mr. & mrs. angeles

Alms, alms, alms. Spare me a piece of bread. Spare me your mercy. I am a child so young, so thin, and so ragged.
Why are you staring at me? With my eyes I cannot see but I know that you are all staring at me. Why are you whispering to one another? Why? Do you know my mother? Do you know my father? Did you know me five years ago? Yes, five years of bitterness have passed. I can still remember the vast happiness mother and I shared with each other. We were very happy indeed.
Suddenly, five loud knocks were heard on the door and a deep silence ensued. Did the cruel Nippon’s discover our peaceful home? Mother ran to Father’s side pleading. “Please, Luis, hide in the cellar, there in the cellar where they cannot find you,” I pulled my father’s arm but he did not move. It seemed as though his feet were glued to the floor.
The door went “bang” and before us five ugly beasts came barging in. “Are you Captain Luis Santos?” roared the ugliest of them all. “Yes,” said my father. “You are under arrest,” said one of the beasts. They pulled father roughly away from us. Father was not given a chance to bid us goodbye.
We followed them mile after mile. We were hungry and thirsty. We saw group of Japanese eating. Oh, how our mouths watered seeing the delicious fruits they were eating,
Then suddenly, we heard a voice call, “Consuelo. . . . Oscar. . . . Consuelo. . . . Oscar. . . . Consuelo. . . . Oscar. . . .” we ran towards the direction of the voice, but it was too late. We saw father hanging on a tree. . . . dead. Oh, it was terrible. He had been badly beaten before he died. . . . and I cried vengeance, vengeance, vengeance! Everything went black. The next thing I knew I was nursing my poor invalid mother.
One day, we heard the church bell ringing “ding-dong, ding-dong!” It was a sign for us to find a shelter in our hide-out, but I could not leave my invalid mother, I tried to show her the way to the hide-out.
Suddenly, bombs started falling; airplanes were roaring overhead, canyons were firing from everywhere. “Boom, boom, boom, boom!” Mother was hit. Her legs were shattered into pieces. I took her gently in my arms and cried, “I’ll have vengeance, vengeance!” “No, Oscar. Vengeance, it’s God’s,” said mother.
But I cried out vengeance. I was like a pent-up volcano. “Vengeance is mine not the Lord’s”. “No, Oscar. Vengeance is not ours, it’s God’s” these were the words from my mother before she died.
Mother was dead and I was blind. Vengeance is not ours? To forgive is divine but vengeance is sweeter.
That was five years ago, five years. . . .
Alms, alms, alms. Spare me a piece of bread. Spare me your mercy. I am a child so young, so thin, and so ragged. Vengeance is not ours, it’s God’s. . . . It’s. . . . God’s. . It’s…

yes!

i admit it now!… and i will tell the whole world that i am an addict…
i am not ashamed to say it because that is who i am… that is what i have become…

i didn’t want to try it at first…
i thought i wasn’t gonna like it…
i was hesitant…

my older brother was doing it…
does that mean i should too?
i asked myself that question…

i see him do it…
over and over again…
he wouldn’t stop!…

he doesn’t even care about the people around him anymore…
so i ask myself, should i?
or should i not….

one day i woke up and said to myself,
“i am gonna try it”
why not?…

i did…

i tried it…

i liked it…

and now,
i don’t know how to stop…

i got hooked…
i got addicted…
i didn’t know it was gonna be this good…

my wife told me to stop it already…
but i don’t know how to begin…
i couldn’t…
i wouldn’t…
i really can’t…

my brother couldn’t even stop himself from doing it…
so how can i convince myself to do the same…
especially that i see him so happy with it…

stop me…
help me…

i am an addict…
and i admit it to all of you…
i am not ashamed to say it because that is who i am…
that is what i have become…

if there should be anyone to blame…
it would be me and not anyone else…

i hold my being…
i should have control of myself…
but how can i let go of something that makes me so alive??…

tell me…

i am an addict!
yes, i am!
and i can’t stop myself doing it over and over again…

turning the page of my SUDOKU
one puzzle at a time…

HEHEHE!… KALA N’YO KUNG ANO NA NOH?… GOTCHA!
THANKS FOR THE SUDOKU, KUYA!

Sudoku has a fascinating history. “Su” means number in Japanese, and “Doku” refers to the single place on the puzzle board that each number can fit into. It also connotes someone who is single—indeed, one way to describe the game is “Solitaire with numbers.” Sometimes it is mis-spelled as “soduko” or “sudoko.” Although its name is Japanese, its origins are actually European and American, and the game represents the best in cross-cultural fertilization. Unlike many games which spring from one culture and are then absorbed by others, Sudoku’s development reveals it to be a true hybrid creation.
The 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler apparently developed the concept of “Latin Squares” where numbers in a grid appear only once, across and up and down. In the late 1970’s, Dell Magazines in the US began publishing what we now call Sudoku puzzles using Euler’s concept with a 9 by 9 square grid. They called it Number Place, and it was developed by an independent puzzle maker, Howard Garnes.

In the mid-1980s, the president of the Japanese puzzle giant Nikoli, Inc., Mr. Maki Kaji (pictured at left), urged the company to publish a version of the puzzle that became a huge hit in that country. Nikoli gave the game its current name, and helped refine it by restricting the number of revealed or given numbers to 30 and having them appear symmetrically. Afterwards the game became increasingly popular in Japan and started becoming a fixture in daily newspapers and magazines. Yet almost two decades passed before the game was taken up by The Times newspaper in London as a daily puzzle. This development was due to the efforts of Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge originally from New Zealand. He first came across a Sudoku puzzle in a Japanese bookshop in 1997, and later spent many years developing a computer program to generate them. In the fall of 2004, he was able to convince The Times to start publishing daily Sudoku puzzles developed using his software. The first game was published on November 12, 2004. Within a few months, other British newspapers began publishing their own Sudoku puzzles.

Once again, Sudoku’s popularity crossed the oceans. By the summer of 2005, major newspapers in the US were also offering Sudoku puzzles like they would daily crossword puzzles. It is interesting to note that while software is critical to being able to supply the growing demand for Sudoku puzzles—it can take hours of processing time to generate one unique puzzle—it was old media in the form of newspapers that have done so much to spread Sudoku around the world. In the US, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today offered Sudoku puzzles to their readers by September 2005.
Sudoku’s future development is unknown. While the 9 by 9 grid is the most common form of Sudoku, there are many variants of the game. Four by four (4 x 4) Sudoku with 2 by 2 subsections are simpler, fun for younger audiences, and easy to deliver to mobile devices like cellphones (this site offers a 4 by 4 variant). There are 5 by 5 games, 6 by 6 and 7 by 7 games. For the truly addicted, there are even 16 by 16 grids, not to mention a 25 by 25 grid apparently offered by Japanese game developer Nikoli. Sudoku puzzles using letters and symbols, some even spelling words in their final solutions are also becoming available. Other variants require computational skills.

Where this rapidly developing fad leads to, no one can tell. What is clear though is that Sudoku is a fun and challenging way for people of any age and culture to hone their logical and deductive abilities. Who knows—played often enough, Sudoku may help make the human race a tiny bit smarter.