JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You know the drill. Tell us the story of this picture. Extra rule: Your story cannot have a guy looking at himself in the mirror. Hahahahaha.

Our model is Matt Saunders of the Philippine Volcanoes, the national rugby team. He is the leading try scorer for the team in international test matches. (It’s called a try, but it means a score. It’s like a touchdown in American football, also known as rugby with armor.)

Your story doesn’t have to have anything to do with rugby.

1,000 words maximum. Deadline: Sunday, 10 October 2010 at 10:10 am. The prize:

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

The Yucch-meter is waiting.

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First findings of the Yucch-meter.

What we like about oberstein’s story: The name Eufrecina. And the name Eufrecina. And the name. . .The plot is interesting, but the construction is awkward. “With her hand holding a ladle”—how else would she hold the ladle? Might be better if you take out all the adjectives and adverbs and let the plot carry the tale.

What we like about nikk929’s story: We love fantastic tales that begin in antique shops in London, the ones that are gone by the time the poor schmuck tries to return the merchandise, that never existed on that street in the first place. But you lost us at “It was a normal day in London.” It is a variation on “It was a cold and stormy night”, only more boring. And what IS a normal day in London? We’re supposed to buy the image of a perpetually gloomy London? We’ve never seen a gloomy London, it was always brilliantly sunny! But we are not normal. What IS normal?

What we like about Qsdn’s story: It’s taut and compact. What we don’t get, not just about this story but about the contest entries in general: Why do we always get cannibalism stories? Why, when you see a good-looking guy, do you imagine his bloody corpse? Don’t you like guys anymore? Guys are great. And they’re an endangered species! You don’t have to kill them all the time.

* * * * *

Second pass of the Yucch-meter.

What we like about angus25’s story: Eww. Eww. Eww. As stated in a previous contest, we’ll publish stories that contain graphic sex as long as they’re funny. This one is what is known in journalistic parlance as SS.

Let us reiterate a recently-asked question: Why, when you see a good-looking guy, do you imagine a woman with no head?

What we like about winnerific’s story: Nice pace, intriguing location, gossipy tone. Prose a bit problematic, but nothing that can’t be repaired. Try writing in short sentences. And don’t be afraid to use the grammar checker on your word processing program. (We’re addressing not just winnerific but everyone who has doubts about their subject-verb agreement.)

What we like about cacs’s story: Science fiction! (Have you read Olaf Stapledon? One of the pioneers.) Bit dry, though—we want to feel something for the character. Maybe a memory of everyone he’s outlived, or the terrible solitude of immortality. Like a sandworm of Dune contemplating his former humanity.

What we like about iamstoned’s story: The plot. Very Pinoy horror-drama. Awkward sentence construction, though. The first line sounds like a machine translation of “Ang mga nakiramay ay nagtataka kung bakit ni isang luha ay walang iniyak si Lolita mula nang matagpuan ang bangkay ng kanyang asawa sa paradahan sa opisina hangga’t inilagay siya sa kabaong para sa burol.” It sounds all right in Tagalog but unnatural in English.

What we like about RightClicker’s story: Fairy tale character bitch fest. Unfortunately it doesn’t go anywhere. The fun of using well-known characters is in revealing some new and unsuspected facet of their personalities, i.e. Snow White really is into midgets. Reinvent, repurpose, redo.

* * * * *

The Yucch-meter had nothing to read for two whole days.

What we like about shadowplay’s story: You sound like you had a good time writing it. If only we could decipher your muddled prose to see what it is you find so amusing.

What we like about wenkebach’s story: A wrestling story! We can’t recall any wrestling stories since the early John Irving (when we used to read him). However, the story is supposed to be set in wrestling class but does not contain any actual wrestling. “They were harder than I thought” just does not convey the physicality of the sport. Where’s the pain?

What we like about ishtevie’s entry: Someday you might create an app for personalized greeting cards! Please note that even if something is written in stanzas with an AAB rhyming scheme it does not automatically follow that that something is a poem.

What we like about Momelia’s story: Froggy Uragon loves Mahinhin Duten. The return of the Ha prefix. The detailed description of frogs’ faces and the research which went into it. (By the way “species” is like “mathematics”, it always ends in S unless you mean “specie” as in coins.) The droll turn of phrase: “The Tuten Frogs are legendary for their breeding exploits on account of they always get some.” “…so cross-eyed that while the normal Tuten sees two, he sees sixteen, and that explains his election.” The oppression of the good-looking. The sheer bizarreness. We approve.

