JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: Obama with lightsaber from Japanese toy company.

‘Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual…Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”’

Neuroscientist Steven Pinker on American Chief Justice Roberts’ fumbling of the administration of the presidential oath of office. The Oath was administered again, so nutcakes can stop ranting that President Obama was never sworn in.

We really are in a new era. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi has an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

A few days ago I noticed a line of ants wending their way across my bedroom. I respect ants, industrious little creatures who carry loads many times their weight, plus I’d seen their Walt Disney cartoons so I left them alone. The following day there were more of them, and I was worried that they’d bite my cats so I swept the ants away and searched the room for whatever it was that was attracting them. There were no dead insects or bits of food; as far as I could tell the ants were migrating from the corner of one (closed) window to a crack in the opposite wall.

Photo: Can’t bite these.

When I woke up yesterday the ant parade had turned into an infestation. As I pondered a solution to this problem that would not involve insecticide (the smell makes me ill, and they are not pet-safe), some of the critters crawled onto my leg and bit me, thus sealing their doom. The safest solution that occurred to me: Citronella, a natural oil that is used in perfumes and insect repellent.

Carlo was going to Rustan’s to look for a very tall champagne flute; I figured that their houseware section was a good place to look. I’ve usually gotten polite and efficient service from the Rustan’s staff, although a lot of the salesladies who worked there when I was a kid have probably retired. At the room sprays and scented candles section I asked the salesladies if they had Citronella spray or any other organic insect repellant. Even before I’d finished my question they replied, “Ano yon?” “Wala” and “Baka sa Essenses.” Hmm, not the service I’ve come to expect from that fine establishment. I repeated my question and one of the ladies began a desultory inspection of their bottled oils to see if they had Citronella; they could not recommend an alternative.

At Essenses they had a citronella bug spray for babies, but it cost P995 for a 250ml bottle. Carlo suggested L’Occitane, but they didn’t have Citronella, and even if they did I’m not spraying ants with L’Occitane product. “Then we should go to SM,” Carlo said, “Because ‘They’ve got it all.'” I rolled my eyeballs and off we went. Right at the door of the housewares section I asked a salesman if they had Citronella and he quickly produced a room-and-linen spray (P279.50) and a bottle of essential oil (P349.50). Amaaazing. Then Carlo found an extremely tall champagne flute for P490, a decimal place less than the fancy one he’d considered buying.

When I got home I squirted Citronella linen spray on the line of ants and they promptly stopped moving. It was an ant massacre. Wish our species could co-exist in peace, but they opened hostilities. I swept away the tiny corpses and sprayed Citronella on their hideouts. Tonight we’ll see if it worked.

36 hours later. Looks like it worked: the ant parade has not returned. My cats usually hate citrusy scents, but they don’t mind the citronella.

Barack Obama is sworn in as the President of the United States, and the word on everyone’s mind is Change.

At the start of the year, Edge.org asked 151 thinkers: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

The answers are wide-ranging, fascinating, and sometimes mind-boggling.

We will see the first artificial life form on Earth (J. Craig Venter, who’s working on that, has announced transplanting information from one genome into another. Meaning, your dog becomes your cat) and discover life on other planets…or extraterrestrial life on Earth (You will be found out at last). Laboratory Earth colonies will be formed for simulating conditions on galactic trips.

Photo: “No thanks, I don’t want to be a dog.”

We will be able to delineate the nature of talent (No matter what Malcolm Gladwell says, talent is mysterious and hard work over decades will only get you so far). Someone will prove the Riemann Hypothesis.It will be possible to chemically or electronically remove humans’ ability to kill or harm other human beings. (Uh-oh. Alarm bells. Remember that Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk split into Good Kirk and Bad Kirk. And Brave New World.) The average life span will increase to 125 years, or 150.

Nanotechnology will enable us to manufacture all our material needs at trivial cost, without human labor, without waste. Other molecular-scale devices will repair and rejuvenate our cells.

Climate will change our worldview. There will be the first major upgrade of the human brain since the Pleistocene. We will be able to control virtual models of our own bodies directly with our brain. Radiotelepathy—the direct communication of feelings and thought from brain to brain—will become possible. (We already have that in the Philippines. It’s called chismis.)

We will learn to make phenotypes. Laptop quantum computers will become commonplace.

True human nature will be unmasked. (Aiiieee!)

There will be a Malthusian information famine. (We can already see it coming.)

Another universe will be discovered IN our universe.

After a media preview of Doubt, a discussion (literally) on the nature of faith in which the awesome Meryl Streep shows mere mortals how to “hiss, murmur and groan at the same time” (Anthony Lane), Grungella and Telly Monster dropped by a cafe for a pot of tea. They fell to talking about the movies of their childhood.

“Come Drink With Me was the movie that changed my life,” Telly declared. “It was a Run Run Shaw production directed by King Hu. When I saw those women warriors in flowing robes flying among the trees, I wanted to fly. In fact I decided to try it. This happened when I was nine. I asked our houseboy to fashion a sword for me, then I put on my mom’s lounging robe and jumped off the roof. I sprained my spine, my vertebrae got smashed together, and I had to wear a brace for a while. That’s probably why I didn’t grow to be as tall as my brother. I’ve been looking for a DVD of Come Drink With Me.”

“My mother took me to see Marcelino Pan Y Vino,” Grungella recalled. “It made a great impression on me. In the movie Marcelino dies at age 8. I thought, Oh crap, I’m going to die at age 8—not because I was good, but because I figured that if anyone was going to be chosen for some special destiny, it would be me (arrogant child). True enough, I had a bad fall at age 8. And I didn’t die! At which point I started thinking, Ha! I cannot be destroyed! I saw the DVD recently, but I have no intention of watching it again.”

Later they marveled at how such impressionable children could watch so many movies without parental supervision and not grow up to be serial killers.

Robert Crum says old people in general don’t have literary careers. After 40, you’re done.

Keats when he wrote On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer: 21.
Shakespeare when he wrote Venus and Adonis: not yet 30. Hamlet: 36.
Dickens when Pickwick Papers was published: 25.
J.D. Salinger published The Catcher In The Rye at: 32.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise came out when he was: 24. The Great Gatsby: 29.

The great exception: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Wrote Crime and Punishment at 45, The Brothers Karamazov at 59. By which time he should’ve been dead. At 27 he was arrested, thrown in jail, and sentenced to death. As he was waiting outside in the freezing cold to be executed by firing squad, his sentence was commuted to four years’ exile with hard labor in Siberia. Then he spent five years as a soldier in what is now Kazakhstan. After that he ran literary journals that failed. He was a compulsive gambler and a depressive. And between the ages of 41 and 59 he wrote The House of the Dead, Notes From Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Take that all you spoiled, comfortable dilettantes.

“God’s lonely man”. Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver was inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.

The Boss at the Obama party at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added…” Read Obama must take lead to avert eco-disaster.

And he has the theme song for it! If we were paranoid, we’d see this as another canny marketing tactic by Ms Ciccone.