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Family portrait, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

Marat lost in the semis to The Fed. He couldn’t summon up his A game, gesticulated, muttered, yelled, threw his racquet. A minor opera from a man who one flew into a rage, smashed a chair onto the court, then recited a poem in Russian and apologized to the audience. Never been one for consolation prizes, but he won five matches in a row. Also, I’d assumed that he’d been playing badly for over a year because he was nuts. Turns out the problem wasn’t all mental. According to the Times of London, his coach Herman Gumy, who joined the team ten months ago, realized that Marat was favoring his surgically-repaired knee. This had changed his movement, notably the swing on his forearm. They’ve been undoing this, and the results are just beginning to show.

From Andrew Leavold at Trash Video: The Search for Weng Weng is a site to promote my forthcoming documentary on my quest for the Philippines’ long-dead midget James Bond. Read the REAL Weng Weng story and interview with Weng Weng’s brother, see stacks of stills from my Philippines shoots – photos with President Marcos’ daughter, WW co-star Dolphy, Eddie Garcia, 80s bold superstar Maria Isabel Lopez, and shots of Weng Weng’s family home, friends and last resting place… the most complete Weng Weng filmography yet, with posters (We’ve found yet another one - a 1981 prequel to For Your Height Only called Agent 00!)… “White Guerrilla In Manila” article on the history of Philippines B-films, Gerry de Leon’s vampire double, Eddie Romero filmography, the Blood Island trilogy reviewed AND MORE!

Contrary to the popular assumption, the Pope does not wear Prada. (The public must have him confused with that other one.)

“L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, categorically denied reports today that (the Pope’s) shoes were a Prada product, saying this was “of course false”. According to Vatican sources the Pope’s shoes are made by a cobbler from Novara called Adriano Stefanelli, who makes them from calf or kid for the winter and nappa leather for the summer. Papal shoe repairs are carried out by Antonio Arellano, a Peruvian shoemaker in the Borgo, the medieval quarter next to St Peter’s. The article, on “Ratzinger’s Liturgical Vestments”, was written by Juan Manuel de Prada, the noted Spanish writer and author of The Tempest, who is not related to the fashion company. De Prada said that the image of the German-born Pope as concerned with “frivolity” was at odds with the truth, which was that he was a “simple and sober” man. Suggestions to the contrary were “stupid and banal”.”

Ferragamo retrospective, Shanghai 2008, originally uploaded by 160507.

It never really gets dark in Shanghai. The night sky is awash in the glow of a million electric lights—11pm looks like early dawn or dusk, depending on how much you’ve indulged in the city’s famous party scene. With an annual growth rate in double-digits since 1992, Shanghai can afford to leave the lights on. In the daytime there’s another indicator of progress: Dust. The construction boom of the last decade—bridges, tunnels, flyovers, expressways, subways, international airport, deep water port, office buildings—has covered the city in a fine layer of concrete dust. Brand-new Bentleys and Aston-Martins drive by with dusty roofs. Five thousand families and a bridge were relocated to make a site for Expo 2010, now under construction.

Shanghai in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Oz Open 05 from maratsafin.com, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

And Marat is in the semifinals! Still unburdened by expectations as no one expects him to win anyway. I can’t stop cackling. So this is his career plan: Appear like comet. Casually dismantle champ at US Open. Impress everyone with pure talent and volatility. Casually lose Australian Open. Come back, win Aus Open. Vanish down the rankings, wait till you’ve been written off. Sneak back into the game while everyone looking elsewhere. Make no promises whatsoever. Clever.

Asked to account for his resurgence at Wimbledon, Marat said, “Shit happens.”

I take taxis everyday, and I’ve been wondering: What is the net effect on the drivers’ and passengers’ mental health of constant unabated exposure to radio content, including

a. News of the day, 95% of it bad, the other 4% horrific
b. Angry commentators fulminating about the news of the day, with the inevitable conclusion that nothing ever changes in this country
c. Callers relating their sad encounters with official corruption, venality and ineptitude, leading to the inevitable conclusion that everyone is “gago”
d. Bad pop and worse bossa nova
e. Unfunny jokes and tag lines delivered by announcers who seem to think that screaming makes everything funnier
f. Maudlin, hysterical drama serials about desperate, unhappy, desperately unhappy people with no hope
g. The needy making appeals for help to the general public because they have no one else to turn to
h. Do they still have that AM show where the relatives of OFWs can call their provider in a foreign country and ask why their remittance hasn’t arrived or is late or is not enough to cover their needs especially since someone in the family is pregnant again?

I don’t believe in the true-good-beautiful best-foot-forward approach and pretending everything is peachy when it’s not, but shouldn’t there be a limit to the amount of horror and torment that we passively absorb from the airwaves? What about some perspective? Programmers will argue that the public deserves to hear the truth, but I’m beginning to suspect a campaign to make us run amuck.

