JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Spiked Math‘s Movie Quizzes. And we thought Pi, Proof, Straw Dogs (best use of bear trap) and A Beautiful Mind (yecch) were the only math movies. (We were wrong about that, too.)

Photo by Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse in the NYT

It’s stopped raining in our neighborhood and we’re getting a bit of sun. The floods should be subsiding elsewhere and the situation returning to “normal”. Except that this—torrential rains and huge floods—is the new normal. We can all stop remarking on the amount of rain fall and the heights of the floods because these cataclysms are now seasonal events. The weather is broken and we don’t have time to convince those who deny climate change. We have to deal with it now.

It will be difficult, but we have no choice in the matter. Obviously drainage systems have to be cleared and made more efficient. Communities in flood-prone areas have to be relocated. Roads, bridges and other structures have to be reinforced. Officials, this is is your job, we don’t need any lip, do it.

As for the rest of us, it’s time to do more for the environment than using those adorable recyclable bags. These are strange days, the days that make you want to apologize to Kevin Costner for mocking Waterworld.

Rain by Ryuichi Sakamoto, from the soundtrack of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor.

Laing pasta

Laing with Tempura

Laing stuffed in Ravioli with Red Tuna Sauce

Last week Mike hopped on a budget flight to Legazpi, Albay to check out the laing situation. Read his food diary at Walk and Eat.

Has anyone taken the PNR train to Bicol? The railway service was revived last year. We hear they have sleeper cars. We’re thinking of jumping on a train to Albay to look at Mayon Volcano but we gather she doesn’t reveal herself fully this time of the year. How are the trains? We’re getting madly conflicting reports.

We hope you are safe and dry at home with your cats, dogs, humans and other animals.

This weather is making us antsy. We were sitting in the living room staring at the shelves when we remembered the Sorted Books project.

Since 1993, artist Nina Katchadourian has been sifting through library collections and remixing their holdings in a delightfully unconventional way. Her ongoing Sorted Books project constructs irreverent, humorous and witty sentences by arranging a stack of books so that their titles can be read from top to bottom or left to right.

Since we weren’t doing anything but losing our mind, we gave it a whack. It’s not as easy as it looks.

This one’s a beginning. We haven’t figured out where it goes.

If on a winter’s night a traveller waiting for sunrise in the lake of the woods…

This could be the start of a murder mystery.

Our story begins last night where three roads meet the sense of an ending.

Blast, we forgot to arrange the spines so the lines stand out.

Who sleeps with Katz in Patagonia? Wish her safe at home.

This should keep you occupied for a few hours.

Don’t look now. Everything ravaged, everything burned. That awful mess on the Via Merulana as she climbed across the table.

More: Book spine poetry.

Send us your stack stories.

The movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, from the director of The Hurt Locker. It was supposed to be released in October; the opening was moved to December lest it be viewed as November election propaganda.

Quick review by Rene: “Colm Tóibín writes a quiet story of a woman’s journey across the Atlantic to find work, new prospects and eventually love in Brooklyn. Her sister’s untimely death brings her back home to her grieving mother. There she sees in a townmate the possibility of a new and unlikely romance. Tóibín’s genius is in the spare storytelling, and the control that keeps the tale real and affective without becoming trite.”

We found our hardcover copy in one of the bargain bins at National Bookstore in Glorietta. For 99 pesos. The annual cut-price book sale is on—best time to stock up on reading matter. If this beastly weather continues we’ll need a steady supply of books to keep from going insane.

What are the best books you’ve found in bargain bins? Tell us in Comments. Biggest bargain gets a hardcover Batman, Inc by Grant Morrison (not available in bins) courtesy of National Bookstore.

Cat not included

* * * * *

Thank you for telling us your favorite book bin finds. These are all good bargains so the winner was decided by a raffle. The hardcover Batman, Inc by Grant Morrison goes to caltrask16, finder of books by Chaim Potok and Pauline Kael and presumably a James Dean/East of Eden fan.

caltrask16, please post your full name in Comments. We’ll alert you when your prize has been delivered to the Customer Service counter at National Bookstore in Rockwell. You can have it picked up by a representative; we just need your name.