Raising Boys

‘Dumbledore is not dead’ August 12, 2005

For those of us who are grieving over the sad fate of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Wulfric Brian Dumbledore in The Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, let us take heart for there may still be hope.

Dumbledore is not dead. He could not be dead. Or so Dave Haber, managing editor of Wizard News, contends and in his website—aptly named Dumbledore is not Dead, he gives us his reasons for this belief.

Haber believes there is more to what happened to Dumbledore in HBP than meets the eye and lists the many clues in the book that tend to show why the Hogwarts headmaster’s death could be other than what it is.

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Mars won’t be near this August August 11, 2005

I received an e-mail from a co-worker in Manila about Mars coming so near Earth in an encounter that will supposedly culminate by end of August and have the red planet looking as big and as clear as our Moon to the naked eye.

If you have received this, too, be warned that this is a hoax. The great opposition of these two planets happened in 2003 and peak viewing for Mars this year will be by end of October, not this month.

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Invitation to babble August 3, 2005

I’ve not been keeping up with my writing practice by posting daily here. My last post was July 29, my birthday, and that was already five days ago. I’m tempted to stay I’ve been stumped with work. That’s partly true. However, there is another reason why I’ve not been meeting my obligations at work and at home.

What I’ve actually been doing is playing babble, a hybrid of boggle and scrabble. I’ve not been sleeping well because of babble: despairing over why I’m in the bottom rung of the player ranking and going crazy over words I cannot find but other players swear are there. My life has not been the same ever since I chanced upon this game in metafilter.

If you love word games and don’t mind getting addicted to one, let’s play babble.

Sun.Star blogs page July 23, 2005

(Cross-posted in Sun.Star Blog Chronicles)

After going over so many themes, I’ve finally selected one that I’m happy with for the Sun.Star Blog Chronicles, a Sun.Star Network Online section intended to cover the blogging community. Thanks to Max, Sun.Star Cebu online editor, who suggested this theme and who took care of the necessary improvements.

The Sun.Star Blog Chronicles is not even halfway ready. In the process of putting it out, other tasks came up delaying the launch of the section. I am, however, forced to hasten its completion because contributor J. Angelo Racoma already wrote about it in his blog. I guess thanks to him, too, for speeding things up.

We’re still accepting bloggers into our pool and coming up with publication rules and guidelines. Some of the submissions will see print in Sun.Star newspapers.

Other things lined up involve sections with reader-generated content and contributors from outside mainstream media.

A jail warden and Arroyo July 22, 2005

The Saturday issue of Sun.Star Pampanga will banner the story of the Angeles City jail warden who was found dead in his quarters earlier Friday, an apparent suicide.

The reason? He was reportedly worried about the investigation being sought by the US embassy on the death of an American national, a former US Navy man, while locked up in the Angeles jail.

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Arroyo Watch blog address July 8, 2005

Yay! We successfully imported Arroyo Watch blog in Blogger to WordPress, thanks to detailed instructions on how to do it from Catsudon.

Click to go the new blog, Citizen Watch: The Arroyo Presidency.

We welcome contributions from readers in the form of an analysis of the crisis besetting the Arroyo presidency. Send an e-mail to sunstar(dot)blogs(at)gmail(dot)com expressing your intention. We reserve the right to edit your submissions, though.