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Happy Birthday, Saffy!

Today Saffy will listen to your questions, petitions, and dilemmas and dispense her wisdom. Post your issues in Comments.

She will also give books to those who post questions, petitions and dilemmas that amuse her.

She has spoken. Incidentally Saffy speaks in the third person, unlike her human who speaks in the first person plural.

Warning: Saffy is not polite like Mat or friendly like Drogon. Saffy is close to 90 in cat years so basically she doesn’t give a crap.

Update: Saffy is through answering your questions. If you posted a question that she answered and have already disinfected your scratches, email saffron.safin@gmail.com by Sunday, 21 June 2015 to claim your book.

He died last week, having done Everything. In his honor we’re going to watch the original Wicker Man, which is either one of the worst horror movies every made, or one of the greatest horror movies ever made.

Sir Christopher on swordfighting.

The series created by Michelle and Robert King begins with a premise grabbed from the headlines. Alicia, who had been a full-time mom for 13 years, is forced to return to legal practice in order to support her family after her husband, Chicago State’s Attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), is jailed on charges of corruption and having sex with prostitutes. Sex is the downfall of American politicians: they can get away with inventing reasons to declare war on foreign countries, but if they figure in a sex scandal it’s goodbye, career. After all, America was settled by Puritans who fled England because it was too licentious.

I’m more shocked by the fact that after six years, there hasn’t been a Filipino version of The Good Wife. Babaeng pinagtaksilan ng asawa, babangon at dudurugin ang mga kaaway (A woman betrayed by her husband, will rise up and crush her enemies.). Of course in a local version, the wife would not only return to the law but she would defend her husband herself, and it would turn out that the husband never touched another woman. Or if he did, he would get run over by a bus and she would find a better guy.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

The Novel Cure, Php695 at National Bookstores

Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” In it, the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,” Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow.”

Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books. Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction.

Read the article at the New Yorker.

We can do this. Describe your emotional state and we’ll prescribe a novel.

Ex. You were unhappily married so you had an affair and now your affair is making you unhappy.

Rx: The Love Object by Edna O’Brien.

Ex. You hate your mother’s boyfriend.

Rx: Agostino by Alberto Moravia

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. Image: Robert Plutchik

Although boredom is essential for human development it’s been given a bad rap. “Boredom has traditionally been associated with a range of negative outcomes, both within the workplace and outside it,” Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire write in their 2014 paper. Mann and Cadman examined the relationship between boredom and creative potential on a range of tasks in two studies.

In the first study, 80 eager volunteers visited their lab only to be given the dull, monotonous chore of copying out lengthy lists of telephone numbers, or to be excluded from it (this was the control group), followed by the creative task of thinking of as many possible uses for a pair of plastic cups.

In the second study, a further 90 volunteers were split into three groups, each group being assigned to various types of boring activities (copying numbers, reading the numbers, or being excused from the whole thing – again, a control), followed by a creative task.

“Results suggested that boring activities resulted in increased creativity and that boring reading activities lead to more creativity in some circumstances,” the authors write.

Read it at New Statesman.

Somewhere, Steven Spielberg is laughing his head off. He’s credited as executive producer of this reboot, which proves that newer is not necessarily better. Jurassic World is so idiotic, it seems to argue that dinosaurs should return because humans are too stupid to run the world.

It is a measure of how far civilization has fallen in the last 20 years that the lead characters in Jurassic Park were two paleontologists and a mathematician, and in Jurassic World they are inept capitalists and a hot ex-Navy guy who’s forgotten that navy means water. (Okay maybe he was a SEAL but the movie doesn’t know that.)

Chris Pratt is the ex-Navy guy turned velociraptor trainer, and right off I absolve him of all blame in this debacle because imagining him naked was the only thing that kept me watching. For most of the movie he wears this vest thing that makes him look like he’s auditioning for Han Solo. In one scene he evades a scent-tracking dinosaur by dousing himself in gasoline, and then the movie forgets that he’s bathed in gasoline so he spends the rest of the movie as a safety risk. His character is supposed to have sexual tension with Claire, the Jurassic World theme park administrator played by Bryce Dallas Howard, but he has more chemistry with me, I mean his trained velociraptors.

Read our review at InterAksyon.com.