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Kimmy Dora which opens September 2 stars the delightful Eugene Domingo as twins Kimmy and Dora. Have I mentioned that it opens on September 2? To remind you to watch Kimmy Dora on September 2, we’re giving Kimmy Dora movie posters to 9 winners!

To join the contest, answer these easy questions before August 26, a full week before Kimmy Dora opens on September 2.

1. If you were a pair of twins, one good and one evil, what would your names be?
2. If I give you a Kimmy Dora poster, where will you hang it?
3. Who will be your date to watch Kimmy Dora which opens in theatres on September 2?

Bonus questions: When does Kimmy Dora open in theatres?

Post your answers here. Winners will be chosen by our bored of judges Raymond Lee and announced on or before September 2.

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Due to insistent public demand (two people) this contest is extended until August 31.

Saffy: I prefer the Sendak.

An excerpt from Dave Eggers’s 300-page adaptation (for the upcoming Spike Jonze film) of Maurice Sendak’s short and beautiful children’s book, Where The Wild Things Are.

Max At Sea in TNY.

Literal is the new conceptual. – Jerome Gomez

Despite my ignorance of contemporary art or perhaps because of it, I go to quite a few exhibitions. I have great faith in the power of observation (Is that a contradiction?): I figure that if I look at enough new art, I will have an epiphany and bang! I’ll know what the hell I’m looking at.

Last Saturday I went to the opening of Here Be Dragons: Topology of Allegory, a group show at Manila Contemporary at Whitespace on Chino Roces Avenue (Pasong Tamo Extension) in Makati (beside Cantinetta and Terry’s). Yeah, I like an exhibition that sounds like the title of a math paper written after a couple of comparative lit electives.

I know crap about contemporary art, but I know that a topological group is a mathematical group which is also a topological space, whose multiplicative operation is continuous such that given any neighborhood of a product there exist neighborhoods of the elements composing the product with the property that any pair of elements representing each of these neighborhoods form a product belonging to the given neighborhood, and whose operation of taking inverses is continuous such that for any neighborhood of the inverse of an element there exists a neighborhood of the element itself in which every element has its inverse in the other neighborhood. Okay I copied that from a book, but I’m not having this headache alone.

Some of the featured works I did not get, such as this pile of rolled-up army maps.

Art by Felix Bacolor

Some of the works made me want to seek out the artists and swat them over the head with a rolled-up catalogue. In the words of Noel, “I can do that too, but why would I?”

But some of the works I found quite elegant, like mathematical proofs.

Art by Poklong Anading

So now I’m trying to figure this stuff out by reading art criticism. I’m lugging Robert Hughes’ The Shock Of The New, reissued this year in an edition of 1,500 copies for the 60th anniversary of Thames & Hudson the publishers.

Books in their dust covers.

The Thames & Hudson books are available at National Bookstores (found my copies at the Rockwell branch). They’re heavy, and I mean literally. The Hughes weighs more than my Macbook, but it’s worth the back strain—it’s witty, incisive, and accessible. (And useful in case Carlo J. Caparas starts a debate on Art and I am stupid enough to take the bait: I could hurl it at him.) Before this all I knew of Hughes was that he got the clap from Led Zeppelin because his wife was a groupie. I read that in a review of his memoir.

Haven’t read The Renaissance yet, but I’ve looked at the pictures.

Apart from my three cats who live with me, I feed three cats who hang around my building. I call them Janko, Jarko, and Purdy (her name is Phoebe but she’s a purdy girl). Lately only Jarko has been appearing daily, and when I serve dry kibble (the same stuff my cats eat) he does not look happy. He leaves his food half-finished.

Jarko Jarndyce, neighborhood badass.

Sunday was Mat’s birthday so the cats had special treats. Jarko got a bowl of canned tuna (Tuna for cats is more expensive and less fatty than tuna for humans). He ate it all up. At midnight he returned. I opened the door to give him some more food. Jarko was sitting next to another furry creature. I thought, Oh great, he’s brought a friend. Then I realized what the critter was.

It was a huge dead rat!

It was almost as big as Jarko!

I gather he’d caught and killed it, then carried it up the stars as a gift for me, his human friend. Cats do that. If they trust you they present you with dead animals. It’s like a hunter presenting you with game hens or a wild boar.

My cats have nothing to hunt but the occasional butiki so they bring me their stuffed toys. Koosi used to drop her toys in the toilet bowl to see where they’d end up. She’s a physicist.

Saffy, Koosi, and the animals they “hunted”: a koala keychain and a toy tarsier.

I thanked Jarko for the gift, then called the guard to take the rat corpse away before it started stinking up the place and the building admin blamed it on the cat.

According to this piece most of the ingredients in shampoo are ‘a veritable toxic dump on your head’ and then the shampoo that ends up in our water supply causes male fish to grow ovaries. Eeeek!

What’s really in your shampoo by Bill Bunn in Salon.

Some shampoo sounds more like chicken marinade than shampoo, boasting of vitamins, minerals, protein and herbs. But, the vitamins and minerals and exotic extras play a useless role. So whether the shampoo brags that it is “infused” with real beer, exotic proteins, vitamins, antioxidants, or extracts from some fabulously endangered species, the additive saturates the users’ minds, not their hair.

All these ingredients would go bad were it not for preservatives, a chemical equivalent of the right to bear arms. Sodium benzoate, for example, is handy because it kills nearly every living thing that might start to grow in a shampoo bottle. Ironically, in most cases the detergents won’t go bad. It’s the psychological ingredients that need preservation.

And I was just crowing about having found a solution to frizziness: avocado shampoo, avocado conditioner, avocado treatment wax, anything avocado. True, Jay-Lo our hair theorist had recommended the actual fruit: cut in half, apply to hair, wash off. But it’s so much easier to buy a bottle of something sweet-smelling.

The composition of the USS George Washington’s crew lends credence to my theory of world domination which states that Filipinos, being employed in millions of households, restaurants, and ships all over the world, are colonizing the planet. Twenty-five percent of the crew are of Filipino descent or have family in the Philippines.

Unfortunately we did not tour the viewing deck, but I learned that there really is a red phone on the bridge and it is a direct line to the President of the United States. Visitors must be kept away from this phone—one of 2,000 telephones on board—lest the Oval Office be inundated with spontaneous “Barack, I love you” calls.

How to transport a transformer in Emotional Weather Report, Gadgets edition, today in the Star.