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My reclusive friend The Bone has already chosen our one movie of the year for 2011. Earlier this year we saw Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges. Next year’s movie also stars Jeff Bridges: the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, with Bridges in the John Wayne role.

The Bone was hoping for Big Lebowski-type humor, but the trailer suggests that that is not likely. The trailer also tells me that in the tradition of Javier Bardem’s crazy pageboy/moptop in No Country for Old Men, someone will have a hideous hairstyle and it looks to be Matt Damon.

Speaking of hairstyles, see the girl? That’s how I wore my hair every single day in grade school. For variation I’d have a single braid, or the two braids would be wound and pinned up Princess Leia style.

I liked the Ruben Toledo covers for the Penguin Classics Deluxe editions of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and The Scarlet Letter. In fact I ran out and bought the Wuthering Heights (and read it again. Repeat readings do not diminish the Bronte’s wonderful strangeness. Everyone in it seems bonkers but they make their own kind of sense).

The Toledo-designed editions must’ve been successful because according to the Caustic Cover Critic Penguin Classics Deluxe is putting out three more books with covers by the artist and fashion illustrator.

First up: Jane Eyre. Never got into Jane Eyre. I lost my patience at the maltreated orphan chapters so I peeked at the ending. After all her trouble, she gets That?!? So I quit. My friends love it, though. Here’s the new Toledo cover.

Hmmm. Not likely to make me try reading Emily’s sister again.

Then there’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I read in high school. I don’t remember the details but I remember the portrait. Whenever I meet people who look extremely young for their age I think, “They must have a portrait moldering in the basement.” The cover:

Huh?! Bit literal, no?

Finally there’s Dracula which I’ve never read but have seen many, many film adaptations of. A large part of my childhood was spent watching old Dracula movies on TV. When I was about 10 I dreamed that I was in the kitchen with my parents when a bat flew into the window, turned into a vampire, and grabbed me. I turned to my parents, expecting rescue. Instead they waved at me and said, “Buh-bye, buh-bye.”

The Toledo:

AAAAAAAAAA! What the hell, Ruben.

The Sesame Street parody.

Check out Peter Bradshaw’s takedown of Eat Pray Love in the Guardian. “Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts’s emotional growth, love the fact it can’t last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. . .”

I don’t know anything about The Game of Thrones, the HBO series that begins in 2011. I have not read the fantasy series by George R.R. Martin. But it has Sean Bean and swords! Boromir! I’m in.

Did you cry at The Lord of the Rings movies because the fantasy realms of your childhood had become ‘real’? I slept through The Lovely Bones but I will always love Peter Jackson.

My gene pool is Bicolano and when I was growing up everything we ate had chili peppers and coconut milk in it. Our adobo had chili peppers and coconut milk. My mom made excellent laing but it was always a huge production number. The gabi leaves had to be the right shape and texture or your tongue and throat would itch. Then they had to be shredded very fine. The coconut milk had to be freshly-squeezed, and the chilis had to be a specific variety or they wouldn’t be spicy enough. She also made a dish called pinangat which is like laing wrapped around shredded pork and shrimps.

Every other week or so I need my laing fix. A lot of Filipino restaurants serve laing—Cafe Bola even has laing pasta—but of course nothing can compete with the memory of my mother’s laing. Last Saturday I went to Naga City for an SM event, and this was in the buffet.

How interesting, I thought, cake with peppers. Then I realized it wasn’t a dessert cake, but a cake made of pinangat. It’s wonderful. This pinangat cake is from a Naga restaurant called Geewan. My mom would’ve approved.

*If you remember the 90s and you read the title of this post, you now have the urge to wear socks on your privates and you will spend the rest of the day hearing this in your head: “Give it away give it away give it away now. Give it away give it away give it away now.”

You will need

Paper dolls
3 or 4 gay or female friends
Nothing to do

Like many little girls I loved playing with paper dolls. I would expand their wardrobes with my own crude designs—I’ve always been partial to capes, armor-like shirtwaists and long coats that could carry a sword. Do kids still play with paper dolls? There are many websites that let you mix and match outfits, but there’s nothing like drawing designs on paper and cutting them out with tabs so they can be attached to the 2D mannequins.

Last Saturday while we were sitting around having coffee I took out the book of paper dolls that I bought for James and keep forgetting to hand over. (Maybe because I really don’t want to part with it.)

I haven’t seen these paper dolls in local bookstores, only Disney princess paper dolls and “beauty queen” paper dolls with fugly clothes. Dover publishes paper doll books with designs from the 1920s-1990s, the Belle Epoque, the Medieval and Victorian eras, etc; their website is here.

We started playing “Which One Is You?”, a game which usually involves going into a store and picking out an outfit or accessory. This time we passed the book around and each one chose the dress that was most herself/himself.

To make the game more complicated we also chose the dresses that we thought the others would choose for themselves, then the dresses we considered appropriate for them, then the dresses we guessed they would choose for us, then the dresses we thought they thought we’d choose for them. Because there is no game so simple that we can’t give ourselves headaches while playing it.

Big Bird chose this for himself: a short flowery muu-muu. Also, he liked the pose.

Ernie approved of this concept: peasant couture.

Bert went for the architectural.

And everybody knew which one I’d chosen.

It is not floral chiffon.