It's the year of the ox: Kung hei fat choy!

Our guestfor our special presentation on Straight from the Skycame straight from Manila to talk about our getting serious about Global Warming and Climate Change. Surely everyone already has an idea of what global warming or climate change is all about. I know that a lot of people believe that this is already happening to the world but most of us have the wrong attitude about this, opting to say that it might happen to other parts of the world, but not here in the Philippines.

With us tonight is Presidential Adviser on Global Warming and Climate Change former Senator Heherson Alvarez (a few days ago, Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo dubbed herself as the “Global Climate Czar”) who will do what former US Vice-President has been doing especially with his video documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. How do we make a shift from merely advocating about the problems of global warming or climate change and putting action into words? Watch this very interesting show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm tonight.

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It’s the Chinese New Year so… Kung Hei Fat Choy! We finally got rid of the Year of the Rat, considered by many as one of the worse years in modern human history. Today we greet the Year of the Ox with hope and faith that it would be better than the previous years. In the Chinese Zodiac calendar, the Oxsymbolizes prosperity through fortitude and hard work, so we can enjoy prosperity only through hard work. That’s bad news for the Juan Tamads out there!

For those people born under the sign of the Ox, you can expect them to be stable and persevering. Ox people are tolerant with strong character. They work hard without complaining. These are people who believe that the road to riches is not through get rich schemes like what the Legacy Group once promised their investors, but only through hard work. Ox people are great organizers and have a systemic approach to each task they undertake. Surprisingly, America’s new President Barrack Obama was born under the sign of the Ox, which means all the more we should be watching Pres. Obama’s moves.

Meanwhile, news reports show that the Year 2008 was the year that the Philippines experienced the weakest growth in seven years, yet despite the world’s economic problems, especially roller coaster world prices of crude oil, the global financial meltdown and even the rice crisis, certain businesses in this country experience unprecedented growth. An example is the Philippine Auto industry that experienced a 6% growth for the year 2008. To think this growth came even at the volatile prices of world crude.

What about the retail markets? With almost all the stores filled to capacity last December, I would like to believe that they did a very brisk business if you compare their sales last year to the previous year. The problem is, the supermarket or retail sales industry in this country don’t publish their sales for the previous month, especially after the holiday season unlike the retail stores in the US, which is a good indicator whether the economy is doing well or not.

It’s a good thing that there is a report on the performance of Public Markets in Cebu City for the year 2008. I was given a copy by City Treasurer Renee T. Empaces. For the year 2008, Cebu City earned P40,189.432. If you compare last year’s figure to the year 2007 where they earned P38,866,714, there is a difference in income of positive P1,322,718. Thus even in the so-called bad year of 2008 Cebu City’s markets experienced a 3% growth! So what can we expect from the Year of the Ox? My take on this is, if we work hard enough, I think we shall weather the economic storm, even if people are losing jobs at a rapid pace.

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Last Friday’s headline in The FREEMAN about that Iranian student who was killed along Sacred Heart Hill, very close to my home is a crime that has to be solved. I only found out about this five hours after the poor fellow was killed. It turned out that he was one of the tenants of my brother Bing, but I don’t think I ever bumped into this fellow, more so that since the collapse of Juana Osmeña Ext. corner Escario St. we have been forced to use the back gate of our compound.

What I found very glaring in the police investigation was that, while his wallet was missing, his cellphone and a silver necklace was still in his person. If this was a robbery, why was the cellphone still with the person? You should know that robbers kill innocent people for their cellphone, which is why I doubt very much the robbery theory.