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Our column Emotional Weather Report, Pet Life edition appears in the Philippine Star most Saturdays.

“You’ll be back…with my Friskies. How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t like Whiskas. Friskies! Friskies!”

At Google’s mysterious X laboratory, known to us as Larry and Sergei’s world domination headquarters, scientists connected 16,000 computer processors to try and simulate a human brain.

A minuscule portion of it, the researchers pointed out, as the human brain has a million times more connections—than their network. Repeat: your brain has more synapses and neurons than a network with one billion connections. Essentially, scientists are using vast computer networks to figure out what goes on inside a single human brain. (You really are an underachiever.)
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Kaya toast set at Toastbox: Coffee with condensed milk, toast with butter and coco jam, two soft-boiled eggs. Their service has improved.

A soft-boiled egg and a glass of milk.
A soft-boiled egg and a glass of milk.
A soft-boiled egg and a glass of milk.
A soft-boiled egg and a glass of milk.
A soft-boiled egg and a glass of milk.

Every single morning from prep to sixth grade. Our mother was a firm believer in protein. 22 school days a month, 220 school days a year for 7 years: that’s 1,540 egg and milk breakfasts, enough eggs for a lifetime. The second we started high school we not only gave up soft-boiled eggs, we rejected breakfast altogether.

Recently we noticed that whenever we do have breakfast it includes eggs. Can’t fight early programming. Yesterday Ige took us to breakfast at Benny’s at Rustan’s supermarket. The Eggs Benedict is not bad at Php265, and they have a wide breakfast selection. We prefer the restaurant’s old name, though: Yum Yum Tree.

A novel way to reduce prison populations
Inmates in Brazil get the chance to read their way to freedom
from The Folio Society Newsletter, Issue 7, 2012

In an unusual move, Brazil’s prison authorities recently announced that inmates in the country’s overcrowded prisons will be offered reduced sentences in exchange for reading a good book.

The scheme has been praised across the world as recognising the importance of reading – a cause close to our hearts at Folio. As Nobel Laureate (and former political prisoner) Joseph Brodsky once said, ‘There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them’.

Thanks to Akyat Bahay Gangster for the alert.

Meanwhile: Free samples of the 2012 Man Booker longlist.

Mike Alcazaren wrote a letter to the management of SM IMAX and posted it on their FB wall. They have not responded and they took down the post on their wall.

The Management
SM Cinema

Paying customer,
Miguel G. Alcazaren

Admiral General Aladeen of Wadiyah arrives in New York to address the United Nations.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is crass, lewd, racist, insensitive, misogynist, rude, immature and offensive. However it is intentionally crass, lewd, racist, insensitive, misogynist, rude, immature and offensive, which is more than we can say for many well-meaning productions designed to assure the audience that they are respectable. Too much good taste atrophies the mind; there is space for bad taste in the cinema, and Baron Cohen does his part to fill it.

Critics argue that by spoofing dictators, particularly Middle Eastern despots, the filmmakers are making light of a real and very serious situation. We think one reason dictators thrive is because everyone is afraid of them—they are treated as sacred monsters. Don’t say anything, they might bite! Well someone needs to laugh at the bastards and show them how ridiculous they really are, and if enough people laugh they might finally get it.

The Dictator is so grotesquely funny we nearly put someone’s eye out when food shot out of our nose. And Aladeen’s big speech towards the end: hysterical because true.

Incidentally, he mentions Filipinos. Does anyone want to get offended?

We would screen this in a double-bill with our favorite Adam Sandler movie, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Photo from Save Your Heritage

10. Nabta Playa
From 7000 and 6500 BCE, an incredible urban community arose in what is today the Egyptian Sahara. The people who lived there domesticated cattle, farmed, created elaborate ceramics, and left behind stone circles that offer evidence that their civilization included astronomers as well.Archaeologists believe the peoples of Nabta Playa were likely the precursor civilization for the great Nile cities that arose in Egypt thousands of years later. Though the Nabta civilization is today located in an arid region, it arose at a time when monsoon patterns had shifted, filling the playa with a lake and making it possible for a large culture to bloom.

10 Civilizations that Disappeared Under Mysterious Circumstances in io9.