JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

A group claiming descent from the Knights Templar is suing Benedict XVI for 100 billion euro. They claim that when Clement V dissolved the order in 1307, the church seized over 9,000 properties including real estate, mills, and businesses. The Templars were a secret society of warrior-monks founded after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims en route to Jerusalem. They became spectacularly wealthy, financed wars, and incurred the ire of powerful enemies who tried them on charges of heresy, devil worship and sodomy. Many Templars, including their Grand Master, were burned at the stake.

“The legal move by the Spanish group comes follows the unprecedented step by the Vatican towards the rehabilitation of the group when last October it released copies of parchments recording the trials of the Knights between 1307 and 1312. The papers lay hidden for more than three centuries having been “misfiled” within papal archives until they were discovered by an academic in 2001. The Chinon parchment revealed that, contrary to historic belief, Clement V had declared the Templars were not heretics but disbanded the order anyway to maintain peace with their accuser, King Philip IV of France.”

Experts have dismissed the lawsuit as cuckoo. If it prospers, does it mean we can sue the Catholic Church for seizing vast tracts of land in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period? 

Rouge Assassin, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

Snapped last year at a mall cineplex. Didn’t watch the movie, but I’m guessing it’s a fight to the death using cosmetics.

Where was it that I read that Facebook members spend an average of three hours a day on their Facebook accounts? I don’t know how they arrived at that number, but from personal observation it sounds correct. You go online to check some statistics, but before you do you decide to take a peek at your Facebook, it won’t take five minutes. You take note of the number of your friends, gloat at how many more friends you have than your friends (or wonder why you don’t have as many friends as they do), approve and disapprove requests for your friendship, send out toasts and pokes, check to see if your crush in high school is on Facebook, and before you know it, five hours have passed and you still don’t have those stats. 

I’m not on any social networking sites, but a few years ago my sister told me that there were three Jessica Zafras on Friendster. We knew they did not just happen to have the same name, because they used my column photo. I suspect they were little gay boys, who constitute a large part of my readership. My sister lodged a complaint, and I don’t know what happened after that.

Today a friend was telling me about looking up his high school crush on Facebook. He found someone with the same name, and checked out the photo. It was clearly not his old crush, but this other person was very attractive, so he decided to “friend” him anyway. Do you ever wonder how many people out there have the same name as you, and whether they’ve ever been mistaken for you?

It makes sense to be familiar with your namesakes, in case they become famous or, more importantly, infamous. Grover just mentioned that the immigration hold orders at airports don’t include dates of birth, so if you happen to be a namesake of someone who cannot leave the country, you’re not going anywhere, either. You’ll need a certificate to prove that you are not in fact that person. I know at least five Michael Tans, there must be a dozen William Chuas, and so on. 

Anyway, I thought of this experiment. Go to Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site, and find out how many people have the same name as you. Then send them all this message: “ARE YOU ME?” The next time they check their accounts, they will receive messages apparently from themselves, raising a question of identity. It’s ontological! It’s epistemological! It’s freaking weird!

If they reply to your message, be sure to let me know. Maybe you could be friends. Or you could be more than friends—you could date each other. You and yourself, it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

Write that caption, originally uploaded by saffysafina. 

What are Jay and Carlo talking about? Believe it or not they were discussing the dimensions of a cake Carlo was going to bake, so get your head out of the gutter. Still, this picture lends itself to all sorts of speculation, so write your own caption (or an entire conversation, if it’s a slow day at work). Example: “I think we can build a small hadron collider. . .”

Post it in Comments before Thursday. The author of the caption chosen by Jay and Carlo gets a hardcover copy of The Passion of Artemisia (Gentileschi), a fictional biography of the Italian baroque artist, by Susan Vreeland.  

Contestants, originally uploaded by saffysafina. 

Lord Kittensley Furface a.k.a. Maximus wins our Best Cat Photo competition! I am partial to cats that look deranged. Congratulations to his human, Marge; your prize is in the mail.

Vertigo, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

“Coupled together, these two words are repeated three times in Vertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster (’freedom’ under  lined by a move to close-up) who, looking at a picture of Old San Francisco, expresses his nostalgia to Scottie (‘San Francisco has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are disappearing fast’), a nostalgia for a time when men – some men at least – had ‘power and freedom’. Second, at the thirty-fifth minute, in the bookstore, where ‘Pop’ Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes’s rich lover threw her out yet kept her child: ‘Men could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom …”

A free replay (notes on Vertigo) by Chris Marker.