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No, actually these are zombie hand effects by Cheryl Cabanos for the upcoming Ang Huling Henya.

But this is exactly how we felt yesterday after standing on the sidewalk at 1pm to hail a cab. It took three minutes, and we were wearing a hat, but our brain still got fried. We walked around like a zombie the rest of the day, then decided that the day was lost and went to bed early. That’s why there’s no new post today.

Discussing the weather is so tiresome.

Yes, we get it 9 days before it opens in the US.

It’s witty, funny, snappy, and it actually has something to say about our relationship with technology. And with Robert Downey, Jr, because this couldn’t possibly work without him. Go!

Don’t forget to sit through the credits. They’re very long, but don’t leave. The cameo is worth it.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com: It’s not the suit, it’s the man. Completely free of anything that might be construed as a spoiler. If it’s in the trailer, it’s not a spoiler.

Method actors are said to be possessed by their characters; Tony Stark is possessed by Robert Downey, Jr. If he seems more substantial than the typical comic-book character, it’s because he mines the actor’s notorious personal history for material. Stark’s personal excesses seem more real because we know of the actor’s past drug addiction. We put up with the character’s arrogance because we know that the actor has been punished for his misdeeds. (This is not an endorsement of drugs. Drugs don’t make you fascinating. Drugs only make boring people even more boring.)

Most of all, Stark/Downey is more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There’s a reason they’re called comic books, you know.

Koosi commands you to read. “Look into our eyes. You will pick up a book and read. Read!”

It’s still April 23, World Book Day, in some parts of the world, and we’re celebrating it by giving away these books.

Would you like one? Post a one-sentence description of yourself in Comments, and we’ll inform you tonight if you’re getting a free book. (Hint: We are partial to the well-crafted sentence.)

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Thank you for your intriguing answers. Some of you we’d like to meet, some we hope we never. You’re so entertaining, we’ll just give you all a book each (Even the one who didn’t get “one-sentence description”). We dropped by National Bookstore in Rockwell today and found a whole bunch of unclaimed books from our past contests. (If you won a prize and never picked it up, tough.) You can have them.

Commenters # 1-32, please give us your full names (They won’t be published).

These are the books we’re giving away:
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates; The Time Between by Maria Duenas; Dreamsongs by George R.R. Martin; Franny and Zooey, 9 Stories, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters/Seymour by J.D. Salinger; The Fall by Guillermo del Toro; Marvel 1602 comic book; Ribblestrop (signed) by Andy Mulligan; The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo by Adam Roberts; America America by Ethan Canin; 12 by Mannix Abrera; Trese: Unreported Murders by Budjette Tan; Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick; Tinker Tailor by John leCarre; 3 Seconds by Roslund & Hellstrom; Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett; In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries; From the Memoirs of A Non-Combatant Enemy (signed) by Alex Gilvarry; The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst; The Rehearsal by Eleanor Caton; The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception; The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips; Camus: A Romance; License to Pawn; Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Sublime; Till I End My Song, a poetry collection edited by Harold Bloom; The Invention of Everything by Samantha Hunt; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday; Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak, in the new translation by Pevear-Volokhonsky; The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Weston; and The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith. And 3 DVDs of Ancient Aliens.

Please read this before you claim your prize.

We will put all these books in a big red bag. Then we will leave your names with the Customer Service staff of National Bookstore, Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati. To get your book, just give your name to Customer Service and ask to see the bag of books. Then pick one and enjoy.

We need to have your real name so we can put in on the list. You can start claiming your books on Sunday, 28 April 2013. They’ll be there till 27 May so you have one month. Obviously the sooner you go there, the higher the probability you will get the title you want.

Yes, you can send someone to claim your book. There’s no bureaucracy. Have them tell Customer Service your name so they can find it on the list.

Scientist, you can get your unclaimed copy of The Surrendered. We didn’t put it in the bag. It’s in an envelope with your name on it.

Not all the winners have sent in their full names. If you do not post your full name by Saturday 27 April, 1pm, you cannot claim your book on Sunday the 28th. In that case, wait one week after you’ve posted your name.

