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Thanks to Melo Villareal of lakbaypilipinas.com for the new look of this site. We were getting tired of the blue palette and figured it was time to spruce things up a little. “A little”, ha ha. This is a work-in-progress; please bear with us.

Baroque Birthday Cake, originally uploaded by 160507.

Went to Tina’s birthday brunch. Brought the Baroque Birthday Cake by Carlo Estagle: chocolate with sculptured sugar frosting and orange liqueur, or as I prefer to call it, Kill All The Grown-Ups. As always, I picked up all sorts of advice and bits of information. A random sampling:

(1) If you’re staying in a hotel, keep your toothbrush in the room safe. Ambeth is serious about this. Don’t leave your toothbrush in the bathroom, where the cleaning person may be tempted to use it to scrub the toilet.

(2) RayVi says if you’re lucky enough to score tickets to a play starring Al Pacino, don’t sit in the front rows. The great man sprays. True, this would not be a problem if you have a fantasy about being spat at by Michael Corleone.

(3) The 16th century Tagalog word for “binabae” or effeminate man was “bayogin”.

Saw the new Harry Potter. I suspect it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t get it. It didn’t answer the question I’ve been asking since Fiennes turned up in the last one: What happened to the Voldemort guy’s nose?

Then there are the other questions. Did he have one to begin with? Is this the cause of his nastiness: proboscis envy? Apart from his meanness towards the kid, what forms does this nastiness take? Did Harry’s dead parents have something to do with the loss of the nose? What does he have against Harry anyway, didn’t he approve of the nude scenes in Equus? Why can’t Voldemort’s name be mentioned when everyone knows what it is, even the poor schmucks in the audience who haven’t read the books? Why can’t Voldemort’s name be mentioned without one’s voice dropping an octave and an eyebrow rising significantly? And what is that girl’s problem, is she attempting semaphore with her eyebrows? So what if the noseless one wins, how bad can it get? How will it affect the lives of the ordinary powerless mortals?

And there’s the big question, the one the entire Potter movie series has been pretending not to hear: What exactly is at stake here? As long as it remains unanswered, the movies will have as much sense of urgency and emotional impact as a power struggle in a boarding school drama guild.

A film adaptation should be able to stand alone, independent of its source, and it must be coherent even to those who have not read the book. At least with the Lord of the Rings movies, you need not have read Tolkien to know why Sauron looked like a glowing vagina.

Signage. Sent by pitirpol., originally uploaded by 160507.

I have some unsolicited advice for mall developers: Air-conditioning. If you’re building a shopping mall in Metro Manila, your market wants air-conditioning. I don’t mean air-conditioned shops that you get to by walking in the open air; I mean completely air-conditioned, fully-enclosed, an artificially-cooled biosphere. Because in case you haven’t noticed, it’s hot. Or it’s raining and hot. And the air is polluted. Forget about dining al fresco or strolling in the sun—where do you think you are, Paris? Milan? San Diego? No, you’re in Manila! Deal with it.

Sure, foreigners like to bake in the heat, but in case you haven’t noticed, the locals outnumber tourists, not to mention that solar exposure negates the locals’ passionate attempts at skin-whitening. Fine, put out tables for the tourists, the smokers, the rich people who think sweat is exotic, but do air-condition your entire mall. You won’t be doing it for charity anyway, you’ll be charging your tenants. Who can afford the electric bill, if there’s enough human traffic to generate steady sales. And don’t mention environmental issues and carbon footprints as your “design rationale”—oh please, you’re full of compost.

Charlie Brooker on murky lyrics. Wonderful analysis of the jewels of Tom Jones’s oeuvre.

“There should be more of this sort of thing in pop. You’re Beautiful by James Blunt, for instance, is infuriating: partly because it is actually quite a nice tune, but mainly because thanks to some indefinably smug aspect of his voice, every time you hear it you want to leap inside his larynx and kick your way out with barbed-wire boots on. Yet all would be forgiven, and it would become my favourite song of all time, if the final line revealed Blunt had been singing it to himself in a mirror while hanging a dog from a noose in his living room. Especially if there was a video to go with it.”

Found: the giant lion-eating chimps of the magic forest of the Congo.

On Monday, July 9, there appeared in the Inquirer a full-page ad with this arresting headline: “Titi: Ari Ng Lalaki”, and under it the Boratian subhead, “Learnings for make benefit glorious nation of Philippines.” It was taken out by Antonio Calipjo Go, an academic supervisor at a school in QC, and it details actual errors found in Philippine public school textbooks. I am not acquainted with the author of the piece, I don’t know what his motives are (A full-page ad in the Inquirer is not cheap), and I don’t buy the self-comparison with Galileo, but the errors he cites are real and in print.

If you have not seen the ad, I strongly urge you to look it up. I have been dining out on it for the last couple of days. Reading the text aloud has brought great joy to my friends; unfortunately this is immediately followed by despair and fury, as they realize what Filipino schoolchildren are learning these days. It looks like a conspiracy to make Pinoy kids bonga (bobo na, tanga pa).

Mr. Go decries the appearance of the words “titi” and “titatita” in a textbook for grade 5 pupils. I have no problem with 10-year-olds knowing what “titi” is—half of them have it, and the other half will be aware of its existence soon enough, but I wonder what “titatita” (pimp) is doing there. Is it a presented as a potential career path?

