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Here’s something for your favorite ballbreakers: an elegant nutcracker. Thanks, Jay.

Going to Imax with Jay-Lo for the premiere of Avatar. High excitement. This is the first movie in 12 years by the director who made me want to learn to fire a shotgun with one arm. Will report later.

Horrendous traffic jams, nasty overcharging taxi drivers, long queues at the mall, bad service in restaurants as the staff is busy rehearsing their dance number for their company party. . .It’s the holiday season! Some survival tips:

Sugar. Lots of sugar.

Bibingka souffle at C2 Classic Cuisine, Power Plant Rockwell

Intense Leche flan, also at C2

PB&J tart at Lu, Joya building (beside Ice Cream Bar), Rockwell

Cheese. Can’t go wrong.

Raclette at Astralis, Power Plant.

The unique present.

Abel Iloko table runner. For inquiries, email rene.guatlo@gmail.com.

Books you plan to give your friends but end up keeping for yourselves.

Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson, one of the funniest books ever written, available at National Bookstore in Power Plant, Rockwell. Then you can read the two hilarious sequels: Amazing Disgrace and Rancid Pansies.

Get Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura for your friends and then argue over whether it should’ve been published at all.

In the Literary Review David Lodge writes, “In the last two years of his life, which were marred by various accidents, illnesses and increasing physical debility, Nabokov worked on a novel called The Original of Laura, writing it, as was his habit, by hand in pencil on small index cards. It was unfinished – very far from finished in fact – when he died, and he had expressly directed Vera to burn the manuscript in that eventuality. Having rescued Lolita from the incinerator many years before, when Nabokov had a sudden failure of nerve about publishing it, his widow understandably hesitated to carry out his wishes with respect to his last work. The Original of Laura has lain in a bank vault for thirty years, the object of intense curiosity and speculation among aficionados, while Vera and the Nabokovs’ son Dmitri agonised over whether or not to allow it to be published. They finally decided to do so, and here it is.”

Copies available at NBS Rockwell, Glorietta 1, Glorietta 5, Greenbelt 1 and Shangri-La.

T-shirt you can wear with confidence because you’re not likely to run into someone wearing the exact same shirt. Although it’s happened to Raymond and me.

Striped T-shirt by Raymond Lee with artwork by Mariano Ching and Louie Cordero. P600. Order from elmondray@yahoo.com.

A while back I mentioned that I collect different editions of A Sport and A Pastime by James Salter. If you find copies of this book or others (Light Years, Dusk, Last Night, Burning The Days) by James Salter in bargain bins and book sales, could you send them to me? Please bring them to National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell and leave them for me at the Customer Service counter, or mail them to me care of Anvil Publishing, 8007B Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong. Don’t forget to enclose your full name and mailing address so I can mail you a book for your trouble. Thanks.

The birthplace of Asia is South East Asia.

Bangalore, December 11, 2009: Over 90 top geneticists from Asia have jointly concluded from their first-of-its-kind landmark study of Asian genetic populations that South East Asia was the “center of the Asian universe” millions of years ago and there was a single major inflow of migration from South East Asia to Northern and Eastern parts of Asia.

This figure shows plausible routes of pre-historical migration of Asian human populations. According to the study, the most recent common ancestors of Asians arrived first in India (aqua-green). Later, some of them migrated to other Asian countries in the South. The first group of settlers include the Malay Negritos (brown), Philippine Negritos (purple), the East Indonesians, and early settlers of the Pacific Islands (dark green). Thereafter, one or several groups of people migrated North, mixed with previous settlers there and, finally, formed various populations we now refer to as Austronesian (light green), Austro-Asiatic (red), Tai-Kadai (dark blue), Hmong-Mien (light blue), and Altaic (yellow).

Continue reading the article in BioSpectrum.

I became familiar with the work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky when I read their translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot five years ago. Reviewers praised Pevear and Volokhonsky’s fidelity to the original, right down to Dostoevsky’s “clumsiness” and all-around weirdness. I don’t know Russian so I can’t venture an opinion on their translation. However I can tell you that when Dostoevsky gets his grappling hooks into your brain you can’t not read him, even at his most infuriating. In fact fury is always part of my Dostoevsky experience. If Pevear-Volokhonsky are responsible for capturing that in the English versions, they’re brilliant.

In the last decade or so Pevear-Volokhonsky have been working their way through the masterpieces of Russian literature: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Chekhov. This is not a timorous duo. Their translations are widely praised and excoriated, as this NYT blog forum on The Art of Translation shows.

David Remnick wrote about P-V in 2005, in an insightful piece on how translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spark feuds, end friendships (Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson), and create small fortunes (Oprah’s endorsement of P-V’s translation of Anna Karenina made Tolstoy a bestseller in America).

In his defence of their work on War and Peace, Pevear notes that “People keep saying that Tolstoy approved the Maudes’ (incidentally very good) translation of War and Peace. In fact, he died in 1910, some fifteen years before they translated it. What he approved was their translation of What is Art? and other late polemical works.” I, too, thought the Maudes’ version was authorized by Tolstoy himself, though I do not know if Tolstoy read English.

