JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Attention: Director of Museo del Pradao. Send this painting to our house immediately.

A couple of weeks ago I heard two random pieces of information that stuck in my head.

The first was that Spain, like Greece and some other European nations, is in the grip of a recession and its unemployment rate is a shocking 25 percent.

The second was that the Philippines is now a creditor nation. We’ve lent a billion dollars to the International Monetary Fund. The international media has noted that while many economies are struggling, ours is doing pretty well. Pundits say the Philippines is one of the breakout economies of the next decade, and “Asia’s perennial underachiever is outperforming.”

Then it occurred to me that these two random bits may be connected. They need money, we have money, their real estate prices are plummeting…

Let’s buy Spain.

1. We can afford it.

1.1. Thanks to our Army of World Domination—the overseas Filipino workers who send money home every month—we’ve got funds.

1.1.1. They laughed at us because we were willing to take the jobs they didn’t want to do in their own countries. Some of them even used “Filipina” as a synonym for maid/domestic helper.

Our column at InterAksyon.com.

from The Gothamist

We used to worry that kids were learning their history from the movies and picking up all sorts of misinformation from mushy biopics and overblown epics.

The situation is worse than we thought.

* * * * *

On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the “unsinkable” Titanic (No, it was not brought down by Celine Dion’s singing, Billy Zane’s eyebrows or James Cameron’s ego), the History Channel presents Titanic: Mystery Solved, documenting the most recent expedition to the wreck site and the most thorough study of the wreck ever made. Premieres on Sunday, 15 April, exactly 100 years since the tragedy (which also kicked off the plot of Downton Abbey), at 2000 on the History Channel.

Before Nora Aunor, all the big stars of the Filipino screen were mestizo. Photo from alphamusic.ph.

At the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament the other week the Fiji Rugby Union made this observation on their official Twitter account.

“The only thing Philippines about the Philippine team playing in the Hong Kong 7s is the name of the team.”

This remark is interesting in light of the flap over Arnold Clavio’s “hindi kayumanggi” statement about the Philippine national football team. We don’t think the Philippine Rugby Union should make like the Azkals management and write a strongly-worded letter denouncing this “racist” statement.

In the first place it will seem like a sore loser move because Fiji won the HK7s, thrashing the world’s rugby powers before beating the mighty New Zealand in the final. (The Philippines, making its first-ever appearance in the tournament, was like the plucky indie movie at the Oscars who’s just happy to be nominated.)

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

“The Hare with Amber Eyes” describes the rise and fall of one family in Europe. Having written about them, the author was faced with the unintended consequences of his discoveries: that just as every national history belongs in a different way to every nation, so every family story belongs to each relation, and every narrative contains elements claimed in equal measure by the teller and the told.

Read Edmund de Waal’s Unfinished Business in More Intelligent Life.

From last year, our review of The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.

Image from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

The image of the Philippines in the international media (assuming the news is not about death tolls from natural calamities) is that of a country whose people are leaving in large numbers. Every day thousands of Filipinos fly out of the maligned airport to seek economic opportunity abroad. We are largely known through our highly efficient nurses, seamen, domestic helpers and Manny Pacquiao.

A much lesser-known fact about the Philippines is that it has long been a haven for refugees and displaced people. This humanitarian tradition extends to people of any ethnicity, color, creed. The famous Philippine hospitality is not an invention of public relations experts but a quality inextricable from being Pinoy.

Manila in the 1930s

Quezon’s List: How the Philippines gave sanctuary to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

VF illustration by James Taylor

The only thing that has changed fundamentally and dramatically about stylish objects (computerized gadgets aside) during the last 20 years is the same thing that’s changed fundamentally and dramatically about movies and books and music—how they’re produced and distributed, not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are.

You Say You Want A Devolution by Kurt Andersen in VF.