Word: manila
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...crosses through the streets before the supplicants are hammered into place and raised aloft under a crown of thorns and above a weeping "Mary." The spectacle is as fascinating as it is repelling. One of the main festivals is on Good Friday at San Fernando, an hour north of Manila. In the capital, hoodlums in the barrio of Tondo leave knives and guns at home for a week and beat themselves in apology for their sins. Another year of skulduggery resumes on Easter Monday...
Less gory are the Moriones Festivals on Marinduque Island, south of Manila. Visitors can join masked processions and passion plays over the weekend. The theme is un-Christian revenge: a mock-up of the head of Longinus, one of the centurions who guarded Christ, is paraded through the streets. Or try spooky Siquijor Island, south of Cebu. Long a center for paganism and magic, the island attracts numerous witches on Good Friday who gather to brew and administer love potions, supposedly most potent on the godless day of Christ's death...
...small, hot room in Caloocan city, one of Manila's shoddy suburbs, a 21-year-old man-child perches on a chair and turns the fan up to high. Yellow paint peels from the walls. There is no running water. The bed is a dirty mattress on a steel frame. But enthroned on a makeshift table sits a workstation worthy of a cash-rich start-up. The man leans toward his crisp, new 19-inch monitor and gets down to business. He surfs to the archive of an online florist and peruses someone's recent order for roses, complete with...
...poster boy of Filipino hackerdom is Onel de Guzman, the 23-year-old Manila resident blamed for allegedly unleashing last year's Love Bug virus, which wiped out files and paralyzed Internet access from Pakistan to the Pentagon. De Guzman was unemployed: he learned to hack partly by sneaking into other people's accounts to access the Internet, which he couldn't otherwise afford. That's typical: hackers in the Philippines tend to be overtrained, underutilized minds trying to satisfy their creative yearnings but kept from doing so by a variety of factors. Besides the stinging poverty that has translated...
Another factor is more sociological than financial. The country's top universities?the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila, De La Salle University?are dominated by students from rich and middle-class families who attended the top high schools. They eventually percolate into the Elite jobs available for graduates. For less-pedigreed programmers, the pickings can remain lean all their lives...