JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Happy Birthday, Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Schmitz Zafra Safin-Sprungli!

Ask your questions and they shall be answered.

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The Oracle has gone to play with the laser pointer. We will no longer be taking your questions. Thank you for your greetings.

X-Men Popart courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

We have always loved the X-Men. How could we not? It is the ultimate outsider fantasy: You mock me, you persecute me, but secretly you fear me. In your darkest hour, only I can save you.

If I feel like it.

Read my column at interaksyon.com, the Channel 5 news site.

Studies show that merchandise looks more appetizing to the consumer when displayed on a table. Like food. This is my reading backlog at the moment. Fine, I can’t lie to you, it’s a quarter of the backlog. I’ve been preoccupied lately.

From the top row, left corner: The Hare With Amber Eyes is a non-fiction book by the famous ceramic artist Edmund de Waal. The hare of the title is a matchbox-sized Japanese carving called ‘netsuke’, one of 264 pieces the author inherited from his great-uncle Iggie, who’d lived in Tokyo for many years. He began to investigate how the netsuke had ended up in his uncle’s flat, in the process uncovering two centuries of family history spanning Odessa, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo. Rapturous reviews.
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Here are some random snapshots. Your assignment is to weave these images together into a story of 1,000 words or less. The images may appear in any order.

1. Gothicky chandelier. We spotted this at a new restaurant in Greenbelt 3 called Cerveseria. They serve tapas, paella, Iberian chicken. The interiors are dimly-lit Spanish-Gothic, with bookshelves.

2. Passengers waiting for their flight to Manila, Abu Dhabi airport, 2 am.

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The Philippine Declaration of Independence, from Wikimedia Commons.

Philippine Volcanoes win big in Asian rugby; Pinoys still don’t notice. In Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum; you draw from everything you’ve read, seen, heard. I’d like to acknowledge some of my models.
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The drive from Makati to Calamba via C5 then SLEX took an hour—less than the ride from Quezon City to Makati on a weekday. The bottleneck started at the tollbooths, then when you hit Calamba proper the roads narrow. Ya know, if you’re going to build highways so we can get to our outlying towns and cities faster, why don’t you go ahead and widen the roads of the towns and cities along the highways? Anticipate progress. Don’t build a dinky road and then allow people to construct their houses smack alongside it. Think of the future, people, it’s big.

From Calamba it was a half-hour drive to San Pablo, to a restaurant called Sulyap. (In English, “Glance”.) Richard explained that the site used to be a school building. The restaurant owners were the distributors of Spanish wine hence the casks at the entrance. There’s a small dining area

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