A sampling of errors in textbooks approved by the Department of Education:
1. “Walang ulap kung umaga. Nasinghot na ng lumalaking populasyon.”
2. “Many Filipino men and women have brains.” (I suspect a literal translation of “mautak”.)
3. “He seemed to be waiting for someone, not a blood relation, much less a bad blood.”
4. “People are not made to float like a bird.”
5. “Seeing a rainbow in the sky is like a dream that disappears that’s why a child wants it painted permanently in the sky.”
6. “As the campers trek through the trail at the rainboat they’ll stop now and then. They had huffs and puffs.”
7. “The chicken was dressed. They stripped off her feathers, served her quite bare and everyone poked at her breast.”
8. “God’s footsteps bulged the mountains up. God like morning bending over her baby kneeled down in the dust.”
9. “On Basilio’s skull, fire nicked. The tiny fire had a blow, huge and quick. He touched the fire on his skull. Past all that is beyond, he runs.”
10. “Si Pres. Garcia ay kumita ng unang liwanag sa Talibon, Bohol.”

Muslims, Jews, Brazilians, countries brutally colonized by European powers— cause they were “silently longing for Christianity”; Jews, who must be thrilled at the prospect of being called evil again in the revived Tridentine mass; and now Protestants, who “cannot have churches because they don’t have a sacramental priesthood”—who will Ratzinger alienate and anger next? I’ll say one thing for this pope: I actually look forward to his pronouncements.

Which reminds me of a song by Prince: “You can be the president, I’d rather be the pope. You can be the side effect, I’d rather be the dope.” I love Prince. A freak and a genius.

I’m reading the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli). Murder, the human condition, and food—why didn’t I think of that? Oh right, because I don’t know how to write about food. The novels are all set in Sicily, in the town of Vigata, which was based on Camilleri’s hometown of Porto Empedocle, which has been renamed Vigata in honor of the series. The middle-aged Inspector Montalbano may be the most charming police detective currently in print: funny, cynical, possessing a finely-developed sense of the ridiculous and a passion for food. His lowest moments are triggered by the evil that men do, the Berlusconi government, and bad food. He flees in horror from the vice-commissioner’s wife’s cooking, and falls into a depression when the owner of his favorite trattoria retires. He is overcome with disgust when his assistant Mimi Augello (male) sprinkles Parmesan on a dish of pasta with clams. Montalbano solves mind-boggling cases with intuition, logic, and inspiration derived from literature (he loves Faulkner). He’s been involved with his girlfriend Livia forever, but has managed to avoid marrying her; meanwhile he fends off the advances of beautiful women such as Ingrid the Swede. He’s also a synesthesiac—he perceives smells as colors.

A terrible meal reads like this: “Montalbano took a bit less of a liking to Giulia, owing to the shamefully overcooked pasta, a beef stew conceived by an obviously deranged mind, and dishwater coffee of a sort that even airline crews wouldn’t foist on anyone.”

A good meal: “He gobbled up a sauté of clams in breadcrumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.”

The translator provides helpful notes on Sicilian culture, history, and dialect at the back of the book, viz. “sardines a beccafico: a famous Sicilian specialty named after a small bird, the beccafico, which is particularly fond of figs; indeed the name beccafico means ‘fig-pecker’. The headless, cleaned sardines are stuffed with sauteed breadcrumbs, pinenuts, sultana raisins, and anchovies, then rolled up in such a way that, when removed from the oven, they resemble the bird.” Mmm.

Do you know of any Filipino detective novels?

Cantinetta, originally uploaded by 160507.

“I don’t eat meat, I’m not a carnival.”
- attributed to Melanie Marquez

When I got over the flu Chus and I had lunch at Cantinetta on Pasong Tamo Extension. We started with an arugula salad then headed straight to the costolette di maiale alla griglia. Meaning porkchop. We split a two-inch-thick slab of porkchop. Good meat doesn’t need fussy preparation and artsy sauces—you stick it in the fire, and that’s it. Do you suppose that one reason we enjoy cholesterol so much is because health experts are always going on about how we shouldn’t? Mmm porkchop.

Auditions for US Open ballkids were held recently in Flushing. It’s the only slam where the retrievers actually get paid. Of course the real attraction is being right on the court for the matches, getting conked on the head by a ball, and handling the players’ sweaty towels (yucch, but then it depends which player).

John McEnroe was a ballkid.

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer had a crush on a Croatian tennis player and became a ballboy at the US Open then he knocked a player unconscious while retrieving the ball?

Meanwhile, Maria Sharapova’s shrieks hit 103.7 decibels in her loss to Venus Villiams at Wimbledon. The human threshold for pain is 115 decibels. Then she becomes a threat to public safety. If you get hearing loss while watching a match, can you file suit? With both banshees screaming I expect birds fell out of the sky and cats and dogs tried to bury themselves. Why hasn’t that girl been gagged? In 1992 Monica Seles was reprimanded for grunting and ordered not to do it again. She went on to lose the final to Steffi Graf, whom she’d been beating regularly.

What a match! Best Wimbledon final since the Borg-McEnroe epic! The reason we watch tennis! Brilliant shot-making, nervy plays, every inch of the court a battlefield, two magnificent players hanging their balls out there! I can’t stop using exclamation points! Roger Federer wins his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title, beating Rafael Nadal 7-6, 4-6, 7-6, 2-6, 6-2. The first grand slam final in which Roger really had to dig in, and he did it. Even lost his temper—at a machine. My nerves are shredded, I have to vomit out my heart. Read it yourself!

Interesting factoid. The last time The Fed was in a five-setter at Wimbledon: his 2001 match against Pete Sampras, who was also going for his fifth consecutive title.