JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The watchtower in Sitio Remedios, on the lookout for pirates. The ones with eyepatches and peg legs who go “Harrrr”, not the ones we are warned about at the cinema, “trying to camcord the movie”.

 

That’s a mermaid at the window. Apparently Rapunzel is out of town, so the Little Mermaid is subbing for her.

 

 

My kapitbahay

 

 

Sitio Remedios is in Currimao. It’s a 10-hour drive from Manila. There are daily flights to Laoag on PAL and Cebu Pacific; the staff can pick you up at the airport. For inquiries and reservations, call Sitio manager Raymond Baroña at +63 917 332 0217.

Rahm Emanuel has just been named White House Chief of Staff by US President-elect Barack Obama. Rahm is the second son of the Emanuels. Zeke the eldest is a bioethicist. Ari the youngest is a Hollywood superagent, the inspiration for Jeremy Piven’s character in Entourage.

Rahm and Barack in The Telegraph

Esquire on the three Emanuels: “Mrs. Emanuel had three sons. Zeke, serious and studious, would leave the family home, become a doctor, and go on to work at the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health, one of the foremost experts on health-care policy in the country. Rahm, the mouthy middle boy, 19 months younger, not so studious, would emerge from a near-death experience at 17–a gangrenous finger had him in a hospital delirious with fever for weeks–a somewhat more focused person…”

In the Telegraph: “One story, more than any other, sums up the intensity, loyalty and, at times, downright nastiness upon which Mr Emanuel’s reputation is built. At a dinner to celebrate President Clinton’s first election victory, Mr Emanuel began to name those who he believed had earned his enmity. As he listed the names of those he saw as traitors, he grabbed a steak knife, stood up and began plunging the knife into the table and shouting “Dead! Dead! Dead!” after each name…” Then there’s the story of the pollster who crossed him, and got a rotten fish in the mail.

Black, Jew to Run Nation, in Gawker: “America, now you’ve done it. You just elected an African-American from Chicago President, and traveling with him to the White House will be his good friend Rahm Emanuel..”

I love him already. So the “Muslim”‘s first pick: a Jew! It’ll be fun.

Professor Selmer Bringsjord, logician, philosopher, and Cognitive Sciences Department chair at Rensselaer Polytechnic, has developed a checklist for determining whether someone is demonic. He heads a team that is creating a computerized representation of a purely evil person.

“To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of “causing considerable harm to others,” Bringsjord says. Finally, “and most importantly,” he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.”

Photo: Should an evil dictator be this fascinating? Or even…cute?

The article doesn’t mention the accomplices of evil: those who sit by and do nothing. I might have some grudging admiration for an evil mastermind who knows exactly what she’s doing, but those who allow her to have her way because they’re too blind, lazy, or stupid to resist deserve only loathing.

The US elections are over.
Suddenly you have so much time on your hands.
What are you going to do?
What about your daily fix of polls and punditry?
You’ve spent months worrying that he wouldn’t get elected, that he would get cheated, or worse.
You’ve grown accustomed to her fragmented verbiage, illogic, winking, and faux-folksy ignorance.
Your life seems so empty without that daily jolt of vitriol and adrenaline. You need help.

Photo: Koosi in post-election funk

At Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers suggestions on How to kill time on the web now that the election’s over. “Follow the financial crisis. The presidential race might be over, but news junkies looking for a fix are in luck—the economy looks sure to provide months of daily excitement. Of course there are many mainstream sources, but the Web abounds with smart bloggers who follow the financial crisis with the sort of precinct-by-precinct detail you’ve come to expect of election news. . .”

At the NYT, Skinny Black Guy novelist Colson Whitehead ruminates on the election of a Skinny Black Guy.

Or you could repudiate Sarah Palin by reading about something really important and beneficial: fruit fly research. Begin with geneticist Jerry Coyne’s essay in The Edge. “The flies are models for disease, too, producing possibilities for curing epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and, yes, one of Palin’s favorite causes, autism.” I kid you not.

Scientists at University College London have found that romantic love and hate use the same circuits in the brain. Turns out there really is a thin line between love and hate, only hate is more rational.

“One major difference between love and hate appears to be in the fact that large parts of the cerebral cortex – associated with judgement and reasoning – become de-activated during love, whereas only a small area is deactivated in hate.”

 

 
Photo: Saffy and Mat during a truce in the ongoing battle for headcat.

So you can hate someone with good reason, and love someone for no reason whatsoever. Hate, reasonable. Love, bonkers.

Meanwhile: Following the revelation that Vogue’s Anna Wintour has a crush on 300’s Gerald Butler, Radar compiled a list of Wintour’s suitors, lovers, crushes, including LeBron James, Eric Idle (!) and…

“Roger Federer: During last year’s U.S. Open, Anna was asked by a reporter what her favorite tennis couture of the season was. “Anything that Roger wears,” she replied with a “girlish giggle.” Anna can frequently be found courtside cheering Roger on in his private box, despite the fact that he has a long-time girlfriend. More amazingly, she smiles and takes off her signature Chanel frames while watching him play. We hear she’s even had him out to her summer home in Mastic, Long Island.”

They forgot to mention that she once dated Christopher Hitchens.

Today’s the day.

Did The West Wing predict the outcome of the US presidential election back in 2006? Will life imitate television imitating life?

Tobias Wolff, Edmund White, Walter Mosley and other writers on The state of America after Bush.

The winner of the Halloween Scare-Off will be announced this afternoon. Thanks for sending in your entries; you have very interesting views about the Filipino character.

*****

1300h. I will not go by the projections. We sat through the 2000 Bore v. Gush election, we cheered at the projections, and we got screwed. I want to see a confirmed final result. I want to see a lead so big it cannot be stolen. I want to hear McCain concede.

1330h. MASSIVE SIGH OF RELIEF. What a speech. And no cheesy soundtrack!

A geek has been voted into the White House. The 21st century has truly begun.

*****

The winner of the Halloween Scare-Off: Blue State or Red State? is. . .

Kaboboyan.

Si Obama ang magwawagi. Wala tayong equivalent na Joe the Plumber na pwedeng i-exploit ni McCain. Wala pa kong nakikitang Pinoy na tubero na kasing pogi at simpatiko.

Short, funny, and without the tone of condescension that soured many intelligent entries. Kaboboyan, your book is on its way to you.

*****

The thing is to Live As If. Live As If you were truly free. Live As If you were surrounded by intelligent, capable people. Live As If your decisions mattered in the general scheme of things. Live As If art, literature, music, the cinema really mattered. Live As If other people were just like you. I don’t mean you should tiptoe through the tulips and delude yourself that everything is wonderful. I mean you must resist. I mean you must not let idiots dictate how you live your life. Stupidity is a given; do not hold yourself back because you think you’re surrounded by it. Do not give in to the tyranny of surveys, trends, and conventional wisdom. You are the product of millions of years of evolution. Organisms mutated, survived, adapted over eons, against huge odds, so that you can be what you are now. Honor your species.

That’s my post-election speech. Thank you.