely for maybe ten weeks, and then you break and you never see the person again,” she said later.

Flawless beauty: Dolores Hart with George Hamilton in Where The Boys Are

While starring in a Broadway play, a friend suggested she take a break and stay at a guest cottage in the grounds of a Catholic abbey in Connecticut. But she had unhappy memories of school. I said: “Oh, I don’t want to go to see more nuns,” she says. My friend said: “Just try it, they’re contemplative and they won’t talk.” Sure enough, Dolores instantly found peace, and the close-knit community she had been craving since childhood. She talked about becoming a nun there and then, but she was only 21 and the abbess considered her too immature.

Dolores certainly sounded surprisingly unworldly for someone who had already spent a few years in Hollywood, telling the abbess she was worried that a Catholic girl like her shouldn’t be making films with Elvis, because she could be “aroused by the boys.” It took three years and several more visits to the abbey before the nuns agreed she was ready to take holy orders, but by then she was engaged. Don Robinson, a successful Los Angeles architect, had been courting her for five years.

But as they returned from their engagement party, she admitted to him that she wanted to become a nun.

Ceremonial: Things could have been different and Dolores could have been a fixture at the Oscars… but her life took a very different direction

Robinson was devastated at first but, as a Catholic himself, brought himself to accept it as God’s will. In the years that followed, he went out with other women, but never found one he wanted to marry. Devoted to the woman he could never have as his wife, he continued to visit Mother Dolores in her nunnery at Christmas and Easter every year until his death just three months ago. “I never got over Dolores,” said Mr Robinson shortly before he died. “I have the same thoughts [about her] today as I did 52 years ago.”

But if Don Robinson showed great understanding of Dolores’s desire to serve God, her studio was furious. When studio MGM asked her to promote Come Fly With Me, Dolores said she wanted to visit “friends in the country.” The studio drove her to the abbey in a limousine, unaware she was never coming back. She became a novice nun that day.

If the studio executives were angry at what they saw as a betrayal of their trust, everyone else, including her family, was incredulous. The Press even pounced on a rumour that she had retreated to a nunnery after having Elvis’s love child. “It was hurtful and aggravating because ours was really such a fine relationship,” she said years later. Her early days as a nun were difficult as she came to realise that being a pampered star was no preparation for the hard life in the nunnery.
“The first night I felt like I had jumped off a 20-storey building and landed flat on my bottom,” she says in the new documentary. “I had no idea it was going to mean working in the garden, ten people sharing one bathroom, the sternness.”

‘I can understand why people have doubts. Because who understands God? I don’t.’

On top of the physical labor, each day Dolores had to keep three periods of silence and sing Latin chants seven times. The outside world and her fellow nuns expected she would soon be pounding on the abbey doors to get out. Dolores admitted she had grave doubts herself. “The first few years were a very, very difficult transition,” she says.

Even in her cloistered world, she was not cut off from her past. She became a close friend of the actress Patricia Neal in the Eighties after a mutual friend suggested Neal stay at the abbey to recover from the end of her turbulent marriage to Roald Dahl. The nuns calmed her down and Neal ended up staying at the nunnery for nearly a year. She later converted to Catholicism and is buried in the abbey grounds.

Mother Dolores has also remained an Oscars voter, watching DVDs of nominated films sent by the Academy in her office. “Watching films tells me what’s happening in civilisation and how much people are suffering,” she says.

She has suffered herself in recent years, her health blighted by a neurological disorder. But as the documentary’s director, Rebecca Cammisa, told me, the nun still has much of the actress in her. “I think she sees returning to the Oscars as a sort of homecoming,” says Cammisa. “If she had stayed in the film business, she would have been this huge star. It just shows you how strong her calling [to be a nun] must have been.”

So as she walks into the Kodak Theatre on Sunday, it’s hard not to think Dolores Hart won’t feel a twinge of regret for what might have been. She admits she has “struggled” with her vocation all her life. “I can understand why people have doubts,” says Mother Dolores. “Because who understands God? I don’t.”

P.S. : She also acted as St Clare with Bradford Dillman (as Francis) in the film “Francis of Assisi).

Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H39k9jfKMw

Plumber of the year award entries

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:08:02 +0800

I’ve always admired women who knew how to handle...

