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MANILA, Philippines - U.S. and Philippine scientists may have discovered new marine species in the world’s most biologically diverse region, their expedition leader said Tuesday.

Larry Madin, who led the Inner Space Speciation Project in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines, said scientists had been to one of the world’s deep-ocean basins in search of organisms that may have been isolated there for millions of years. . .

Exotic creatures found in ‘coral triangle’ 

- Budjette’s impression of Brad Pitt in Se7en.

This gets filed under Pointless Anecdotes or Stuff I’d Forgotten I Wrote.
We were looking for the house of Graciano Lopez Jaena. According to the map of Iloilo City, the Lopez Jaena birthplace—which I’d assumed was a house—was not far from the Lopez Jaena monument in the Bellfry Plaza. Yes, with two L’s.

In Bellfry Plaza there is a fountain whose waters were reportedly miraculous. The fountain has been enclosed in a steel fence because some people took to washing their dirty laundry in it.

On our first attempt to find the Lopez Jaena place, the map was rather vague and Ruth decided to ask for directions. She was the designated asker for directions, as she speaks Ilonggo. She approached this guy in an undershirt. Not the guy I would’ve picked to get directions from: his eyeballs were in constant motion, and he had a demented grin. She repeated the question twice, then showed him the map; he gawked at the map, then pointed to the distance. She thanked him. He punched her in the arm in a friendly manner, then walked off, twitching like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo.

Graciano Lopez Jaena was editor of La Solidaridad  and a noted orator. The marker on his monument said he died in Barcelona in 1896. Where was  the house he was born in?

There was a small crowd gathered on the edge of the plaza. Oh no, I thought, an evangelist with an amplifier.

It wasn’t a Bible-thumper, it was a guy with a wooden box like shoeshine boys carry. He opened the box and extracted a large mottled brown snake. It was a python, about seven feet long. The guy jabbered into a microphone in Ilonggo. The audience laughed appreciatively. He “interviewed” the python about its habits, and it “answered” his questions. The audience applauded. I don’t think they were clapping because they believed him; more likely they were being nice to him.

I don’t know exactly what the snake-guy was doing—my impression was that he was going to segue into a sales pitch. Snake oil maybe, or matching shoes and handbags. After a few minutes he put the snake back in the box. It leapt out and tried to strike him. “Ooh, he’s in a bad mood,” the guy said. “I’ll pray over him.” He recited an oracion  in pig Latin.

The snake promptly shot out of the box again, barely missing him. “Maybe he didn’t get the Latin,” the guy cheerfully announced. “Let’s try again, this time in Ilonggo.” He recited another prayer. The snake tried to strike him again.

Snake-guy turned to his assistant. “Did you feed him today?” The boy gaped at him and slowly shook his head. “That rat we caught this morning, you should have fed it to the snake.” The boy responded with a look of pure duh.

I would’ve stayed to watch some more, but the sun was beating down. Off we went in search of Lopez Jaena’s house.

The 10th Cine Europa festival opens at the Shangri-La Plaza tomorrow the 18th and goes on till the 31st. This year’s lineup includes Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg the musical starring Catherine Deneuve, La Mome, Luchino Visconti’s magnificent adaptation of The Leopard with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, Kolya, The Lives Of Others, and many others. Download the schedule here.

“Watching her, and the two litters of kittens she had over the following 18 months, offered we humans a new reaction to the cacophony of the war. The bloodiest suicide bombings, even miles away, have the sound and feel of the apocalypse, causing humans to freeze, no matter how often they experience it. Cats need to hear it only once. As they skitter to the safety of trees and bushes, they enter the blast and the tremor on the hard drive of their brains. On the next occasion, come the blast, they barely stir.”

What Cats Know About War by John F. Burns, Iraq bureau chief of the New York Times.

Atonement premiere, originally uploaded by 160507.

So Ige the well-travelled kusinero goes to London, Budapest, and wherever, and when he gets back he’s still vibrating with excitement. “Kevin and I were taking a walk and there was a premiere of Atonement and guess who I saw!”

