The Philippines has suffered interminably about the state of its public rest rooms, CRs or bathrooms since my wife and I started coming here in the mid-1990s, and deservedly so. But now, in 2014, the state of the nation’s rest rooms has improved significantly. Nowadays, there is usually toilet paper in clean, dry bathrooms, whose use was historically advocated by Westerners and Balikbayans or Filipinos who have returned home from abroad. The recent increase in the country’s foreign tourism cannot be ignored as a major factor either.

Now we come to special case of the men’s restroom in the most unlikely of places, The Rosarian Hotel and Restaurant located in the small provincial town of Gumaca in Quezon.

Yes, the bathroom was clean, but it still lacked “paper”. Most noticeable, however, was the tarpulin mounted over the men’s urinals. In the West, one usually sees obscene, crudely scrawled messages or images above each urinal, typically reminding the pisser that if he has “read up the wall this far, you’re probably pissing on your shoes” and not into the urinal. These images, on the other hand, might compel the urinator to reexamine his penis to see if it’s as short as the sexually clad female figures are suggesting it is by their mock measurements and shock.

There’s is no doubt that this bit of sophisticated graffiti surpasses any such scrawls seen in the men’s toilets of the West.
                                             Collis H. Davis

    My mother, Billie Davis, and father, Collis Davis Sr., pose for this Xerox copy of the original photograph, but Billie seems preoccupied with something or someone off-shot. Interestingly, she’s holding the light meter (shown above right), a General Electric selenium cell reflected light measuring instrument. My caption notes that although she’s a subject, she continued to direct this shot insofar as the exposure was concerned. That was my Mom. I was speculating that the photographer of this photo was none other than Reuben Burrell, her photography teacher!!! Can you imagine?
                                                                                       Collis Davis Jr.

Folklore has it that there’s a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Can you, the reader, divine what I mean by the above statement when you scrutinize this image very carefully?

For greater detail in this scene, click the image to go to my Photography page where there are additional shots for your enjoyment.

There’s a lot of memorabilia one collects in his or her travels. This match book I obtained during my New York years when I was a pack-a-week smoker (1962-1979). I have carried this around over the past three or four decades, but have decided this week to put this relic on my web site’s Humor page. The irony in its name is obvious.