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Koosi, our 14-year-old housemate, posing with a shopping bag.

Happy Birthday, Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Zafra Safina!

Saffy will answer all questions about your future in Comments. If it please her, she will also grant wishes not pertaining to lottery numbers or finding eternal love with a famous person you’ve never met.

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Saffy renounces her human father, Marat Safin, a member of the Russian parliament, for voting for a bill that stigmatizes gay people in Russia.

Mat says: Don’t let your human go to the bathroom alone. Do you want them to be lonely? If they get lonely they might invite another cat into your house, and that means less territory for you.

Whenever they go to the toilet, follow them. Stare at them while they’re doing their business. Better yet, while they’re on the toilet, use your litterbox. There’s no better time for inter-species bonding. Remind them of how much you have in common.

Koosi says: Humans tend to worry about our health. They confuse us with babies, their loud, stinky, generally useless miniature versions. Be considerate. Assure them that you are in excellent health. Periodically jump up on their laps or computer keyboards and stand with your butt in their face. This way they can sniff you as mammals normally do, and they can determine that you’re perfect.

The cats recommend Becks in Paris, a blog that “imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition – the glittering surface of a footballing icon cracked open by existentialism.” It is les pyjamas of ze chats. Via 3QD.

The Cat and the Devil, a children’s story by James Joyce, illustrated by Gerald Rose

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey “assembles the regimens of 161 assorted creative geniuses into a lean, engaging volume.”

The prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos believed that “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” And indeed, if there’s a drug the artists in Daily Rituals can agree on, it’s caffeine. Soren Kierkegaard preferred his coffee with sugar, or perhaps it was vice versa: “Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled above the rim,” his biographer observed. “Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.”…

James Joyce, we learn, woke daily around 10:00 a.m. He’d lie in bed for about an hour, then get up, shave and sit down at his piano, where he’d play and sing before writing in the afternoon and then hitting the cafes later that evening. John Updike, meanwhile, worked mornings, preferring to “put the creative project first,” as he put it. Of his discipline, he said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”

In our experience, it takes three hours of doing “nothing” (i.e. household chores, watching a movie, walking, grooming the cats) to produce one hour of writing.

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.

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.