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Over half the people on earth have one; without it the world wouldn’t be peopled.

And if you don’t want to say it, don’t agree to appear in The Vagina Monologues and then hijack the show with your complex about it. Stay at home, you’re allowed.

Reader V for Vendetta sent in this report.

Kuh Ledesma was the one and only sour note, a major one, in last night’s Vagina Monologues.

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Here’s an Orangina commercial that was pulled from French TV in 2010 (French TV? Where the yogurt ads feature nudity??). Is the ad promoting homosexuality or zoophilia? Or is it a pussy joke that didn’t work?

The cat who lives outside Momo at Ayala Triangle Gardens.

1. Get a cat. Cats sleep two-thirds of the day. Learn from the experts.
2. Turn off your phones, tablets, computers two hours before you go to bed and resist the urge to check your messages.
3. Read a Victorian novel. Dickens, Austen, Eliot and Trollope are particularly effective.
4. Watch consecutive episodes of CSI or Law and Order. There’s something comforting about watching grisly murders getting solved.
5. If you can’t fall asleep, don’t stress yourself out by thinking “I must fall asleep now! Now! I need to have a clear head tomorrow!” Go back to your book or watch an old movie on TCM. Or hang out with your cat.

Wandering cats, Kyoto. Photo by Rizzo Tangan. Thanks to Boboy for sending it in. Bundle up!

Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Something Sigmund Freud says in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s stupendous film on the birth of psychoanalysis, caused us to sit up straight in the slouch chair. He tells Sabina Spielrein, the patient, then lover, then student of his estranged disciple Carl Jung: “We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” Jung, whom she was still fascinated with, is an Aryan who is interested in mysticism and talks about helping people “become what they were born to be.” Jews, Freud reminds Spielrein, have seen what people really are.

The fates of the protagonists, summarized dispassionately at the film’s end, attest to the truth of Freud’s statement.

(In our own heads Freud is telling us, “We are nerds. They tolerate us now because we are clever, but someday the Sardaukar will come after us.”)

Cronenberg’s deceptively pretty movie based on the play by Christopher Hampton is itself a form of psychoanalysis: it dredges up the dark impulses under the bright surfaces. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung consults his intellectual father figure, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, who sees their relationship in Oedipal terms naturally: the son attempting to kill the father.

Jung has a beautiful house paid for by his rich wife; he sails in the tranquil blue lake in a boat paid for by his rich wife. But his great love and intellectual match may be Spielrein, who enters the movie kicking and screaming literally. He cures her of her symptoms, and then gets her off by spanking her.

Keira Knightley as the hysteric Sabina Spielrein

The alien in Alien. Hmmm. Michael Fassbender is starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is “set in the universe of Alien.” Freud believed there are no accidents…

As the hysteric Keira Knightley contorts her face and extends her already prodigious jaw so far she looks like the alien mother getting ready to bite off someone’s head. Her acting is almost risible because her costars don’t seem to be acting at all (Vincent Cassel expresses volumes by raising one corner of his mouth very slightly). However, the director has stated in interviews that this is exactly how the historical Sabina behaved. However one regards Knightley’s performance it is certainly brave.

Fassbender caps his amazing year by playing Jung as a very proper man consumed by terrible agonies. (His visions will result in the theory of the collective unconscious.) Mortensen’s Freud is playful, paranoid, magisterial, a man who sees complexes everywhere. His expression on the ocean liner as his disciple goes off to first class says everything we need to know about the outsider who is suddenly reminded of his true status. Don’t get too comfortable.

Sigmund Freud’s couch by Annie Leibovitz

Cat in a doorway, Venice 2001. First time we ever took a camera on a trip, we took pictures of cats. They’re always cooperative.

You’re sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you’ve forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup.

So there’s the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you’ve forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”

Doorway of the dinky hotel we stayed in, Venice 2001. The padlock on our suitcase was broken and the clerk lent us a bolt cutter without blinking.

Don’t walk through a doorway, read Scientists measure the doorway effect in Scientific American.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge 7.9: Addictions is no longer accepting entries. We’re very pleased to see stories from first-time participants. The winner will be announced in a day or two.

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Until we can lay eyes on the actual movie we’ve been reading the reviews of Shame by Steve McQueen. As you know it is about a sex addict played by Michael Fassbender. The reviews have been mixed—many critics have noted that the sex is the movie is strangely non-erotic. Since the protagonist is a sex addict, isn’t that the point?

This got us to thinking about addictions and how at some point the substance, thing, or activity one is addicted to ceases to be fun. Sounds like material for a LitWit challenge.

In 1,000 words or less, write us a story from the POV of an addict who no longer enjoys whatever it is they’re addicted to (sex, drugs, alcohol, shopping, whatever) but can’t bring themselves to stop.

The deadline is noon on Saturday, 10 December 2011. The winner will receive these three books: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarré, and Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Thank you for following the Weekly LitWit Challenge. Unfortunately the volunteer English teaching program we had planned fell through, but yesterday we turned over a donation of school supplies to NBS Foundation’s Project Aral. In the coming months we will make regular donations to schools in need.

Best solution: Don’t have anything to regret.

Thanks to Jackie for the alert.