What we like about paopao’s story: The ending. We didn’t see that coming. And the part where the boy escapes from a second-floor room using parkour gave us a good laugh. However, the negotiation between the teenagers sounds unnatural. Then the boy silently critiques the color scheme of the girl’s room, thinks of “retching like a supermodel”, and references Glee. We have something to say about that but we don’t want to make Anderson Cooper angry (Love ya, Andy).

* * * * *

Deadline.

What we like about dibee’s story: It’s The Matrix. But without those speeches in the sequels that caused our minds to leave our bodies. Clever; good idea to bring in Narcissus. Some grammatical glitches, easy to deal with.

We have always been suspicious of our own reflections in the mirror. They seem to know something we don’t.

What we like about magdewart’s story: It’s a John Hughes movie. Or that old Hotdog song, Beh Buti Nga. We suggest throwing in a twist. One that does not involve revenge on the pretty girl. This entry was posted after the deadline and is not in contention for the prize.

Thanks to everyone who joined LitWit Challenge 3.9. The winner/s will be announced tomorrow.

My reclusive friend The Bone has already chosen our one movie of the year for 2011. Earlier this year we saw Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges. Next year’s movie also stars Jeff Bridges: the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, with Bridges in the John Wayne role.

The Bone was hoping for Big Lebowski-type humor, but the trailer suggests that that is not likely. The trailer also tells me that in the tradition of Javier Bardem’s crazy pageboy/moptop in No Country for Old Men, someone will have a hideous hairstyle and it looks to be Matt Damon.

Speaking of hairstyles, see the girl? That’s how I wore my hair every single day in grade school. For variation I’d have a single braid, or the two braids would be wound and pinned up Princess Leia style.

The Philippine Volcanoes, the national men’s rugby union team
Gold medalist, Rugby 7s, 2005 Southeast Asian Games
Silver medalist, 2007 Southeast Asian Games
(Rugby was not in the programme at the 2009 Southeast Asian Games.)
Champion, 2008 ARFU Asian 5 Nations Division 4
Champion, 2009 ARFU Asian 5 Nations Division 3
Champion, 2009 ARFU Asian 5 Nations Division 2
Not representing the Philippines at the 2010 Asian Games.

Because they might win something? That would really disrupt the cycle of official recrimination and blamestorming that follows just about every Philippine appearance at international sports competitions. Where would we get our regular dose of self-pity then?

Maybe I misread the report. Or maybe it was a clerical error.

Anderson Cooper says it’s bad to describe something, say, electric cars as “gay”.

“I was sitting in a movie theater over the weekend,” he said during an Ellen guest appearance, “and there was a preview of a movie, and in it, the actor said, ‘that’s so gay,’ and I was shocked that not only that they put it in the movie, but that they put that in the preview, they thought that it was okay to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it.

“I just find those words, those terms, we’ve got to do something to make those words unacceptable cause those words are hurting kids. Someone else I talked to recently said that the words people use and the things people say about other kids online, it enters into their internal dialogue. And when you’re a kid, it can change the way you see yourself and the way you think about yourself, and the worth that you give to yourself…”

Ergo it is bad to describe CNN anchors as gay even when we mean happy. Oh, Anderson. Mahal ka pa naman namin. You should come to Manila. We say “Ang bakla!” and “Hoy, bakla” all the time. To girls.

The full story in HuffPost.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

Bravo.

So when he punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face, it wasn’t just another writer fight, it was a Nobel prizewinner fight.

Like Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann coming to blows. Or Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

Mahal ka ni Billy Crudup, ayaw mo na sa kanya.

Mahal ka ni James Franco, ayaw mo na sa kanya.

Mahal ka ni Javier Bardem, ayaw mong sumama sa kanya.

May tawag diyan.

Ang masasabi ko lang: May gumagawa pa ng cassette ngayon?!?

* Translation.

You’ve got a big problem.
Billy Crudup loves you, you don’t like him anymore.
James Franco loves you, you don’t like him anymore.
Javier Bardem loves you, you won’t go with him.
There’s a term for that.
All I can say is: They still manufacture audiocassettes?!?

Everyone in this movie sounds like a T-shirt.
All the foreigners she meets are stereotypes.
The character played by Richard Jenkins threatens to turn this big-budget Lonely Planet episode into a real movie, and then they turn him into a T-shirt, too.