JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

In Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply, Alan Rickman plays a dead cellist who reappears in his girlfriend Juliet Stevenson’s apartment, summoned back by her boundless grief. This was the second movie we saw him in; the first, of course, was Die Hard. Alan Rickman, you are welcome to haunt our houses any time. Thank you.

From his first album in 1969: Space Oddity.

From his final album in 2016: Lazarus.

He knew, because David Bowie always knew.

Travel
From 2013: Turkey Travel Diary, featuring some of the handsomest cats we’ve ever seen

Music
From 2008: Sad, Sadder, Saddest, in which we wound up at a “Lost 80s” concert.

Either all the ticket-holders had already gone inside, or they were all late, because there were no queues of any sort. Ernie went up to some people standing by the flower beds and asked them if they needed tickets.

Sad: They all said, “Hindi kami manonood niyan (We’re not watching that),” with matching expressions of loathing.
Sadder: A woman glared at Ernie and said, “I already have tickets.” What she meant was, “Extra tickets to an 80s concert is a problem I don’t need.”
Saddest: Later, Grungella realized that they probably mistook Ernie for a scalper.
Positively funereal: Being mistaken for a scalper to A Flock Of Seagulls show.
Lugubrious: They literally could not give the tickets away!

World Domination
From 2012: Let’s Buy Spain. We can afford it, it would be our revenge for three centuries of colonial oppression, and we can call them our muchachos and muchachas.

Ricki and the Flash, an Oscars reunion, is maudlin, belabored, hollow, and features the second worst Meryl Streep performance in our memory (“Worsted” only by her Witch in the altogether horrible bowdlerized film adaptation of Into the Woods; her title role in Mamma Mia is third). We didn’t believe a moment of this Jonathan Demme-helmed, Diablo Cody-written vehicle, and only our faith that Meryl would do something amazing at the last minute kept us in our seats. At the last minute we concluded that she could not technique her way out of this. Rick Springfield is more believable than Meryl is—a sentence we never thought we would type. Casting beats technique in this round. (Her cover of Bruce Springsteen: Aieeeeeee.)

For a rockstar/horrible mother we can believe in, check out Julianne Moore in What Maisie Knew.

Rick Springfield reminds us of Jesse’s Girl which reminds us of this scene from Boogie Nights. Between a bonkers Alfred Molina, that coked-up look on Mark Wahlberg’s face, and the Asian boy setting off firecrackers: perfection.

Keep chasing that laser pointer.

This morning I woke up at 6:30, which I almost never do, and saw that Mat had walked from the kitchen, where he was sleeping last night, to the foot of my bed. He had used his last burst of strength to cross those few meters.

The rest of the day he slept peacefully, and I even managed to make him eat and drink a little. Saffy and Drogon sat nearby, watching him. At 8pm Mat tried to stand up, but was too weak. He started gasping for breath.

Mat died tonight at 8:08 pm. He had a good last day, surrounded by his human, her books and papers, and his two feline companions. There’s no place to bury him here—the spot under the tree where Koosi is buried has been concreted over, and the nearest pet cemeteries are in QC and Cavite. Fortunately Tina offered to bury Mat in her garden in Paranaque, where she recently buried her askal Atis, 17.

This video was taken three years ago with our old phone. Mat was always an angel, and I am lucky to have been his human. Goodbye, Matthias Eomer Octavian Federer-Urban. You were thoroughly lovely.

Here’s Mat’s favorite song.

Think of adopting a stray cat.

Woke up the other day with this playing in our head. Why, we have no idea. We read the chapter on earworms in Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia, but he doesn’t know what causes them, either. Earworms are also known as “last song syndrome”, but in this case we hadn’t heard Bob Dorough in years when he started singing in our head. We have a cassette of one of his albums, which a friend recorded from vinyl, but our one surviving cassette player has a perpetual whirr. So we were happy to find Devil May Care on YouTube, along with his other songs including Baltimore Oriole and Blue Xmas, an anti-Xmas song that ranks up there with Christmastime is Here from A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Yes, we like bebop, our musical tastes are guy-ish and Dorough’s singing IS odd.