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Chicken liver paté, foie gras mousse and fish paté at La Cuisine.

At a restaurant.
Ernie: Ano yung sandwich ninyo na may figs?
Waiter: Roast fork sandwich, Sir.
Ernie: Hindi vavoy, figs.

At a bookstore.
Me: Do you have Me Cheeta? (the acclaimed “autobiography” by Tarzan’s chimpanzee, longlisted for the Booker Prize)
Clerk: Yes, we have a copy.
Me: What’s the name of the author again?
Clerk: Cheeta.
Silence.
Me: The human author?
Silence.
Clerk: I’ll go get the book.

(By the way the author is James Lever.)

At dinner. Our friend The Count likes to describe events in cinematic terms. “Cut to Pilar! Close-up on Boy!” Here he is describing his crush emerging from a car.
The Count: Tumigil ang kotse. Bumukas ang pinto. Lumabas ang paa. Lumabas ang binti. Lumabas ang tuhod. Lumabas ang likod.
Ernie: At magkahiwa-hiwalay silang lahat!
End of story.

Chocolate truffles, Borough Market, London, 2009. Photo by Ricky Villabona. Click on the photo to see more truffles.

For this week’s LitWit challenge I’m still giving away the set of four Nancy Drew Books.

Here’s the situation. Intrepid girl sleuth Nancy Drew comes to Manila to investigate a mystery.

What mystery? Better yet, which mystery?

Post the title of the Nancy Drew adventure and a short synopsis.

Example: Nancy Drew and the House in Foster City. While visiting friends in Manila, Nancy hears about a haunted house in the San Francisco Bay Area. Apparently its owner had committed media suicide. It is said that during the full moon, a ghost walks through the rooms groaning, “My lawyer can answer that. . .So sue me. . .” On her return to the US, our girl detective takes a side trip to SF and discovers that the house. . .has disappeared! Or did it ever exist in the first place?

We’re accepting entries until 11:59 pm on Saturday, September 26. The weekly LitWit challenge is brought to you by National Bookstore.

How to save on special effects while ratcheting up the suspense: Kurt Neumann’s The Fly from 1958.

The winners of last week’s LitWit challenge brought to you by National Bookstore are:

lzlsanatomy for The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka: Ang Pagbabago ni Gregorio (Huwag Mong Tapakan ang Ipis!) and ruth for King Lear: Hindi ko kinaya! Ang istorya ni Cordelia (Our father, how I hate my sisters!) starring Gretchen B. Winners, please post your addresses in Comments (they won’t be published) or let me know if you can claim your prizes on Saturday at the Good Ideas Forum.

Because we had such a strong field, judge Butch Perez also picked two Honorable Mentions:
Tagwatit for Milyonaryong Taga-barong-barong: The Gameshow Massacre (Wow! Sinong di mawiwili?), his proposed Carlo J. Caparas adaptation of Q&A by Vikas Swarup—previously filmed as Slumdog Millionaire; and Darnapinoy for A Passage To India by E. M. Forster: Bombay, Bombay, Bantay Salakay!

Thanks to National Bookstore for supporting this weekly contest, and to Butch Perez for thinking up this challenge (and picking the winners, so please address your protests to him). Thanks for joining last week’s LitWit challenge, this week’s challenge commences in a bit.

Cat, Rome, September 2009. Photo by Ige Ramos. Click on the photo to see more Roman cats.

From the colosseum to the Forum, from the Torre Argentina to the so-called Protestant Cemetery (actually the non-Catholic cemetery), legions of Leos bask and scratch and doze in the ruins of classical Rome, draped over pillars and pedestals, preening and posing for the camera lenses of the city’s migrant visiting army. Watching the tourists’ faces as one walks about this most walkable of metropolises, one sees their obvious pleasure that these otherwise empty and often barbarous ruins should be adorned with live cats; among the most popular postcards are those with cats lying artlessly about famous monuments. As a Dutch lady explained it to me, the animals make these artifacts more human in some way.

From 1999: Et Tu, Kitty? Stalking an army of cats through the ruins of ancient Rome. By James Hamilton-Paterson in Outside Online.

From the TLS: Stolen manuscripts, ancient books, papal letters dating back to 900BC found in the home of the late John Sisto.

Technology is all over The Lost Symbol, the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. It ranges from portable gadgets like the hostage’s iPhone to the advanced laboratory where a scientist does research in the Noetic Sciences. This last term required a consultation with that archive of esoteric knowledge Google, but since the characters themselves are not above googling this was allowed. (If they googled more often, The Lost Symbol would be a much shorter book.)

Casa Esoterica, technology in The Lost Symbol, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

This I want to read: Carl Jung’s New Book, which for a quarter century has been locked in a vault in a Swiss bank. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious in the NYT.