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Messy Bessy eco-friendly household products at the Rustan’s Flower Shop. They’ve got linen sprays, anti-mold and mildew sprays, insect repellent, all-purpose cleaning scrubs, hand wash and whatnot.

I needed a (cheap) birthday gift for a neat-freak friend. This gift set consists of laundry linen spray and an all-surface cleaner.

Abe Lincoln shorts my brother-in-law found at Landmark. I thought I’d seen some strange designs on shorts, but these are just bizarre. There’s something disturbing about wearing Honest Abe’s face on your posterior.

I found Secret Ingredients, the New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, at National Bookstore in Glorietta 5, P705. The anthology contains comic pieces by Woody Allen and Steve Martin, longer fiction by Roald Dahl and Julian, Barnes, a report on the Cheese Wars by Burkhard Bilger (The US FDA requires that all store-bought milk be pasteurized; unaged raw-milk cheese is “considered a birthright” in France and Italy), a profile of the wild food advocate Euell Gibbons, a buffet of articles on food. It reminds us that food writing begins with good writing.

I recommend the New Yorker anthologies over the complete New Yorker archive on DVD, which is user-unfriendly, paranoid about being copied, and hard on the eyes. It’s like doing research on one of those microfiche readers. Basically they just scanned every single issue of the New Yorker; good luck finding the article you want.

Army Navy burger at Glorietta 5. Where did I hear that this is Judy Ann Santos’s personal recipe? If it is, Juday can really cook. The burgers are juicy, with a hint of spice, and they’re served in foil wrappers that remind me of my childhood when some people said “ham-boor-jer”. Delicious. The burgers cost P135 to 235, and they also have burritos.