JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Wednesday. 1520h screening of And I Love You So, Power Plant Cinema 2. The title and trailer are honest: this is a drippy movie. It is concentrated schmaltz; they should hand out tissues and nasal decongestants. After the events of last week I think we know what genuine grief unmediated by box-office considerations looks like: this movie is a bit much. It’s like swimming in condensada (super-sweetened condensed milk): it gets in your nose, suffocates you, and turns your brain into yema. After nearly an hour of sitting through the mostly self-inflicted torments of the heroine, I decided to leave. I was warned. My bad.

Then something happened to remind me why I go to the movies instead of watching videos at home.

In the movie Bea Alonso plays a preschool teacher, Derek Ramsay the dead guy (He appears in a wig early on. Aiiiieeee! tragic mistake), and Sam Milby the live guy. (It’s like Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply without the truly the madly or the deeply!)

Bea Alonso is teaching her kindergarten students the alphabet. They are doing the letter G. There is a knock on the classroom door. The other teacher opens it. It’s Sam Milby in a calculatedly swoony bit. “G is also for Guapo!” cries other teacher. And what else is G for?

“Gay,” chorus the people in the back rows.

You have to admit, they set themselves up.

I had to exit the theatre and call my friends, I was laughing so hard. Don’t sue me, just reporting an actual occurrence.

The women’s underwear section at Marks & Sparks. Good engineering. Boring styles.

Years ago when I was writing in TODAY, the column that elicited the largest number of reactions was not about world domination, movies, or covering books in plastic. It was the column about brassieres. At the time there weren’t many brands available locally, and we were getting our first email accounts. Now there are many more brands, and you can order underwear on the net, but we have the same complaints.

Breasts. That’s all I need to write to get your attention.

Everyone on earth has them (Some even have three nipples), but their omnipresence has not diminished the obsession. A multimillion dollar industry has been built on the desire to make them bigger. Transvestites take birth control pills in the hope that hormones will enlarge their mammaries. Starlets have attained fame disproportionate to their talent by displaying their boobies.

There is an entire branch of magazine publishing devoted to the worship of breasts. If for any reason you are dissatisfied with the volume and density of your chest area, you can go for plastic enhancements.

It’s when you happen to like the breasts you were born with that the problem begins. What if, like the classic Seinfeld episode, yours are real and spectacular? For committing the crime of contentment (which is inimical to the market which promotes dissatisfaction in order to sell you stuff), you are punished.

Real and Spectacular in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star fashion section.

Photo from Frank Bruni’s 2006 NYT review of Le Cirque.

From Michael Purugganan, ex-journalist, now Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics at NYU:

New York City is the city that never sleeps, where one can dine at any hour of the day on meals whose prices range from the absurdly cheap to the absurd. Clearly, the presidential entourage chose more towards the absurd end.

But if you MUST dine at Le Cirque, just remember that Le Cirque has a special tasting menu at $35 for dinner for three courses, which if you include a modest bottle of wine to share, should bring the tab to less than $60 per person. The waiter at Le Cirque should have told them about this special—could have saved everyone a lot of grief, and they can still say they had dinner there.

Color me impressed. You’ve got good ideas. I’d even call some of them greatish. The next step is to collar the people who are in a position to consider these ideas and execute them (the ideas, not the people). So we’re going to organize a think tank coffee where you can pitch your ideas.

I’m thinking of having it around September 24, when this site turns three years old. To join the think tank coffee, all you have to do is post a Good Idea. Whom should we invite to hear us out? (Politicians might be admitted but they will not be allowed to speak. They have other venues, we only have this one. Who am I kidding? I’ll invite Ted and Jaime and hope they appear.) Any specific format you’d like to suggest?

Meanwhile, keep the Good Ideas coming. Think! Think!

DISCLAIMER. We do not endorse (or even agree with) every single idea posted by our readers. Our goal is to force urge people to think of something useful to the general public. You retain all rights to your original ideas.

Great hunting at the bookstores this weekend. Fully Booked at Bonifacio High Street and Powerbooks at Greenbelt are both having sales and offering discounts of up to 80 percent. I got a stack of books including several John Rebus detective novels by Ian Rankin, NYRB Classics, Penguin biographies of Penguin founder Allen Lane and the much-maligned Sonia Orwell, a spy novel by one of the pioneers of the genre, Eric Ambler, and a hardcover The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D.T. Max—an investigation into fatal insomnia, kuru, scrapie, mad cow disease, and other strange conditions caused by prions. Sixteen books, average cost per book: less than 120 pesos.

By the way the name ‘Bonifacio Global City’ is too long, ‘BGC’ doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, ‘Boni’ is a street in Mandaluyong, and The Fort, Serendra, and High Street refer to different places. So we’ve taken to calling Bonifacio Global City ‘BoGlo’, a contraction coined by Ricky Villabona. That would make the regulars ‘Bogglies’. Some people will pronounce it ‘Boh-Gloh’, some ‘Bow-Glow’, and pretentious twits will feign Italian and say ‘Boh-lio’. (Back when Fully Booked was called Page One, we heard it called ‘Pa-gee-oh-neh’.)

We are appalled that Carlo J. Caparas has been declared a National Artist. We write furious essays denouncing the way Malacanang made a mockery of the selection process. We attend events to proclaim our outrage at the palace’s bizarre choice. Well we forgot something.

Who will explain to the average Filipinos—to whom ‘arts and culture’ is an alien concept that has no bearing on their daily lives, but to whom the name Carlo J. Caparas is familiar because they follow telenovelas based on his comic book characters—why he is not worthy of the National Artist award?

If we do not do this, then all our protests serve only to proclaim our intellectual superiority to Mr. Caparas—surely a sign of massive insecurity. Once again, we will be talking amongst ourselves.