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Midgets. Always a great source of entertainment because everyone in the Philippines is 6’4″.

Saffy and her stuffed toy sheep, with a box of the world’s greatest hopia. Delicately flaky crust, finely ground mung bean paste. Hopia that you have to get from Xiamen, since they invented it.

Photo from the History Channel

Vikings is a production of the History Channel, so we’re inclined to think that this series about the rise of the legendary chief Ragnar Lothbrok is concerned with historical accuracy and authenticity. On the other hand its creator and showrunner is Michael Hirst, whose previous projects The Tudors and The Borgias can hardly be accused of accuracy. The court of King Henry VIII may have been as sexy as depicted in The Tudors, but the famed portrait by Hans Holbein shows that the monarch’s calves were larger than the waist of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who portrayed Henry.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

This goes out to the 5 people who read our Whiplash review.

There’s a lot going on this month, including several plays we must watch (Dangerous Liaisons, Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Filipino). We asked Rody Vera why everything has to be crammed in the same four weekends, straining our powers of bilocation. He says it’s because it’s Arts Month.

We propose that the NCCA make it Arts Quarter, so the audience doesn’t have to do the headless chicken dance to see everything.

“Are these real concerns? Is this work convincing?”

Behind all the other questions one asks oneself about a novel, these are perhaps the most determining—and the most slippery. Probably we should accept that in many cases a straight yes-or-no answer just won’t be possible. There will be shades of gray. Still, the matter of whether a work of fiction—its setting and characters, its interactions and preoccupations, etc.—feels “authentic” may have much to do with how we ultimately judge it, whether we like it, whether we take it seriously. But what do we mean by authenticity? Since we can hardly ask for documentary accuracy from fiction, what is it exactly we’re looking for?

Read In Search of Authenticity by Tim Parks in the NYRB blog.

Meanwhile, here’s a murky tale of a Stanford student, her Silicon Valley mentor, her overly involved mother and “psychological kidnapping”. Not a ringing endorsement of the human race.

Ha ha ha! Try journalism.

Martin Freeman was said to have been best man, aww. So they’d already rehearsed it, just switched roles.