JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I’ll be preoccupied for the next few hours.

PARIS (AFP) – Biologists on Wednesday reported the spectacular discovery of a species of giant lizard, a reptile as long as a full-grown man is tall, and endowed with a double penis.

Dubbed Varanus bitatawa, the lizard measures two metres (6.5 feet) in length, according to the account, published by Britain’s Royal Society. . .(keep reading on Yahoo News).

Thanks to Butch for the alert.

I like hanging out in National Bookstore, but then I am the kind of person who hyperventilates when she sees nice paper. Some of the things I’ve spotted in store lately:

I’m not sure if my puberty was triggered by seeing Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait or Matt Dillon in Rumblefish, but when Heaven Can Wait came out in 1978 (After the ice had thawed) I convinced my mom to take me to see it thrice. (Now that I think about it, my mom and I had the same crush.) My friend took a simpler approach: He put pictures of Warren Beatty under his pillow.

Star (Hardcover, Php1259) is the biography of Beatty by Peter Biskind, author of that great book about Hollywood in the 70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The megalomaniacs and demented geniuses who defined the filmmaking of that period make the indies of the 90s onwards seem bland and wimpy: Down and Dirty Pictures is a little boring, even with the excesses of the Weinsteins.

On the left: a travel notebook (Php419) that contains an accordion folder for your travel documents, receipts, etc, and a notepad. Right: A set of 55 antiquarian bookplates (Php634.75).

You like bookplates huh? Okay, we’ll also give away bookplates with this week’s LitWit Challenge.

In the children’s section, The Lost Files of Nancy Drew: the scrapbook of our favorite girl detective. It comes with a set of postcards with the original cover art of the series. (Php395)

Wells Tower’s short story collection was a fixture in critics’ best books lists last year. The title story is a hilarious, gory, deeply moving tale of marauding Vikings. (Hardcover, Php1149)

The winner of this week’s LitWit Challenge: The Absolute Pits will get this set of hardcover books:

A Mad Desire To Dance by Elie Wiesel, “a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and one of our fiercest moral voices, a provocative and deeply thoughtful new novel about a life shaped by the worst horrors of the 20th century and one man’s attempt to reclaim happiness.”

Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, “a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.”

Bicycles by Nikki Giovanni, in which “romantic love—and all its manifestations, the physical touch, the emotional pull, the hungry heart—is distilled as never before by one of (America’s) most talented poets.” (“Like never before!” — N, R)

How do you get your hands on these books? We’ll require some more sordid self-exposure. As LitWit Challenge 2.5: Confessions, Revelations, etc showed us, there’s nothing like spilling your guts. You release bottled-up emotions, we get to watch, and we all feel better afterwards.

Here’s the deal: Write a letter to your ex (or if you never got together, an object of your affections) telling them all the things you were dying to say but never got around to verbalizing. We’ll lift the word count limit for this, but be kind to the judges’ eyes. Post your letters in Comments. The deadline for your entries is 11.59pm on Saturday, 10 April 2010.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

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Oooh, good stuff. I love these confessions. And since we don’t know who’s confessing or whom they’re referring to, we’re technically not exploiting our personal histories for (very little) gain. Keep them coming!

My friend Ige—Guillermo Ramos-Connolly—is celebrating his birthday today. To mark the occasion (as well as the birthday of his Macbook) we had dinner at Lusso yesterday.

The catalyst of our friendship was cat food. Fifteen years ago I was writing a column in Today, and Ige sent me snail mail reporting a shortage of cat kibble in Manila supermarkets. He had two adopted strays, Bono and Isabel (Later Bono got pregnant and Isabel was the father). I had not yet been adopted by cats, but our publisher Ted had written some columns about his very fat cat Tommaso, who was so lazy he slept through the big earthquake in ’91. Ige asked me to ask Ted where he bought cat food; soon we were having dinner and conspiring to publish books. He designed some of the Twisted books, and we co-published Twisted 8. Ige and his partner Kevin are my advance travel party: they convinced me to go to Prague in 2001, and a couple of years ago they said I had to go to New Zealand.

I suggested we take our coffee outside so we could watch the people walking by and speculate on their private lives. Barely had we stepped out when a TV crew arrived, filling the narrow restaurant with boom mikes and cameras. They were shooting an episode of Survivor for Israeli TV. According to one of the crew the Survivor set is in a resort in Camarines Sur; the women having dinner had been voted out of the tribe.

“Can I ask them if they know the Zohan?” our waiter asked. We said we weren’t sure; they might be sensitive. I thought of trying a few words of Yiddish, but I know bupkes. I do know Israel is one of the countries that Pinoys can enter without a visa (Brazil and Morocco are two others).

The “borrowed” speech.