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Tinker, tailor, chef: Famed chef Julia Child was a spy, recently declassified documents reveal. In WWII she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. She was assigned to Ceylon, China, and India, where she became interested in cuisine, and where she met her future husband, the connoisseur Paul Child. After the war they moved to France, where her gastronomic epiphany would lead to the writing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 

The X-Files 2: I Want To Believe is not nearly as horrendous as the reviews say it is. If you were an X-phile, it’s a pleasant way to pass two hours in the company of old friends—even if somebody onscreen has to say “I want to believe” every 15 minutes to remind us of the characters’ issues. There’s a brilliant moment early on, when Mulder and Scully visit the FBI building and stop in front of a picture of US President George W. Bush. As the grinning president’s photo appears on the screen, we hear the portentous notes of  the X-Files theme. Labyrinthine government conspiracies and unfathomable secrets: The X-Files has taken over reality.

A review of The X-Files 2: I Want To Believe in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star. 

Michael Phelps, originally uploaded by saffysafina

Breakfast
3 fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, lots of mayonnaise
2 cups of coffee
5-egg omelet
Bowl of grits
3 slices French toast with powdered sugar
3 chocolate-chip pancakes

Lunch
1 pound enriched pasta
2 big ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread
Energy drinks, 1,000 calories each

Dinner
1 pound pasta
An entire pizza
More energy drinks

All the stuff doctors warn will clog arteries! Hurrah! There is a catch though. You have to be Michael Phelps. (If you are not Michael Phelps training for the Olympics, this is the Homer Simpson Diet.)

Yoda the 4-eared cat, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

Yoda is a four-eared cat who lives in Chicago. His human, Valerie Rock, told the Daily Mail that she and her husband found him in a bar, being passed around by curious patrons. His original human was giving away a litter of kittens. She says that despite his unusual appearance, Yoda’s behavior is normal. I’m guessing this means he can’t lift a refrigerator from a distance by lifting a paw. 

The article mentions that the Yoda character in Star Wars was based on George Lucas’s cat. Andy Serkis has said that his cat was the inspiration for his portrayal of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, particularly the hissing and the coughing up of hairballs.

It would be interesting to see if Yoda the cat’s offspring also have four ears. That would make the trait a genetic mutation. X-Cats.

It’s the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Ninoy Aquino. “Do you remember where you were when you first heard that Ninoy had been shot?” asked my friend, the Princess Poulet. Yes I do. I remember that it was a weekend and I was at home with my mother. Everyone knew that Senator Aquino was arriving that day, so we expected to see the television coverage. But there was no TV coverage of the homecoming, and as the day wore on it was obvious that something bad had happened. Then there was the news bulletin that he’d been shot, allegedly by a hitman who was identified by the name sewn onto his underwear. 

Poulet’s innocent question quickly turned into a morbid game of Where Were You When. On September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit the tower, I was standing in front of an ATM on Wilson Street in Greenhills. My druid and I had just eaten a big dinner at a Chinese restaurant. She had noted that it was the Coptic New Year. Then as I was withdrawing money from the machine, my druid got a text message saying a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We thought it was a joke in very bad taste.

I was in front of the ATM at United Supermarket (it’s no longer there) in Greenbelt during the big earthquake of 1991. I had just withdrawn money when the ground began to shake violently, then swirl like the contents of a blender. There were aftershocks for days. I remember watching TV coverage of rescue workers retrieving people from collapsed buildings. One TV reporter shoved a microphone at a girl half-buried in rubble and asked, “How are you feeling?” 

“I just realized something,” announced Ernie. “You know that song, Why Can’t It Be? It goes, ‘Why can’t it be/Why can’t it be the two of us (Very awkward phrasing—literal translation of Bakit hindi puede tayong dalawa)/Why can’t we be lovers etc etc.’ The succeeding lyrics go, ‘We met at the wrong place, at the wrong time. . .’ That answers their question. Quite possibly, they never met!”

“What about that Everything But The Girl song, Missing?” I pointed out. “It goes, ‘And I miss you like the deserts miss the rain. . .’ How can the deserts miss the rain when they’ve never had rain?”

Well I was wrong. Turns out the Sahara desert had a green period 6500 to 4500 years ago.