“James MacAvoy?” I asked.

“No.”

“Keira Knightley?”

“No.”

“Vanessa Redgrave? Joe Wright?”

“Ian McEwan!” he cried. “I called his name and waved at him! I took a picture!”

“That’s great,” I said, “Send it to me.”

Here’s the photograph. Good luck spotting the author of Atonement, Enduring Love, The Cement Garden, The Child In Time, First Love, Last Rites.

There will be an invitational screening of ufo Pictures’ ENDO on Wednesday, 17 October, 7pm at Cine Adarna, the University of the Philippines Film Center, Diliman QC. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and forum.

Endo is a romantic comedy set in the world of contractual labor. It was written by Jade Castro, Michiko Yamamoto, and Raymond Lee, directed by Jade Castro, and stars Jason Abalos and Ina Feleo. It’s lovely. The screening is by invitation, no tickets will be sold. If you’d like to be invited, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. See you at UP.

As of 17 October, 12.40 am, I’ve run out of invitations. Everyone who posted before that will be admitted to the screening. Thanks.

Richard Dawkins reviews God Is Not Great in the Times Literary Supplement.

“There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (”Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but…”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and
me, he concluded, “and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”…

Elsewhere: Incroyable! England storms into Rugby World Cup final on Jonny Wilkinson’s boot. And Stephen Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times.

Tiangge. Photo by Uro de la Cruz, originally uploaded by Koosama.

“A recent paper by the law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success. The professors call this effect “the piracy paradox.”

“The paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Many other consumer businesses face a similar problem, but fashion—unlike, say, the technology industry—can’t rely on improvements in power and performance to make old products obsolete. Raustiala and Sprigman argue persuasively that, in fashion, it’s copying that serves this function, bringing about what they call “induced obsolescence.” Copying enables designs and styles to move quickly from early adopters to the masses. And since no one cool wants to keep wearing something after everybody else is wearing it, the copying of designs helps fuel the incessant demand for something new.”

The Piracy Paradox by James Surowiecki.

koosi in carrier.JPG, originally uploaded by 160507.

Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known for The Golden Notebook, Lessing also wrote stories about cats: Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor, and The Old Age of El Magnifico. Here’s a bit from Rufus.

“Events did cast their shadow, months before. All that spring and summer, as I went past on the pavement, a shabby orange-coloured cat would emerge from under a car or from a front garden, and he stood looking intently up at me, not to be ignored. He wanted something, but what? Cats on pavements, cats on garden walls, or coming towards you from doorways, stretch and wave their tails, they greet you, walk a few steps with you. They want companionship or, if they are shut out by heartless owners, as they often are all day or all night, they appeal for help with the loud insistent demanding miaow that means they are hungry or thirsty or cold. A cat winding around your legs at a street corner might be wondering if he can exchange a poor home for a better one. . .”

The final visit to Bienvenido Santos, writer. With guest appearances by Ruth Roa, Tina Cuyugan, Ambeth Ocampo, RayVi Sunico, Danton Remoto, the fabulous Gilda Cordero-Fernando, and the cruddiest car that ever crawled the streets of Manila. Emotional Weather Report, today in The Philippine Star.

This is for Scrat, reduced to a zombie state by the shock loss of the New Zealand All Blacks at the Rugby World Cup.

Great—another four years of self-flagellation.

I know it’s been your dream to see them play in the flesh. You even got tickets to the final way in advance. Why compound the trauma of your heroes’ loss by watching two other teams fight for the title? Give me the tickets, I’ll go to France. It’s the least I can do as a friend.

Unmentionables, originally uploaded by 160507.

Here’s one for my bag-addict friends. The Tighty Whitey Bag: a tote bag that looks like big men’s briefs. More emasculating than carrying your girlfriend’s handbag! (Unless that’s your thing, in which case, enjoy.) It’s like she turned your underwear into a bag! Go ahead and speculate on what’s in it. Thanks for the gift cheques, David & Goliath.