My Published Articles for ViewsHound: December 2020

Monday, December 7, 2020

Celebration of Life: Macrine J. Katague via her Favorite Music ( Tangos)-Part 11

This is Part 11 out of 14 on the series, Macrine J.Katague, Celebration of Life.

Macrine and I dancing the Rumba, Boac, Marinduque, 2011

Macrine and I dancing the Tango during the PAFC Gala, Washington DC, 1999

Macrine and I loved to dance the Tango, Cha Cha and Rumba. A few decades ago while we were vacationing in Miami Beach, Florida staying at the Fontainebleau Hotel*, we participated in a dance contest. We won first place dancing the Cha Cha. But Tango is our favorite dance and La Cumparsita is our favorite tango music. In this episode I am posting two version of La Cumparsita(instrumental and vocal).

Meanwhile enjoy this Tango music, El Choclo sang by Julio Iglesias

Tango music also reminds me of Macrine's first cousin Yong Nieva and wife Ivy Almario and their Beach Resort, Amana in Cawit, Marinduque

Macrine and I with Yong Nieva, Amana Resort, Marinduque, 2011

http://livinginmarinduquephilippines.blogspot.com/2012/11/improve-your-sex-life-by-dancing.html

A Short History of Fontainebleau Hotel

*Envisioning the creation of one of the most opulent and magnificent hotels in the world, hotelier Ben Novack purchased the Firestone Mansion, home of auto tire magnate Harvey Firestone in 1952 for $2.3 million. He tapped Morris Lapidus, who was known for his modernist sensibilities and flair for theatrical spaces, to be the hotel’s project architect. When it opened in 1954, Fontainebleau Miami Beach was the largest and most luxurious hotel in South Florida. Located on the oceanfront in the heart of Millionaire's Row, Fontainebleau Miami Beach is one of the most historically and architecturally significant hotels on Miami Beach. Its signature features included a 17,000-square-foot lobby with the now-legendary “Stairway to Nowhere,” six acres of formal gardens designed to replicate Versailles and thousands of dollars in antique furnishings to authentically convey the hotel’s French period theme.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the hotel reigned as Miami’s leading resort and Lapidus’ gently curving façade came to symbolize the very essence of glamorous Miami Beach. For nearly 25 years, the Miami Beach hotel was so well-known that no sign was necessary to identify it. Celebrities and entertainers, ranging from Elvis Presley and Bob Hope to Lucille Ball and Judy Garland, made the hotel so popular that Novack was once forced to post armed guards to bar non-guests from entering.

At that time we were not aware of the above history. However, we know we were staying in a luxurious hotel. This is an example of our lives well lived. Rest in Peace, My Love!! For more details on Tangos read:

https://marinduqueawaitsyou.blogspot.com/search?q=tango

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Have You Heard of CRISPR Gene Editing Technology?

Just recently, I was watching CNN Fareed Zakaria Sunday Talk#. On this recent episode his guest was 2020 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley-one of my Alma Mater schools.

The interview was about CRISPR technology of creation of new medicines, agricultural products, controlling pathogens and pest as wells the controversial subject of editing human embryos to produce super/designer babies. This aroused my interest so in case you are not familiar with this subject, here's a brief summary from Wikipedia.

CRISPR(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Gene Editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense system. By delivering the Cas9 nuclease complexed with a synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) into a cell, the cell's genome can be cut at a desired location, allowing existing genes to be removed and/or new ones added in vivo (in living organisms).

The technique is considered highly significant in biotechnology and medicine as it allows for the genomes to be edited in vivo with extremely high precision, cheaply and with ease. It can be used in the creation of new medicines, agricultural products, and genetically modified organisms, or as a means of controlling pathogens and pests. It also has possibilities in the treatment of inherited genetic diseases as well as diseases arising from somatic mutations such as cancer.

However, its use in human germline genetic modification(designer babies) is highly controversial.

The development of the technique earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. The third researcher group that shared the Kavli Prize for the same discovery (led by Virginijus Šikšnys) was not awarded the Nobel prize.

In 2012 and 2013, CRISPR was a runner-up in Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year award. In 2015, it was the winner of that award. CRISPR was named as one of MIT Technology Review's 10 breakthrough technologies in 2014 and 2016. In 2016, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with Rudolph Barrangou, Philippe Horvath, and Feng Zhang won the Gairdner International award. In 2017, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Japan Prize in Tokyo, Japan for their revolutionary invention of CRISPR-Cas9. In 2016, Charpentier, Doudna, and Zhang won the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. In 2020, Charpentier and Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pp17E4E-O8

For more details visit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing

Meanwhile for a less complicated subject, enjoy this:

#https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/11/08/exp-gps-1108-fareeds-take.cnn

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Celebration of Life: Macrine J. Katague via her Favorite Music (Hymns)-Part 10

This is Part 10 of the 14 Series on Macrine J. Katague, Celebration of Life.

Macrine loved to sing. In her younger years, she sings coloratura soprano. When she started smoking later in her forties ( during nursing school), her voice changed to mezzo soprano. Macrine and I loved singing in the choir here in Northern California. In the late 1980's, we sang in our church choir on Sunday masses in Pinole, as well as with the UP Alumni, Berkeley Chapter Choir based in El Sobrante, California.

Eleven years ago, we sang in our Church Choir here in Fair Oaks. We even sang a duet of Silent Night in Tagalog at the concert before the Christmas midnight mass. Macrine and I had also organized the Marinduque Association of the Capital Area( MACA) Christmas Caroling Group in Colesville, Maryland in the late 1990's.

Besides singing in the church Choir with me, Macrine sang a few times during a friends wedding and she got paid, so I will consider her a semi-pro. Anyway in this episode, I am posting two of her favorite hymns that we sometimes sung during Catholic masses. Make a Channel of your Peace( the Prayers of St.Francis), and On Eagle Wings..

The Prayer of St Francis song (Make me a Channel of your Peace)reminds me of our one week vacation in Rome and in the Vatican, and our visit to Assissi, Italy in 1990

On Eagle Wings reminds me of our one week vacation in Aruba, 2001

Meanwhile, while searching for the best arrangement of the above two songs, I found two renditions of Cohen's Hallelujah as follows:

Celine Dion surprises the Canadian Tenors-Oprah in the Audience

Religious Hymns reminds me of our college years and the University of the Philippines Student Catholic activities, 1951-1955.

https://davidbkatague.blogspot.com/search?q=UPSCA

Meanwhile, enjoy this photo from Chateau Du Mer, Boac, Marinduque, Philippines-our second home!!

Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.