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When last we saw Leonidas and his brave Spartans at Thermopylae, they looked like this. (Is that Michael Fassbender on Leonidas’s right?)

Two hundred ninety-nine lay dead, one returned to Sparta to report their mission accomplished (It was a suicide mission, Spartans wanted a glorious death). We rejoin them shortly after the events at the Hot Gates, with Leonidas’s Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, who specializes in warrior queens) leading the Spartans into battle against the Persians. She tells us why Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) has it in for the Greeks: apparently the Athenian leader Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) personally killed Xerxes’s father, King Darius. Xerxes used to be human so we get to see Rodrigo looking like himself at first—but then Darius’s naval commander Artemisia (Eva Green) fans his hatred of the Greeks. She kills everyone who might talk sense into Xerxes, and then makes him undergo a ritual that turns him into this.

Aaaaaaaaaaaa his eyebrows are trying to kill us! Help, he’s going to audition for the Village People in 480 BC!

Then the Persians attack the Greek city-states with a huuuge fleet. Themistocles tries to mount a proper defence, but Athens has just invented democracy and everyone gets an opinion, so he and his men are on their own. Themistocles is played by Sullivan Stapleton, who is not a bad actor but lacks the heroic heft for this stuff—he makes Gerald Butler look like Daniel Day-Lewis.

His small fleet has to battle the huuuge navy led by Artemisia, who divides her time between slaughtering men and changing her goth-metal costumes. Why isn’t Eva Green in more movies? Here she plays a ferocious warrior who wields two swords at the same time, and she doesn’t even need them because she can castrate men with a look.

The movie is Rated R-16 because every ten seconds someone gets hacked with a sword, then his blood spurts in slow motion for another ten seconds. The screenplay for this movie must be three pages long, most of it Lena Headey’s voice-over. 102 minutes of men disemboweling, beheading and vivisecting each other, and you know what was cut from this R-16 version? A sex scene. Because Eva Green’s breasts are more dangerous than men impaling each other with swords. Just say no to heterosex.

300: Rise of An Empire must be an advertisement for the color red. After three minutes of carnage we had the overwhelming urge to eat the bagnet dinuguan at Wooden Spoon (We went afterwards and they were full, as usual). Speaking of food, if you go to Hossein’s Persian Kebab, don’t even mention 300 or its sequel to Mr. Hossein because he gets furious. However, if you are doing a history report on the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek Alliance, better talk to Mr. Hossein because if you get your information from 300: Rise of An Empire, you will flunk the class and deserve it.

Watch: If you want to see rippling musculature. And live actors made to look like visual effects.

If you’re into history, archaeology, and art, this book is an absolute delight. If you know nothing about the history of the human race, this book will save you from ignorance.

British Museum director Neil MacGregor has chosen 100 artifacts from different periods in history to create revealing snapshots of how people lived in those times.

The Standard of Ur, a wooden box inlaid with mosaic, dates back to 2600 BC. Archaeologists thought it was a standard, a sign carried into battle on top of a pole. They still don’t know exactly what it’s for, but most likely it’s a box to keep precious objects in. The mosaic carved in shell, red stone and lapis could be the first comic strip, portraying life in the ancient city of Ur in Sumer in Mesopotamia. You see the king ruling his subjects, and leading them in wartime. Note the chariots: as early as 2600 BC, artists had figured out how to render movement graphically.

This reliquary made in Paris in 1350 or so is made of solid gold and encrusted with sapphires, crystals, rubies and pearls. Look closely: there are angels blowing their trumpets and people rising from their coffins and raising their hands. It’s a scene from the Last Judgement. The reliquary contains a single thorn purportedly from the Crown of Thorns that was placed on Jesus’s head. In the Medieval Ages there was a booming trade in holy relics: saints’ fingers, skulls, bits of bone.

From Mozambique in 2001: A throne built from decommissioned weapons from various wars, monument to all who suffered in the civil war in Mozambique. (Is it possible that they got the inspiration from the Iron Throne in George R.R. Martin’s epic?)

A History of the World in 100 Objects is available at National Bookstores, Php1195.

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When you speak to Ben Anderson, you must bring your best game. The formidable Anderson with Lav Diaz.

