Time was when sheer star value practically guaranteed victory for popular celebrities running for public office. Joseph Estrada, Ramon Revilla, Bong Revilla, Lito Lapid, Vilma Santos and many more stars surged to electoral success, with Estrada eventually making it all the way to the presidency before he was summarily impeached.
The next Philippine presidential race is still three years away, but the search for President Benigno Aquino III’s successor is already beginning to heat up—with Mar Roxas, Jejomar Binay and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. gearing up for an exciting, three-way fight.
“Don’t quit your day job.” We often hear this unsolicited advice when actors decide to pursue politics. In the United States, Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono and wrestler Jesse Ventura held important public posts at some point in their careers—as did Jerry Springer, who became Cincinnati’s scandal-plagued mayor 14 years before he began hosting his controversial talk show in 1991.
Like a bat out of hell, aging hard rock legend Meat Loaf stormed the stage at a Mitt Romney campaign rally Thursday to declare his support for the Republican flag-bearer in the White House race.
Katy Perry’s doing her best get-out-the vote effort: At a rally for President Barack Obama, she wore a tight white dress imprinted like a ballot, and a square box on her right hip filled in the names of Obama and Joe Biden.
In rites witnessed by four national artists, Fernando Poe Jr.’s widow Susan Roces and daughter Mary Grace Poe-Llamanzares finally received the posthumous National Artist medallion and citation on behalf of the “Action King” of Filipino movies from President Benigno Aquino in Malacañang after a six-year-long wait.
Government censors will be implementing a “TV violence rating code” to get television networks to tone down graphic scenes of sex and violence in the news and other programs, while setting aside 15 percent of their airtime for “child-friendly” programming.
The nomination of veteran comedian Dolphy for the National Artist award was already being processed, according to Trixie Angeles, legal counsel of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
It was like losing a battle for Marine troops in Zamboanga City, who were so upset about the “American Idol” results that “nobody wanted to eat, cook, fetch water.”
Hollywood actor Jeremy Renner arrived in the Palace wearing a formal Barong Tagalog over green cargo pants.
Don’t look now, but slowly and surely—and insidiously—sex has come back to local TV screens, sometimes as early as the daytime and even morning hours! Do we have to state the obvious, that TV is a mass medium that enters people’s homes, so what it shows has to be For General Patronage, because vulnerable minors are watching?
“I think there’s this morbid fascination with animals that can potentially eat us,” opined shark expert Dr. Vic Peddemors, who is featured in Discovery’s Shark Week’s “Summer of the Shark 2” and “Great White Invasion.” As head of the shark research section of the New South Wales Department of Primary Industry, the scientist initially studied seaweed and eventually ended up working on dolphins and whales before focusing on sharks.
