JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Treason! I have just discovered that friends who are supposed to be rooting for Roger Federer to win the US Open and his 12th Slam are secretly cheering for Novak Djokovic. That means you, Dorski. Oh the humanity! Just because he’s tall, cute, funny, does hilarious impressions of Nadal and Sharapova, and throws his T-shirt at the crowd to reveal spectacular torso, you abandon the quest for history?!

The Fed has to win because I don’t want to have another dream in which I’m berating him for my life.

Excerpts from The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and a short film by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein outlining the book’s arguments.

“I started researching the free market’s dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington’s failed attempts to follow “shock and awe” with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”

All you need to know about rugby: really brawny guys in really short shorts. That frequently get ripped.
Janine di Giovanni has an extremely informative guide to the Rugby World Cup in France, including rules (Apart from tackling above the shoulders, opposing players are allowed to do pretty much anything they want in order to get the ball off you - and they do. Crushing your face into the mud and belly-flopping on top of you are all encouraged.), useful phrases (Quelles cuisses! What thighs!), and the roundup of Rugby’s Fittest First XV (Sebastian Chabal, aka The Caveman or The Anaesthetist—because if he touches you, you’re out for the count).

Does anyone have a copy of the 1978 James Toback movie Fingers starring Harvey Keitel?

I just watched the French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped and it killed me so now I need to see the source.

Rasheed has a report in The Christian Science Monitor on the case of the Indonesian maids abused by their employers in Saudi Arabia. I would say “shocking” except that we’ve heard so many terrible cases and Pinays still line up to be maids in Saudi. These horrors happen and will continue to happen because as long as we export humans out of poverty and need, we’re not going to have the balls to stand up to anyone. This is not covered by my world domination theory, which assumes that we hang on to pride and dignity.

“”We continue to hear of abuses being committed against migrant
domestic workers as employers do not change that much in terms of
negative attitudes toward domestic helpers,” says Ellene Sana, the
head of the Center for Migrant Advocacy in Manila. “Domestic workers
are considered virtual slaves by employers who feel that they can
ill-treat them as they please, without the slightest remorse.”

“The fate of abused workers in Saudi Arabia is further complicated by
the fact that labor-exporting countries in Asia, pressured by growing
populations, feel an obligation to send larger and larger numbers of
workers overseas in search of work. This has caused many of these
governments not to press to hard concerning abuses against their
workers out of fear that protesting too much could offend Saudi
Arabia and other Gulf countries.”

“On the question of pedophilia, The White Book was unequivocal: it formally advised against Thailand, which no longer had anything to recommend it, if indeed it ever had. It was much better to go to the Philippines or, better still, to Cambodia—the journey might be dangerous, but it was worth the effort.” - from Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The movie 8mm refers to the Philippines as a source of snuff movies.

Patis dissed: “The nuoc mam from Phu Quoc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste. . .But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.” - from the story Love by Robert Olen Butler

In the movie Constantine, the possessed girl hisses at Keanu Reeves: “PapaTAYin natin siya!” So Hollywood has established that Tagalog is the language spoken in hell.

This just in from Budj.
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
…
“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.” —Spook Country by William Gibson

To recap:
Novels by foreigners set in the Philippines

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2. The Tesseract by Alex Garland - made into a movie set in Bangkok; too bad as Ige points out there was a great Eddie Garcia part in there
3. Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
4. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd - doesn’t read like he was actually here.
5. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo
6. And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
7. Someone alerted me to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro—Thanks, I’ll look it up.
8. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge, who reportedly got his ass kicked at Scrabble by a madame in Malate
9. Ay, almost forgot Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka (Thanks for the reminder), a strange and wonderful novel about the Japanese soldiers trapped in Leyte towards the end of the Japanese Occupation.

Filipino characters in novels set elsewhere

1. The hero in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Who else would know how to deal with alien cockroaches. By the time the book was adapted for the screen, the Pinoy had mutated into Casper Van Dien.
2. Eugenio Martinez in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3. Filipino nanny in A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
4. Pinguez in Thomas Pynchon’s V
5. Conchita the maid in Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester
6. Tatsuo’s parents in Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Songs with titles alluding to the Philippines: Filipino Box Spring Hog by Tom Waits; Bebot by the Black-Eyed Peas.
Movies set partly or completely in the Philippines (the Phils as the Phils, not Vietnam or Indonesia): An Officer and A Gentleman (don’t think they actually shot here), No Way Out (signifier: bananas), that Claire Danes one, and Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, who makes casual reference to Manila in all his movies. And Kon Ichikawa’s masterwork Nobi (Fires On The Plain), which is set in Leyte but was actually shot in Japan. (Really minor quibble: The Filipino cast members should’ve been speaking Visayan.)

Tagalog heard in movies: The Rock, Constantine, Her Alibi, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Does anyone know the title of that French spy novel with an episode at the Hobbit House?

Tina notes that several of the novels set in the Philippines are of an apocalyptic nature. It’s only fitting that Apocalypse Now was shot here, even if it’s set in Vietnam. Apocalypses R Us.

From Reuters: The dream of a free world becomes a nightmare of modern day slavery in Ken Loach’s latest film, about migrant workers trying to eke out a living in Britain where they are exploited and abused. The 71-year-old British director brings his trademark gritty socialist style and themes to the Venice film festival, where the ironically titled “It’s a Free World” is in competition. . .

Loach said he wanted to shed light on the fate of the thousands of economic migrants, many from Eastern Europe, who arrive in Britain each year in search of a better life. “There is an established consensus in our country … that this is progress, that this is the way things always have to be, and that there is no alternative,” Loach said. . .

The question: Is migrant labor slavery? Is our country engaged in the slave trade?

At a bookstore I noticed a display of pretty bookmarks at the counter. One of them said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Bonga, the nearest star is 93 million miles away.

Heard of the new controversy involving the game show Wowowee. Which thrives on this stuff—name another game show with a body count. Wowowee has one of those contests where people have to choose from among seven covered digits, and if the number 2 turns up in the correct decimal place, they win two million pesos. Turns out all the covered digits were zeroes—you can watch the incident on YouTube. This leads to a new round of sniping between Joey de Leon, host of Eat Bulaga, and Willie Revillame of Wowowee. De Leon’s recent pronouncement: “Ang yabang mo, Willie. Hindi lang ikaw ang mandaraya dito sa Pilipinas!” (Subtitle: You blowhard. You’re not the only cheat in the Philippines.)

It works on many levels, no?

There’s an entire genre of Filipino movies set in Tondo, the oldest and reputedly the toughest slums of Manila. In these movies an ordinary man defends the poor and the weak against powerful oppressors, be they landlords or criminal gangs. Sometimes the hero is himself a wanted criminal, a Robin Hood figure who robs the rich and gives to the poor. This was the trademark role of Joseph Estrada, who parlayed his image as a man of the people into a career in politics culminating in the presidency (and eventual ouster on corruption charges). At present there are three heroes of the Tondo genre in the Senate, making Robin Hood figures an overrepresented sector. Whether the cast members of Tribu will go on to be senators is highly doubtful; they have enough trouble taking a stroll in their own neighborhood.

Tribu in the Hong Kong Standard.

In 30 Rock, network honcho Alec Baldwin tells jeans-clad comedy show producer Tina Fey to dress up for a business lunch with a comedian they want to recruit. Wardrobe finds her an outfit, then he tells her, “That’s the way you should dress, by the way.” “Yeah,” she snarls back, “If I was president of the Philippines!” Tina Fey is the long-time headwriter of Saturday Night Live, and is the writer and producer of both 30 Rock and the TV comedy it’s about.