JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Personal blog of Jessica Zafra, author of The Collected Stories and the Twisted series
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Archive for June, 2013

What people are reading in the Hellmouth

June 04, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Current Events 9 Comments →

inferness

Hah! From Bubble Gang, which has been on the air forever and is still funny.

Etiquette for Cats # 4 – 5

June 04, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Cats 1 Comment →

mat closeup

Mat says: Don’t let your human go to the bathroom alone. Do you want them to be lonely? If they get lonely they might invite another cat into your house, and that means less territory for you.

Whenever they go to the toilet, follow them. Stare at them while they’re doing their business. Better yet, while they’re on the toilet, use your litterbox. There’s no better time for inter-species bonding. Remind them of how much you have in common.

koosi etiquette

Koosi says: Humans tend to worry about our health. They confuse us with babies, their loud, stinky, generally useless miniature versions. Be considerate. Assure them that you are in excellent health. Periodically jump up on their laps or computer keyboards and stand with your butt in their face. This way they can sniff you as mammals normally do, and they can determine that you’re perfect.

The cats recommend Becks in Paris, a blog that “imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism.” It is les pyjamas of ze chats. Via 3QD.

Game of Thrones: We really hate weddings. (Now with trauma support group.)

June 03, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Television 27 Comments →

grey wind
The North Remembers. From the first season: Grey Wind about to teach Jon Umber a lesson. Where was the Greatjon?

Remember that it is fiction and It Didn’t Really Happen. If you have read the books, you knew this was going to happen, and you have been dreading the event even as you looked forward to seeing how the filmmakers would portray it.

Your sorrow is real, though, so see you in Comments. (Do not go there unless you’ve seen it. Then again, doesn’t “Spoilers Abound” just make you want to read the whole thing?)

Is it very cruel? Yes, but not much more cruel than life, which is heavily padded with tedium to ward off the blows.

Is this a good time to remind you that not everyone gets out of The Hobbit alive?

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red wedding

Sunday we were at the mall with our one-year-old niece, Dany. Dany is short for “Daenerys”. Yes, we have a niece named for the Targaryen. If she had been a boy, she would’ve been named Rhaego. Yes, Rhaego the Stallion that Mounts the World. We don’t know how name-selection goes in your families, but in ours we had this discussion: “You can’t call your child Rhaego! Rhaego is killed by Mirri Maz Duur. Also, it sounds like a porn star name.” We were suggesting “Magneto Xavier” for a boy, “Sigourney Ripley Scully” for a girl. Daenerys is pretty cool, though.

We’re saving up for Paris so we were walking around the mall chanting, “Don’t buy anything, don’t buy anything.” Then we spotted Cutting Edge, the store that sells Game of Thrones T-shirts. We figured it was safe to go inside because they never have GoT T-shirts for girls in our size (T-shirts for boys are not flattering). They still didn’t have shirts for us, but they had this.

flask

So we’re chanting “Don’t buy anything, don’t buy anything…Game of Thrones flask! We’ll take it.” They had flasks bearing the Targaryen, Stark and Lannister sigils. Our allegiance shifts between these three Houses, but we picked the lion because it’s a cat. Plus everyone in that family drinks and they would have the best liquor. (The store also sells coffee mugs, which cost more than the 6 oz stainless steel and faux leather flasks, refrigerator magnets, and a miniature dragon’s egg that will probably not hatch in the microwave.)

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Is avoiding all ritual a ritual?

June 03, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Cats 1 Comment →

Cat and Devil (Rose) - 002
The Cat and the Devil, a children’s story by James Joyce, illustrated by Gerald Rose

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey “assembles the regimens of 161 assorted creative geniuses into a lean, engaging volume.”

The prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos believed that “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” And indeed, if there’s a drug the artists in Daily Rituals can agree on, it’s caffeine. Soren Kierkegaard preferred his coffee with sugar, or perhaps it was vice versa: “Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled above the rim,” his biographer observed. “Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.”…

James Joyce, we learn, woke daily around 10:00 a.m. He’d lie in bed for about an hour, then get up, shave and sit down at his piano, where he’d play and sing before writing in the afternoon and then hitting the cafes later that evening. John Updike, meanwhile, worked mornings, preferring to “put the creative project first,” as he put it. Of his discipline, he said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”

In our experience, it takes three hours of doing “nothing” (i.e. household chores, watching a movie, walking, grooming the cats) to produce one hour of writing.

Scully returns!

June 02, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Television 4 Comments →

gillian-anderson-the-fall

Gillian Anderson photo and podcast interview from Empire.

We will always be X-philes and we’re happy to see Gillian Anderson in anything. Post X-Files we’ve seen her in a lot of period dramas, including Bleak House, Great Expectations, and the hilarious making-of-a-period-movie movie, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

Gillian Anderson never fails us, but she was incandescent as Lily Bart in the Terence Davies adaptation of The House of Mirth. Lucky we caught it at the Toronto festival in 2000 because no one else seems to have seen it. Why is this movie not airing on cable 24 hours a day? Why isn’t it the video widely available? Why isn’t it taught in schools? It’s criminal to neglect work this fine.

We’ve been watching the miniseries The Fall, in which Anderson plays a hard-nosed cop on the trail of a serial killer. You might call it typecasting (Darkness, death, weirdness—Call Gillian Anderson!), but apart from the character’s fierce intelligence it’s an un-Scully role (like, she gets laid). She also plays Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist on the TV series Hannibal, which we are looking forward to because we were promised that Mads Mikkelsen abstains from the “Hellooooo Clariiiiiice” theatrics.

LitWit Challenge: A translation of Ice and Fire. (Update: Read Game of Thrones in epic Tagalog.)

June 02, 2013 By: jessicazafra Category: Books, Contest 30 Comments →

Fascinating choices. Wala bang Kasalang Pula?

How would you translate Night’s Watch, White Walkers, King Beyond the Wall, Faceless Men? Would Lady Stoneheart be Binibining Pusong Bato?

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This month we’re doing a Translation challenge.

Pick your favorite scene in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin and translate 750 words of it into Tagalog. Any scene from any of the five books published so far.

Post your entry in Comments. We’re accepting entries until 5 June 2013. The winner will receive these three books of steampunk science-fiction (Aurorarama), pulp psychodrama (Body), and science-fiction comedy noir (The Teleportation Accident).

litwit may 13

You may submit more than one entry.

Valar dohaeris.

The LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Obviously if you have not read all the books, the entries will contain spoilers.

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