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:54:27 +0800

I’ve always admired women who knew how to handle money..

Seriously, this is some esoteric talent.

How babies are really made

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 22:22:30 +0800

During his wife Sandra Denis’ pregnancy, Canadian photographer Patrice Larochethe artist created a hilarious explanatory photo series titled “How to Make a Baby”. The creative couple planned and carried out their project throughout the whole period of 9 months, taking pictures in the exact same settings as Sandra’s belly expanded.

The pregnancy saga of Sandra and Patrice basically denounces all the traditional stork stories.

__,_._,___

The real laws of nature:

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 09:02:27 +0800

1.Law of Mechanical Repair - After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you’ll have to pee.

2.Law of Gravity - Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.

3. Law of Probability- The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

4.Law of Random Numbers - If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal and someone always answers.
5.Supermarket Law - As soon as you get in the smallest line, the cashier will have to call for help.
6.Variation Law - If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now.

7.Law of the Bath - When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.

8. Law of Close Encounters - The probability of meeting someone you know increases dramatically when you are with someone you don’t want to be seen with.

9. Law of the Result - When you try to prove to someone that a machine won’t work, it will.

10. Law of Biomechanics - The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

11.. Law of the Theater & Hockey Arena - At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle, always arrive last. They are the ones who will leave their seats several times to go for food, beer, or the toilet and who leave early before the end of the performance or the game is over. The folks in the aisle seats come early, never move once, have long gangly legs or big bellies and stay to the bitter end of the performance. The aisle people also are very surly folk.

12. The Coffee Law - As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

13.Murphy’s Law of Lockers - If there are only 2 people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers.

14. Law of Physical Surfaces - The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor, are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

15.Law of Logical Argument- Anything is possible if you don’t know what you are talking about.

16. Brown’s Law of Physical Appearance - If the clothes fit, they’re ugly.

17.Oliver’s Law of Public Speaking - A closed mouth gathers no feet.

18. Wilson’s Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy -As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it.

19. Doctors’ Law- If you don’t feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there you’ll feel better.. But don’t make an appointment, and you’ll stay sick. This has been proven over and over with taking children to the pediatrician.

If you don’t forward this your friends, your belly button will unscrew and your butt will fall off.

Got this on email!

A duck story

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:40:53 +0800

A woman brought a very limp duck to the veterinarian’s office. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, “I’m so sorry, your pet duck Cuddles has passed away.”

The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead,” he replied.

“How can you be so sure,” she protested. “I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a black Labrador Retriever.

As the duck’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.

The vet patted the lab and led it out of the exam room. He returned a few moments later with a cat.

The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.

The vet looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck.”

Then the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.

The duck’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. She screamed, “$150.00!” “$150 just to tell me my duck is dead!”

The vet shrugged. “I’m sorry. If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the lab report and the cat scan, it’s now $150.00.”

New Rules for 2013 (Complete set)

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 14:27:00 +0800

The old order is fading fast. Here are some of the New Rules for 2013. Pls add!

1) Bad writing printed on paper can be considered a crime against the environment. Needless destruction of trees

2) Officials are servants, not royalty. They don’t govern kingdoms. If they are being investigated, they must leave pronto

3) Artists must record good songs— good enough even without a video!

4) TV News must be delivered in a less hysterical manner. We want to be informed, not terrified!

5) Filipinos speaking in English must lessen their use of the words ‘actually’, ‘in fairness’, and ‘basically’.

6) There must be a quota for posting food pics on instagram and all social media—like once a year per user

7) There must be a stop to attributing natural disasters to God’s supposed anger at us. God does not throw temper tantrums.

8) Anyone who predicts the end of the world must apologize publicly in all media if it does not happen

9) When visiting anyone’s house, you must have at least 30 min of conversation before you ask for wifi password

10) All sexual acts that end in orgasms must be logged, recorded and reported for purposes of data correlation with no. of future births to measure RH law vis-a-vis Filipino fertility

"It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is..."

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 13:19:00 +0800

“

It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: “There, words do not reach.’’ Such queries fall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi (“Thou art that’’) is the ultimate word in this connection.

By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental.

”

- Joseph Campbell, discussing the structure of his course on mythology at Sarah Lawrence, from “The Mythological Dimension - Comparative Mythology.” Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011-03-11. iBooks.