In The Honourable Schoolboy, the spy Westerby goes to the races in Hong Kong to observe his quarry, Drake Ko. He spots one of Ko’s associates in the owners’ box.

“Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, and half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy. . .

“”That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

“Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.”

Biblical text-writing may have poisoned monks
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News. Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors: red. The study, which will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, also describes a previously undocumented disease, called FOS, which was like leprosy and caused skull lesions…scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books…

And Marat is in the quarterfinals! Before Wimbledon he couldn’t win two matches in a row, and he always says grass is not his best surface. (Was it last year that he led a revolt against the food?) Last night he beat the 13th seed Stanislas Wawrinka. That match wasn’t aired because they showed the Murray-Gasquet five-set thriller. British number one vs. French number one. I thought Gasquet had it—he was on in the first two sets, then in the third set Murray got pumped up, which got the crowd pumped up, which got him really pumped up. I think the Brits are finally warming to Murray as the replacement for their beloved Tim Henman. Will their adulation carry him past the Nadal juggernaut in the quarters? Earlier, The Fed beat former Wimbledon winner Lleyton Hewitt—there was some difficulty in the first set, then it was a stroll. The media has really pounded Roger over his vulnerability this year (so he gets testy in the press conference, and they say, See? He’s really vulnerable!)—many predicted that Hewitt would win despite having lost their last 11 matches. There goes number 12.

Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

The lonely goatherd asks: Why is Sulpicio Lines still operating? Why hasn’t it been forcibly disbanded? With a record like theirs—some 7,000 passengers killed in about 23 years—why does anybody still travel with them? And has President Arroyo repeated President Aquino’s “No stone unturned” promise yet?

(1) I DON’T KNOW, but if someone has a sound theory, do post it. (2) Uhh, because its defenders argue that there aren’t enough vessels working in these 7,100 islands and a shipping line with a Titanic-type body count is better than no shipping line at all? (3) As far as I know, more people died in the sinking of Doña Paz than on 9/11, but no one declared war on unsafe transportation. It’s “bahala na” at its deadliest. (4) Aargh.

I was feeling glum for no good reason (which is better than being depressed with good reason) so I thought I’d cheer myself up by watching Wanted. Excellent idea: the movie blew the gloomy thoughts out of my head. Tibur Bekmambetov’s (Russians Russians everywhere I look; really must move to St Petersburg) adaptation of the graphic novel (My sister says they changed it substantially) is ridiculous, exhilarating, insane, and fun for anyone not overly attached to the laws of physics (You mean the trajectory, not the bullet!) or probability. In it, James MacAvoy’s cubicle rat shmoe is recruited for a fraternity of assassins formed in the medieval period. (His minder is Angelina Jolie, who is more lethal than any of the men.) The Fraternity was founded by a weavers’ guild, so I kept imagining the members of the Fashion Designers’ Association of the Philippines hunting down the evil and corrupt and garrotting them with tape measures.

The Fraternity call themselves “the assassins of fate”, “fate” being represented by a loom which churns out cloth, the warp and weft of which they translate into binary code and then into the names of their targets. So if I decide that I am the instrument of fate and I eat a bowl of muesli for breakfast every day (The Bowl of Fate), and I discover a pattern in the cereals which corresponds to the names of actual people…The point being, don’t think too much and you’ll enjoy the flick.

LeCarré, originally uploaded by 160507.

For the next month I’m going through the LeCarrés, so if anyone spots a copy of Smiley’s People, let me know (Forget Constant Gardener, zzzzz). I just finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which is wonderfully bleak and nerdy (We consider nerdhood an honor). So that’s what the fuss was about. Was, because the Smiley novels are harder to find in stores, which probably means fewer people are reading them, which bolsters the argument that the audience is getting dumber. Another reason to miss the Cold War: enemies you get to know so well they’re practically your friends. After all, your adversary is the instrument of your destiny.

In Tinker, George Smiley is looking for a mole inside the Circus (British intelligence). Having been ignominiously booted out of the Circus, he has few allies and assumes everyone an enemy. He only knows a few details, not the whole picture, so he has to sift the rest out of files he has no access to. His allies manage to get their hands on them, and they start plowing through reams of documents, just digesting vast amounts of data. If there are gaps, they point to what the mole doesn’t want him to know. It’s basically auditing, but thrilling. Occasionally someone gets killed in a brutal manner that the author doesn’t dwell on, because it’s a given that if anyone is found out, he’s already dead. It’s about waiting patiently for something to click into place and show how everything is connected. Then you wish you didn’t know, because it destroys your faith in institutions, nations, and human beings. It’s a deep, dark pit that LeCarré plumbs, and it’s a trip worth taking.

Another resemblance between Saffy and Koba Stalin: She insists on being in every picture, and Stalin had his associates erased from his pictures—and from this world.