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Ash cloud over Mt Pinatubo

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent…

Read The Climate Fixers: Is there a technological solution to global warming? by Michael Specter in The New Yorker.

Roger Federer won the Madrid Open and got a Men In Black suit from Will Smith. Interesting body language, no? Is Roger bending towards Will or moving his lower body away from him?

Charming story in the L.A. Times about a pathologically shy man who meets a woman at a film series and falls in love. Read it here.

We have friends who have fallen in love at the movies—with actual people, not characters onscreen.

Many years ago, when Jean-Baptiste (not his real name) was studying film in Paris (the real location), he went to a screening of Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road. It’s about a couple of guys who go around Germany in a van, fixing broken film projectors. Naturally life gets competitive with the movies: during the screening the projector kept breaking down. Yes, this story is meta.

When the lights went on during the first of many interruptions, Jean-Baptiste noticed this cute girl sitting across the aisle in the near-empty theatre. At the next interruption they exchanged a nod. Next, a shrug. Next, a half-smile. When the movie finally ended, Jean-Baptiste should’ve gone up to the girl and introduced himself. (Well that’s what we would’ve done, but we are more guy than most guys. Hmmm we should give lessons.)

Instead Jean-Baptiste slunk off to the metro, berating himself for being such a timorous weenie (torpe). He got on the train, where he promptly ran into the girl from the screening. Jean-Baptiste may be a timorous weenie but he knew that if he didn’t strike up a conversation with the girl he deserved to be struck by lightning.

He didn’t strike up a conversation with the girl.

Fortunately she had fewer issues than he did and she struck up a conversation. They ended up dating. Never mind how it turned out.

The assignment for LitWit Challenge 8.9: Using the basic plot of the Jean-Baptiste story, write a story in 1,000 words or less about two people who fall in love at the movies. You may change the location, names, genders, the movie they saw. In fact you can ditch the Jean-Baptiste story altogether, but you have to stick with these rules:

1. It has to be romantic (not a smash and grab operation).
2. It has to start in a movie theatre.
3. It has to be unlike a Star Cinema romcom, you know what we’re saying.

We have a real screenwriter on board to judge this LitWit Challenge: Raymond Lee, whose recent credits include Zombadings, Endo, Maximo Oliveros, and yes a bunch of Star Cinema movies from years ago including Tanging Yaman, Anak and Milan.

The prize: Php2500 in National Bookstore gift certificates. (It’s tuition-paying, textbooks-and-school-supplies-buying season, as our friend reminded us.)

Post your stories in Comments on or before 11.59pm on 25 May 2012.

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

Our 5-year-old niece Kim Jong- Mika is a huge fan of Captain America/Chris Evans, so we’ve been reviewing Chris’s movies to determine if they are appropriate viewing for a child. (Nyahaha that’s what children are for!)

She’s already seen Captain America and The Avengers (and yelled “I love you Captain America!” in the theatre, sorry moviegoers). The two Fantastic Four movies are stupid (We only watched them for the scenes in which the Human Torch reverts to civilian gear…which has been burned off by his transformation!) but innocuous, and we think she can deal with the idea of apocalypse in Sunshine (the Danny Boyle SF movie).

This is a druggie? What’s he addicted to, protein shakes?

Chris is phenomenal in Puncture, based on the true story of an ambulance chaser who takes on Big Pharma and the health care industry. He plays a brilliant drug-addicted lawyer whose life is always two minutes from falling apart—it’s one of those unlikely hero movies.

The problem (and we never thought we’d use the word in this context) is that Chris is still built like Captain America—something we cannot fail to notice as he spends half his screen time walking around in boxers (Cue stampede as readers abandon their screens to find the movie). We don’t believe he’s a junkie. True, there are addicts who seem perfectly healthy, but this is a bit much. An astounding performance is wasted because we can’t see past that body.

Rating: Not appropriate as Mika may stab other kids with toy syringes and she’s a strong girl.

This is your neighbor and you’re looking up your exes??

We’d already seen What’s Your Number, in which Chris plays Anna Faris’s mostly naked promiscuous annoying/adorable neighbor and felt like strangling their respective agents. How could they allow their clients to be in this drivel? The DVD version is still drivel, but much funnier than we remember. Turns out the best jokes were deleted from the theatrical version. Why? Because they were about sex.

You know how it is in this hyper-Catholic country: horrific violence is allowed onscreen, but sex is verboten. Which is weird because given the population growth—unchecked at the insistence of the church—what do you think people are doing? They can’t be praying for Jessica Sanchez to win American Idol 24 hours a day. Is that the point of the church’s resistance to the reproductive health bill: to produce more people of Filipino descent who can get into American Idol?

Rating: Not appropriate as the child might lace her vocabulary with expletives and get expelled from the first grade, for which her parents will blame us. But it is funnier, more entertaining, and contains more Chris Evans than the version we watched.

Next we’re accompanying Mika to a toy store to decide which action figures are appropriate for a child her age…

Our niece also likes Thor/Chris Hemsworth. We’re not taking her to see Snow White and the Huntsman because she’s going to yell at the screen. However: excuse to review all his movies (as if we needed one)!

We looked down at our feet and noticed we were wearing Dothraki-style shoes. (Or Winterfellian? Dornish? Qarthian?) These are espadrille-type shoes we bought on sale last year.

How Not To Be In An Airport Altercation, our column in InterAksyon.com.

So you have a few more millennia to bore everyone to death with your existential anguish. You can be the apocalypse!

Read Oldest known Maya calendar found in Guatemala in the LA Times.