JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photos from tumblr.

Marat Safin. We’d vote for him.

Photo from vogue.com.

First time ever, oddly enough. Vogue January. Thanks to mcmorco for the alert. We went to the bookstore immediately to get our copy but it’s still the November issue on the stands.

Lesser Meryl Streep projects that we like:

1. Still of the Night – She undergoes psychoanalysis.
2. Falling In Love – She meets Robert De Niro (in his cute period) at a bookstore.
3. Plenty – She can’t adjust to life after wartime.
4. Prime – “Amaaaazing” has become part of our regular speech.
5. Holocaust – TV series where we first saw her.

VF illustration by James Taylor

The only thing that has changed fundamentally and dramatically about stylish objects (computerized gadgets aside) during the last 20 years is the same thing that’s changed fundamentally and dramatically about movies and books and music—how they’re produced and distributed, not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are.

You Say You Want A Devolution by Kurt Andersen in VF.

has been chosen by the Yucch-meter.

Porn addict by suresuresure: Written for shock effect, not shocking at all.

Cussing addict by Meng: There is an actual condition known as Tourette’s Syndrome. Look it up.

Palabok addict by kidnapmeimrich: Cute, but not an addiction.

Facebook addict by tita: Good. Sounds real.

Dating site addict by angus25: Very interesting, but the narrator thinks too much to be an addict in the grip of his impulses. He’s just lonely, that’s not a disorder.

OC-OC by samutsari: Obsessive-compulsive behavior is similar but not the same as addiction.

Dating older men by cake: Not an addiction, a daddy complex.

Blogging addict by joyeah: Sounds like a real person: furtive, embarrassed at her condition but unable to stop herself. The narrator is believably dorky and borderline incoherent. We have a winner.

Congratulations, joyeah, you are the winner of LitWit 7.9. Please post your full name in Comments and we’ll alert you when your prize can be picked up.

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

* * * * *
joyeah, you or your representative can pick up your books at the Customer Service counter of National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati, any day starting Saturday 17 December 2011. Just give your full name when you claim your prize.

In Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Christopher Hitchens is our guide through the intellectual minefields. He reports from the last frontier.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”

Read Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.