This blog is about the exotic and the mundane and everything in between that I find interesting but doesn’t usually end up as news. But who was that famous news anchor who said “News is what we say it is”? (Answer, again, below).

This blog will attempt to find relevance in the commonplace, value the undervalued, and satisfy my personal curiosity about all things that have anything to do with being Filipino. Hopefully, more than a few readers will share the same curiosity. I have adopted as one of my personal mottos Susan Sontag’s own: Be interested in everything… and nothing else.

Most of the topics will have something to do with the stories that have been broadcast on Sidetrip sa Saksi, my travel cum social commentary segments on GMA-7’s late-night newscast in the Philippines.

I like to think I play something like a court jester’s role on a nightly news menu that is overwhelmingly bad news. But while I try to keep the tone light, I don’t want to be lightweight. I also don’t do comedy (that’s too hard).

The basic concept of Sidetrip sa Saksi is to travel somewhere -- usually in the Philippines but we have also been to Europe, Africa, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong and Macau -- and highlight a cultural or social element in that place and try to say something that would be interesting and relevant to Filipino viewers. All in less than three minutes. Naturally, my team and I have more information and material than what ends up broadcast. This blog is an additional venue for this stuff.

This medium being that wonderful invention called a blog, the topics may roam to anything outside of Sidetrip stories that may strike my fancy. My interests include television news and technology, journalism trends and issues, documentaries, environmental issues, tribal cultures, the visual arts, geography, military history, non-fiction authors and their work, Islam and the Moro struggle, and international relations. The blog will also contain by-products of my other gig at GMA, I-Witness, the network’s full-length documentary show.

The Sidetrip blog will also coincide with the start of GMA’s Pinoy TV in the United States this month (San Francisco Bay Area at first). Sidetrip the TV segment will be aired as an “interstitial”, short breakers in between regular programs. In other words, in the gaps where commercials would be on free TV. (ahh, the joys of cable)

But aside from being a space filler, Sidetrip has another mission. There is a need, I think, to round out perceptions about life in the Philippines. There is no doubt that crimes, disasters, and scandals occur in abundance in my country and must be covered aggressively by the media. But ordinary life as I and tens of millions of other Filipinos live it is full of interesting things that are not always observed. But if you just stop to observe them, one may start seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary and realize that hey, life’s not so bad in these islands after all.

By the way, Binondo’s kalesa horses sleep in Tondo, in small stables for three to five horses tucked away in alleys lined with tiny family apartments. The main threat to the kalesas’ existence: the pedicab, which is the cheapest form of transportation in Metro Manila next to walking.

In the town of Luisiana in Laguna, one of its main products, pandan, is being fashioned into pandan evening gowns, an innovation that is a far cry from the traditional crafts of pandan hat and bayong making.

And the Honesty Café is in the northernmost province of Batanes along the nearly deserted coastal road that starts in the capital of Basco. Kalesa horses, pandan inventions, and the Honesty Café have all been subjects of Sidetrip sa Saksi.

The quote, “News is what we say it is,” comes from the late David Brinkley, formerly of NBC News.