JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

According to this article in the Australian Herald Sun, more people are naming their kids after characters in science-fiction movies. Hence Jean-Luc (as in Picard), Neo, Trinity, and so on.

This is not news to those of us who live in a weird names capital of the world, with our senator Joker, actor Dingdong, and numerous old ladies named Baby Girl. We all went to school with someone named Jonathan Livingston Sy or Edgar Allan Pe. My friend Din used to volunteer as a student registrar at UP so he could encounter names like “Crassus, Jr” (named for a Roman emperor; still better than “Commodus”, which might as well be “Crapper”) and surnames like “Bagong-gahasa” (newly-raped). Zed goes to a fish restaurant run by the Misses Kaliskisan (Scales).

There’s a special logic to the naming of kids in Pinoy families. “Why are you named Jade? Isn’t that a girl’s name?”

“Because my mom’s name is Ruby.”

I would caution people against naming their children “Venus”, “Aphrodite”, “Apollo” or “Lovely”. That’s just tempting fate.

Ever notice that one of the main signifiers of socioeconomic class in Metro Manila’s malls is toilet paper? Specifically, the availability of toilet paper in their washrooms. The toilets in the SM malls (We still call them Shoemart, because we remember when they were just shoe stores, which means we are old), which target the lower middle classes, do not have paper. However, little packets of tissue paper are sold in vending machines. Glorietta and Shangri-La malls, which target broader demographics, have both free toilets (no paper) and pay toilets (with paper). The more “upscale” Podium, Promenade, Power Plant, Greenbelts 3 and 4, and Bonifacio High Street (which looks like that outlet mall in Barstow outside Las Vegas) have t.p. in all their washrooms.

Interpret.

rue Cazotte, originally uploaded by 160507.

Paris, je t’aime; the movie not so much. It consists of short episodes set in the different arrondissements and directed by a bunch of well-known directors including Alfonso Cuaron, Gus Van Sant, and Tom Tykwer. The idea is to make Paris seem romantic and worth visiting; the fact that it’s become necessary to make a movie to deliver that point says a lot about Paris’s image these days. You mean Paris isn’t the default setting for romance anymore?

The producers reportedly got the idea from Love, Actually, which made London seem romantic and exciting; the memory of Love, Actually still makes me want to run screaming out of the theatre (and I usually enjoy Richard Curtis flicks). The episode I like most is the last one, by Alexander Payne, in which a middle-aged American postal worker speaking French with a midwestern accent sums up the weird combination of joy and sadness that seizes visitors to Paris. It makes up for the cuteness that afflicts the rest of the movie. Paris is many things, some of them infuriating, but it is not cute.

The most unbelievable episode is the one in which an estranged couple have a drink at a bistro and Gerard Depardieu as the maitre d’ tells them it’s on the house. Ha! A freebie in a Paris restaurant? Has the apocalypse arrived?

Five minutes into the movie, at the end of the Montmartre episode, there’s a shot of my friend’s apartment building. It’s the only building on rue Cazotte, which is the shortest street in Paris, in case you’re in a trivia contest.

By the way there’s a new Woody Allen impressionist on the screen: Julie Delpy. 2 Days In Paris, which she wrote, directed, sang the theme of, and stars in with her ex-boyfriend Adam Goldberg, her parents, and probably her cat, is like Annie Hall with Delpy playing both Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. It’s lovely and hilarious, though it ends rather abruptly. Noel and I both found Adam Goldberg hot all of a sudden. One thing I know about relationships among the hyperverbal: talking never resolves anything, it’s just more ammunition.

Martin Scorsese on Michelangelo Antonioni; Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman.

“Where almost every other movie I’d seen wound things up, “L’Avventura” wound them down. The characters lacked either the will or the capacity for real self-awareness. They only had what passed for self-awareness, cloaking a flightiness and lethargy that was both childish and very real. And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.”

“To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: ‘Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?'”

One of my favorite cosmic coincidence sites is Goro Adachi’s Etemenanki. (Etemenanki is one of the towers of Babel.) This post connects the showing of a Battlestar Galactica episode about radiation poisoning, solar flares, a Discovery launch, the opening of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the end of the Mayan calendar, the Transit of Venus, the “passing of the torch” from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Deep Impact, the octagonal floor plan of the Dome of the Rock, the Russian spy Litvinenko who died of radiation poisoning, Comet McNaught, Nostradamus, Pink Floyd, the death of Gerald Ford, the execution of Saddam Hussein, 2001: A Space Odyssey and two must-haves of any good conspiracy theory: the Knights Templar and the Book of Revelations.

Mind-boggling entertainment, the start of a migraine, or your signal to drop everything and head for the hills to await the apocalypse?

So if you’re planning on writing the next Da Vinci Code-type bestseller, you know where to rip off your plot.

Has it occurred to you that Transformers has a premise similar to that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only it’s much less static?

Mat writing his column, originally uploaded by Koosama.

Today is Mat’s birthday. A former neighborhood tough and Casanova, Mat now stays home and plays war games with Koosi and Saffy. I named him Matthias because when he appeared I had just seen The Scorpion King. Who was called ‘Mathayus’. Fortunately we can spell.