Litlanesfoss, Iceland, photo by Wild Wonders of Europe in the National Geographic
We know nothing of Iceland except that it’s the location for the scenes Beyond The Wall in our favorite TV series. But we found this unlabeled picture we saved from the National Geographic last year, and it turns out to be a photo of waterfalls in Iceland.
Now we have to go to Iceland.
Why is Iceland a portal to the moon? by Justin E.H. Smith, via 3QD.
Saffy says: Sometimes humans get the bizarre idea that we can be trained to do their bidding. When they call us, we’re expected to come running. That’s just disrespectful. Next they’ll expect us to fetch things or roll over. How dare they! They need to be taught that cats cannot be summoned or commanded. So when your human housemates call you by name, never respond.
However, when the human calls another cat, run to the human immediately. How dare they call another cat when you are on the premises! The gall. They are sworn to adore you.
There is a lot of sex in Juana C. the full-length film debut of the political critic/YouTube phenomenon. Kinky sex, sex for pay, boy on boy, girl on girl, group and something called vroom vroom. Why is there so much sex in a movie that wears its advocacies on it XXL sleeve?
Because if we devoted 1/10th of the time we spend thinking about sex to discussing the issues that affect our country, we would have a more rational, responsible, better-educated society. An informed society is harder for corrupt politicians and opportunists to take advantage of.
And because what the politicians and businessmen do to Juana Change in the movie, they are doing to us. Our nation is being screwed by the very same people who are supposed to protect us.
In the first offering from Laganap Productions, Juana Change is a girl who comes to Manila to attend a prestigious university. Her townmates from Barangay Kaploc are counting on her to lead the fight against the corporate interests which are stealing their resources and killing their village. But the impressionable Juana falls in with the high-living crowd and winds up seriously in debt. How is she supposed to pay?
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Sid Lucero stars in Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan, Lav Diaz’s “short film” (Okay that’s the last time we make that joke) which just premiered at Cannes.
From Wesley Morris’s Cannes Diary at Grantland.
…I stopped to check the schedule and saw that a four-hour-and-10-minute Filipino movie called Norte, the End of History was about to start. I also saw the lobby dotted with peers and a couple of friends standing near the mailboxes and around the Nespresso parlor (for nine days, I’ve been burying the lead on you: There’s complementary, pod-based espresso here served by flight attendants from 007 Airlines).
Not one of these film professionals seemed terribly compelled to spend four hours in the dark after sitting for 110 minutes looking at a sunless Midwest. It was a warm, sunny day. Best, perhaps, to explore that, instead. But I found myself drifting toward the lobby, anyway, past a woman in a gold-and-cream ball gown who was having her photo taken, and into the theater. Doing this was entirely involuntary in a way that’s never happened to me. The festival director, Thierry Frémaux, brought the cast to the stage, including the woman in the dress, then the director, a small stylish veteran named Lav Diaz. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice that the house was maybe half-full.
They took their seats, the lights went down, the movie came up, and I sat there. Two-hundred-fifty minutes later, the lights came up, I stood with tears in my eyes, and clapped as loudly as I ever have for any movie in my life. (Note: I’ve actually never clapped for a movie before.) When Diaz made his way back inside the theater to join the cast, the applause grew, and the whistling and cheering commenced. You always hear Cannes stories of 20-minute standing ovations, but I always seem to miss them. This didn’t last 20 minutes, but it was long and special, yet didn’t feel remotely adequate thanks for what had just been given to us.
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While The Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias, Php865 at National Bookstores.
Bored. Must…reach…book.
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For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again—at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere.
I nearly always saw them at the beach, where it’s difficult to get a good look at people. Especially so for me, because I’m nearsighted and would rather see everything through a haze than return to Madrid with a kind of white mask on my otherwise perfectly tanned face, and I never wear my contact lenses when I go to the beach or into the sea, where they might be lost forever. Nevertheless, I was tempted to rummage around in the bag in which my wife, Luisa, keeps my glasses case—well, the temptation came from her, really, because she, if I may put it this way, was constantly transmitting to me the more peculiar activities of the more peculiar bathers around us.
Read While the Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias.
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We were going to ignore the new Dan Brown release as we have no intention of reading it, but MMDA Chair Tolentino has just made it sound interesting.
Thanks for the free book publicity–anything that makes people read.
No thanks for speaking for everyone and making us sound like flaming idiots!
Read the MMDA’s official denial that Manila is the hellmouth.
(Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s) “On Loneliness” is considered a founding document in a fast-growing area of scientific research you might call loneliness studies. Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was. It has now been linked with a wide array of bodily ailments as well as the old mental ones.
In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking.
Read The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You in TNR.
Take this quiz to see where you are on the UCLA Loneliness Scale.
According to the quiz we are not lonely at all. Probably because we really enjoy being alone, plus we refer to ourself in the first person plural so we don’t even think we’re alone.
Reading works. And music.
Here’s Tom Waits singing Lonely. Which makes us happy.
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