Cordillera Coffee Experience: The Story Behind Their Coffees

Wazzup Pilipinas!

I attended an event at Cordillera Coffee or Cordicoffee’s advocacy, The Coffee AID Jam after braving traffic from a tourism conference in BGC. It was a night of homegrown music and coffee featuring independent musician Tao Aves and Ukelele Manila ambassadors.

Cordillera Coffee serves organically and highland grown pure Arabica coffee from Kalinga and Benguet. It has a unique taste due to the rich soil and unpolluted environment of the Cordillera region, they also have the exotic civet (alamid) coffee which is well-known in the region for strong aroma and good taste. If you are in the area it is worth the trip, they have good concoctions and great dishes such as house specialties, pastas, sandwiches, and toasts. Well-loved dishes include Chef Gene Gonzalez' Cordillera Risotto and new menu item Pinoy Kaya Toast, and home baked goodies like the Cordi tsokolate brownies and tsokasuy (chocolate with cashew) cookies, and their Tablea Arabica cupcakes.

One of the very reason why I attended is that, I’m an avid supporter of our local artists, advocacies, indigenous cultures and products and social enterprises. I heard from cordicoffee volunteers the sad fate of many cordillera coffee growers, some are exploited by businessman and not really getting the fair share, and the hardships of growing coffee in the mountains specially during rainy seasons. Coffee AID advocates fair trade and help support local coffee growers. The event is also the perfect time to sign up as a volunteer for their outreach activities like coffee tree-planting, harvest and processing, as well as community workshops.

Floy Quintos’ Ang Nawalang Kapatid Closes DUP’s 38th Season

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A musical adaptation of India’s greatest epic closes Dulaang UP’s 38th season. Ang Nawalang Kapatid, adapted from The Mahabharata by acclaimed playwright Floy Quintos, with original score by Ceejay Javier, directed and choreographed by Dexter M. Santos, is a re-telling of the epic battle between the Kaurava and Pandava families. The story focuses on the anti-hero Karna, a brave young man who must choose between loyalty to his family or to the state which made him a prince.

Ang Nawalang Kapatid was originally written as a children’s play for the Ateneo Children’s Theater and was first produced for their 2011 season. This new version allows for many more of the complexities of the original material to be dramatized. New arrangements of the original songs were created by Ceejay Javier, whose original works include “Isang Panaginip na Fili”, “Astig”, “Alex in Wonderland”, “Break Away Antigone”. He is best known as Musical Director for Atlantis Productions’ “Next To Normal”, Disney's “The Little Mermaid”, “Carrie”, “Addams Family”. As expected, the new staging will showcase Dexter Santos’ flair for images and movement as seen in his previous works “Maxie the Musical”, “Collection”, “Orosman at Zafira”.

In adapting the Indian epic, Floy Quintos has chosen to highlight the story of family and blood ties, and the conflicts that these bring about. Karna, who in Indian literature is traditionally the anti-hero, is now a young man searching for his dharma, his truth and destiny, while unaware of his true blood ties. The young and energetic cast is made up of the Dulaang UP Ensemble, with a live band. Krina Cayabyab is vocal director.

Financial Data Leads Malicious Spam Hit List for Third Year in a Row

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Spam in 2013 decreased by 2.5 percentage points compared last 2012. Kaspersky Lab experts said this is because more and more Internet users and subscribers are likely becoming aware of these spam materials.

However, Kaspersky Lab noticed that they see more fraudulent and malicious messages appearing and cybercriminals are adopting new tactics to steal confidential data, especially passwords and logins to banking systems.

The experts at Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, have summarized spammer activity for 2013:

• The proportion of spam in email flows was 69.6% in 2013, which is 2.5 percentage points lower than the previous year
• The percentage of emails with malicious attachments was 3.2% - 0.2 percentage points lower than in 2012
• 32.1% of phishing attacks targeted social networks
• The biggest sources of spam were China (23%) and the USA (18%)
• The proportion of spam in email traffic continues to fall. In the last three years, the share of unsolicited messages has fallen by 10.7 percentage points.