Calvin and Hobbes! The first thing we read in every issue of TODAY. Then we would double back and read every page. Fine, our paper never achieved the phone book thickness of the major dailies on Sundays, but every page was worth reading. No fillers. (And that’s why it no longer exists. Sob.)

Collections of Bill Watterson’s beloved comics are now available at National Bookstores (Photo above was taken at the Power Plant Rockwell branch). The Treasury Collections are Php689 each, and there’s a massive four-volume hardcover Complete Calvin and Hobbes at Php3990.

We miss the little psychotic.

Whenever we meatatarians dine out, our token vegetable dish is either laing, adobong kangkong or gising-gising. Gising-gising is a dish of green beans, peppers, and ground pork in coconut milk—as the name says, it should be spicy enough to wake you up. We like the gising-gising at Recipes, at Bistro Remedios and Lorenzo’s Way. And at Via Mare, although these days we get the feeling Via Mare isn’t even trying anymore.

The other night we ordered gising-gising at Smoking Hot, a newish restaurant in Greenbelt 3. The chopped-up beans and peppers looked alike, so with each mouthful our friends felt like their tongues were being flayed. (We have the Bikolano gene so anghang has little effect on us.)

This reminded us of a fish stew we ate in Shanghai (the photo above). It was as if they had a serious peppercorn surplus and wanted to use as much as they could. The stew was delicious, and it made our pores weep in the dead of winter.

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Another restaurant chain in serious need of sprucing up is Dulcinea. We still like their churros and hot chocolate, but the pastries in the vitrine look like they’ve committed suicide. We’ve had eclairs, meringues and negritos (their politically-incorrect name for the chocolate beehive) with the consistency of fossils. Obviously they were several days old; if you dropped them on your feet they’d leave bruises.

Some weeks ago we ordered the lentejas and it tasted like someone had dropped a whole salt shaker in it.

The restaurants were renovated some years ago, but the interiors are dispiriting. It’s become the sort of place you go to when you feel like crap and don’t want anyone to see you. Dulcinea, we liked you. Wake up.

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Why do the newer restaurants have such terrible acoustics? You’re sitting two feet away from each other but you have to yell to make yourself heard. Meanwhile you can hear conversations from across the room among people you don’t know. Glass frontage plus hard, smooth surfaces and no insulation equals auditory chaos.

Last week we had dinner at Grace Park in One Rockwell, Makati. We thought it was a Korean restaurant; turns out it’s Margarita Fores’s new project (named after Grace Park, Caloocan). The menu is Cafe Bolang Sosyal (i.e. mahal), and the look is “Stuff unearthed from lola’s bodega”. We approve of unmatched tableware.

We ordered squash ribbon pasta with goat cheese, the fish of the day (apahap), and beef belly. Everything was delicious, but we had hoped for a greater variety in the menu. Okay, the place has just opened. Grace Park was packed on Tuesday night; there was a bit of a wait, but our very efficient waiter gave us updates on the estimated time of arrival of each dish. Afterwards we were served a slice of key lime pie, on the house.

The problem was the acoustics. It was like sitting inside a blender. It was so noisy, Raul was singing Bobby Darin’s version of Don’t Rain On My Parade at Raul volume, and we could barely hear him. Finally we moved to a table outside, where it was quieter. Another ten minutes inside and we would’ve had headaches.

Rating: Recommended, but bring ear plugs.

As his new book, A Delicate Truth, heads for bookstores, John le Carré reminds readers and critics that his novels are not authentic accounts of the espionage business but works of fiction.

But I was never a mastermind, or a mini-mind, and long before I even entered the secret world, I had an instinct towards fiction that made me a dubious fact-gatherer. I was never at personal risk in my secret work; I was frequently bored stiff by it. Had things been otherwise, my employers would not have allowed me to publish my novel, even if later they kicked themselves for doing so: but that was because they decided it was being taken too seriously by too many people; and because any suggestion that the British Secret Service would betray its own was deemed derogatory to its ethical principles, bad for recruitment, and accordingly Bad for Britain, a charge to which there is no effective answer…

Read John le Carré: ‘I was a secret even to myself.’