JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Dear Auntie Janey,

Late last year I saw how biased and narrow-minded he really is. A new batch of staff had just come in. The new staff and some of the tenured staff had a miscommunication. Instead of making things better, my boss sided with the new staff and made it appear like we were bullying them. He continues to give the newbies preferential treatment even if some of them are clearly incompetent and in need of training. Because of this I’ve had several meetings with our department head (the boss of my boss). He’s already taking a drastic course of action that is bound to shake some feathers in our department.
(more…)

Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington is the closing film at Cinemalaya 2011. It will screen at 11.45pm on Saturday 23 July at the CCP, right after Quark Henares’s long-awaited Rakenrol.

Zombadings 1 opens in theatres soon, when the barrage of Hollywood extravaganzas finally fizzles out (they own all the playdates).

Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington

Synopsis
Remington is in love with Hannah but she finds him lazy and uncouth. Then he starts to change. Suddenly he is becoming neater, nicer, more sensitive. Is he doing it for her? Or is something beyond his control changing him into someone he is not?

He discovers that his gradual transformation is tied to something he did long ago, to childhood transgressions and curses uttered in graveyards. Hannah falls for the new and improved Remington. But he starts falling for someone else.

As the ghosts of Remington’s past come to haunt him, so do the Zombadings. Undead and fabulous, they threaten to rock this sleepy town to death.
(more…)

(more…)

Laura Miller wrote about reading retreats. You pack some books, go someplace where there are few distractions, and read undisturbed. Where do you go? There’s the Castello di Galeazza in Bologna,

Photo by Renato Ribichini in Panoramio.

but Italy would be a massive distraction.
(more…)

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

Holy hypnotists, Batman, are we in the middle of a crime wave?

We know there are criminals afoot in our clammy city—pickpockets, bag-slashers, muggers, carjackers, the “small-time” (although they are said to belong to crime syndicates) criminals as opposed to the large-scale operators who need to get elected into office first. The problem is not unique to Metro Manila—it’s supposed to be worse in other big cities—but we live here.

So we take precautions. In restaurants we never hang our bag on the back of a chair so a thief can casually walk out with it. It sits next to us where we can keep a constant eye on it, or hangs from a hook under the table. When walking outside we make sure our bags are zipped, not left open for a thief to pluck out our wallets. In certain areas we wear our knapsacks in front. When going home late at night, we ask our friends to take down the license numbers of the taxi. We adapt.

But what if the problem evolves?

Continue reading in the Philippine Star.

Self-hypnosis kit

“You don’t need to be naked when you eat tuna.”
– Metro Manila Development Authority Chair Francis Tolentino

We’ll need a rimshot.

– You don’t??
– He lied to me!!
– The only exception is skinless longganiza!
– My cats do it all the time.
– No no no, tuna is a metaphor.
– But he’s a nudist fundamentalist.
– What about when you fish for tuna?
– It’s laundry day.
– They’re not naked, that’s trompe l’oeil.
– You don’t need to be, but what if you want to be?

Aah, take them all down. Let us see the sky again, gray though it may be.