I’ve decided to take a crack at the Maudes’ translation next year, just because I have an old edition of War and Peace that has maps and illustrations.

I also plan on learning Russian, which people assure me is a devilishly tricky language that will likely drive me bonkers. How else could I decide whose translation I like?

Moscow subway line from flickr.

Koosi says: “I see coffee people. Latte, macchiato, cappuccino, espresso…”

The other day I went into a store to buy pressed powder. I have very oily skin, which is probably why I don’t have lines on my vast but very mobile forehead, but if I don’t de-grease my face my glasses start sliding off my nose. I looked at the varieties of face powder and was surprised to see only three shades available, all of them too light for the Filipino complexion. They were certainly too white for me and I’m paler than average because I don’t go out in the sun much (lest I explode).

This store is part of a worldwide chain, and they certainly sell more than three shades of pressed powder. I presumed that these three pale shades were in stock because they were in demand in the Philippines.

So I asked the salesperson if they had any other colors of pressed powder, and she assured me that one of these shades would do: it would “blend” with my skin and become invisible. She added that she herself used the lightest shade. Since she was tanner than I am, this accounted for the fact that her neck was considerably darker than her attractive made-up face.

Have you noticed that many if not most of the women in this city wear make-up too white for their skin tone? This leads to what is popularly known as the “espasol” effect, after the local sweet that is liberally covered in flour. It would appear that Filipinas believe themselves to be lighter-skinned than they actually are, either because they think they’re mestiza (or hoping that some long-dormant recessive gene will kick in) or because they have inordinate faith in their skin-whitening products. Interesting. Many of us think we’re white.

Wrote this in 2005; not much has changed. The Unbearable Whiteness of Being in the Hong Kong Standard.

Reader: Noel Orosa, who must’ve read every book on interior design for small spaces in the last three months.

Noel’s Top 9 and Bottom 1

Manufractured by Mara Holt Skov and Stephen Skov Holt. “The best book I bought this year. It completely reflects my design philosophy: if it can’t be precious, then it better be witty. It’s premised on two things: mass-produced items that have been repurposed into works of art or beautifully functional pieces, and relatively precious items made to look like junk.

“For example: Lace fabric when mixed with epoxy resin can turn into a singularly beautiful table. And blown glass can be made to look like plastic bubble wrap. One of my favorite pictures in the book is that of a minimalist long gown made by designer Cat Chow fashioned solely of out of one extremely long zipper. Ended up giving my copy to the interior designer who’s doing my place since she’s opening a furniture shop, which is more or less based on this concept. Planning to buy another copy of this for myself soon.”

500 Ideas for Small Spaces by Daniela Santos Quartino. “My year’s worst. It contains exactly 5 ideas for small spaces. The rest are ideas for spaces of any size. Fortunately, Fully Booked’s Rhea Llamas was gracious enough to allow me to return this book in exchange for something else. Thanks again, Rhea!”

Living Large in Small Spaces: Expressing Personal Style in 100 to 1,000 Square Feet by Marisa Bartolucci and Radek Kurzaj. “Exactly what the title promises. It starts out by showing you what you can do with a 100 square foot (that’s a mere 9 point something square meters!) dorm room —quite a lot, amazingly enough. Numerous inventive examples. The table with bowling pin legs eventually became an inspiration for my own dining table.”

Flea Market Style by Emily Chalmers, Ali Hanan, and Debi Treloar. “My Bible this year. I couldn’t sleep every night without looking at its pictures. It made me realize I love most things used and abused—furniture, parts of old houses and raw materials like reclaimed wood. Things that have had a past life lend your place instant history. Their presence sparks a dialogue between these pre-loved items and your own family heirlooms or even any brand new, now-looking thing you buy. Best of all, they’re usually cheap. Given to me by Ricky Villabona.”

Junk Style by Melanie Molesworth and Tom Leighton. “More of the same though Flea Market style is infinitely better. Also donated by Ricky Villabona.”

The Further Adventures of The Queen Mum by Harry Hill. “The wackiest children’s book I’ve read this year. Premise: The Queen Mum, recently dead, has to earn her angel wings by going back to earth to do good works. Causes range from the extremely consequential such as saving a supermodel from falling flat on her face while walking the ramp to the trivial like, say, global warming. For the right to serve the latter cause she has to battle Mother Teresa in a heavenly face off.”

The Arrival. “A brilliant, wordless graphic novel by Shaun Tan. Amazing art. Comic book as cinema much like The Killing Joke by Alan Moore. Manages to turn the universal immigrant experience into a timeless tale.”

Ripley Under Water. “Makes me want to read every single Patricia Highsmith book.”

Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson. “Too strange not to be true. A non-fiction account of the Baekelands who for at least two generations have been living off the rapidly depleting fortune of their great grandfather who invented Bakelite—the first successfully commercial plastic. Mostly, it’s about Wasps behaving badly. Make that very badly. Matricide and mother-son incest bad. Reads like Truman Capote and Dominick Dunne collaborating with Sophocles on a revisionist Oedipus Rex. By the way, thanks for lending me the movie based on this. Great performance by Julianne Moore.”

“Re-reading and rediscovering The Forward Book Of Poetry 2008 ever since you returned it to me.”