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Most of Why Counting Counts is a catalog of selected words (filipino, patria, nacional) repeated in Rizal’s two novels, Noli Me Tángere (or Noli) and El Filibusterismo (or Fili), both of which, in the view of Filipinos, helped imagine the nation. The latest translations of these books, by Harold Augenbraum, are from Penguin, with Augenbraum’s introductions. Rizal is required reading in grade schools and colleges in the Philippines, like Machado de Assis in Brazil. This book by Ben Anderson, professor emeritus of international studies, government, and Asian studies at Cornell, might look like a dry exercise in arithmetic, with tables of fictional characters alongside a series of numbers. But it’s precisely this reduction that produces the book’s provocative effects. The noun tabulations and stirring of ingenious word data build suspense, and lead us to new and still-simmering questions about Rizal the nationalist, polemicist, and artist.

The reason Anderson counts (in two meanings of that verb) is that he trusts completely in the significance of Rizal’s words as a way, ultimately, to understand both the hero and the nation he produced.

Read it in the LA Review of Books.

Saffy loves abel and will spend hours rubbing her face on it. She is swathed in a mosquitero scarf. For a moment we thought the cover design was the eagle of the Nazi Reichsadler, but Rene says it is the two-headed eagle symbol of the Augustinian Order, woven into an abel blanket from the 1920s.

Five years ago, during a trip to Ilocos Norte, Rene Guatlo brought us to a shop that sold local textiles handwoven in the traditional manner. That was our introduction to abel, the hardy homespun Iloko fabric with the austere designs. Since then Rene has schooled us (ininggit niya kami) in the varieties of abel: binakul with the op-art patterns, binandera, burbur, bitbituka, mosquitero, etc.

Through our interest in abel, we’ve gotten to know other indigenous textiles such as the hablon of Iloilo and the sinamay of the Bicol region. We’ve lurked in bazaars organized by HABI: The Philippine Textile Council, whose mission is to promote the understanding, appreciation and use of indigenous Philippine textiles.

Inside back cover: Kandit, a Tausug waist cloth

Now the textile council has published Habi: A Journey Through Philippine Handwoven Textiles, an introduction to our rich weaving traditions. Essays by Adelaida Lim, Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, Robert Lane, Lourdes Veloso Mastura, Floy Quintos, Rene and other experts take us through the histories, symbols and processes of these living, wearable artifacts.

“Weaving is not only traditional but spiritual, symbolic, sacred,” HABI chair Maribel Ongpin writes. “What it produces expresses identity, culture, history, including dreams, the belief system, the environment.”

Today indigenous weaving traditions struggle to survive in the face of cheap, factory-produced textiles. As Rene pointed out, the weavers are getting older, younger generations are not as interested in picking up the old ways and learning the intricate patterns, and raw materials are getting scarce.

Bontoc tapis

By popularizing handmade indigenous textiles, HABI hopes to promote the market for the fabrics and keep weaving alive in the 21st century. This attractive book edited by Rene Guatlo, designed by Katherine Bercasio, and packed with vivid photos by Patrick Uy, should get more than a few readers hooked on handwoven. We especially like its portable, un-fussy design and strong visuals. Coffee table books may be impressive, but we can’t carry them around with us.

HABI: A Journey Through Philippine Handwoven Textiles retails at about Php400. Copies are available at the HABI office, Unit 4D Carmen Court, 6080 Palma Street (Backwell), Bgy. Poblacion, Makati City. Telephone (02)4782765. Open Monday to Friday, 7am to 2pm. For inquiries, visit their Facebook page.

Movie #19: Don Jon by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays a porn-addicted Guido and is still adorable.

Snow is coming, fan art by Bego

Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii and its neighbors when it erupted in 79 AD, annihilating the population with extreme heat and burying everything under twenty feet of ash. (This kept artifacts perfectly preserved and allowed archaeologists to make plaster casts of the citizens caught in the cataclysm.)

Kit Harington is gorgeous and his Celtic gladiator Milo kills nearly as many people as the eruption-earthquake-tsunami (Pompeii is directed by Paul—NOT Thomas—Anderson of the Resident Evil series, which specializes in this stuff), so we’ll call it a tie.

Kit shows greater range here than he does in Game of Thrones, and by “range” we mean abs, pecs, quads and glutes. Just about our only complaint Thrones-wise is that Jon Snow is always wrapped in furs when he’s with the Night Watch on The Wall or undercover in Mance Rayder’s army. (In the love scene, Ygritte took everything off and Jon Snow was still covered in fur. Booooo.) Kit Harington is so pretty, if he shaved his facial hair he could be the hero and the leading lady.

Yeah, the movie is stupid fun, but it was intended for stupid fun and not historical accuracy. There’s plenty of swordplay and carnage: nothing looks real so know they’re not really dead. Emily Browning plays the aristocratic young woman Cassia who falls in love with the gladiator, which is perfectly understandable because she has eyes. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje reprises the noble Woody Strode role in Spartacus, and speaking of Spartacus, we’re disappointed that there is no dialogue like this in Pompeii.

Our friend Ruthie always used to misquote this as “Antoninus, do you prefer oysters…or salami?”

Carrie Ann-Moss and Jared Harris play Cassia’s parents, and Harris always looks like his guilty embezzler in Mad Men. Kiefer Sutherland has some fun as the eevil Senator Corvus. In the tradition of Resident Evil, Pompeii plays like a video game in which the hero must battle other gladiators, then the Roman champion, then the eevil senator while rescuing the damsel AND escaping from the giant ash cloud and the earth opening up millimeters from his feet. The dirtier and more battered Kit gets, the lovelier he looks—if the war for the Iron Throne were a beauty pageant, Jon Snow would be King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm and Daenerys would be first runner-up.

Verdict: Watch if you have nothing else to do and you can’t wait for GoT Season 4 to begin.

We suddenly remembered The Last Days of Pompeii, a book we borrowed from the St. Theresa’s library and devoured on the school bus. It’s available online at Project Gutenberg, and we just realized that it was written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the immortal opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night”.

We never heard about Isabelo de los Reyes in school. The first time we encountered the name was in Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination, which traced the influence of anarchist thought on the works of Jose Rizal and of his contemporary, De los Reyes. If we’d taken up De los Reyes’s book, El Folk-Lore Filipino, we wouldn’t have spent Social Studies class trying to teleport ourselves out of the room.

Published in 1889, El Folk-Lore Filipino was a two-volume compilation of local knowledge. Historian Resil Mojares (The Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge) calls it the founding moment of “Philippine studies” by Filipinos. These are the moments that build nations, and Mojares pays homage to De los Reyes by creating an archive of his own.

Isabelo’s Archive is a delightful compendium of essays on a wide range of historical subjects. Erudite but never pedantic, intellectual yet accessible, Mojares’s book is a gateway drug to a long, wild trip through our nation’s history. We meet the sorority of cloistered maidens of Philippine epics, from the Ilianon maiden sealed in a room of gold to the Subanon maiden whose suitor must construct a golden bridge “thin as hair” between their houses so that she may never tread on the ground.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes of men with tails in One Hundred Years of Solitude; European missionaries visiting the Philippines in the 17th century reported that among the tribes of Mindoro were men with tails. Herman Melville mentions “Manillamen”—Filipino sailors—in the crew of the Pequod in Moby Dick; an American geographer concluded that Filipino seamen who escaped from the Spanish galleons in Mexico in the 16th century introduced tuba (coconut brandy) to the Huichol Indians.

Mojares ruminates on our notions of time (We have no word for it), and shame, and brings up half-forgotten figures such as Bartolome Saguinsin, possibly the first Filipino to publish a book of poetry; Rufino Baltazar, author of what may be the first book of arithmetic by a Filipino; and Gabriel Beato Francisco, one of the first Filipino novelists. The first novel in Tagalog may have been Francisco’s Cababalaghan ni P. Bravo (The Amazement of P. Bravo, love the title).

There are pieces on beheadings and headhunters that should please both scholars and tabloid readers. Mojares takes a Borgesian turn in A Poem of All the Names of the Rivers, The Book That Did Not Exist, and Unicorns in the Garden of Reason.

We thought we were going to snack on Philippine history; we ended up having a feast.

Isabelo’s Archive is available at National Bookstores, Php850.