JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Living in the Philippines often feels like blunt force trauma so it makes perfect sense that our hero is a boxer. Considering that he carries the weight of the expectations of 90 million Filipinos along with the added weight needed to move up a division, it’s a wonder Manny Pacquiao can stand up at all. Little guy beating up the bigger guys—resonate much? But he destroyed David Diaz in impressive fashion, demonstrating that a boxer in late mid-career can learn new things—something Pinoy politicians can’t seem to grasp.

Kevin Mitchell in The Guardian: “…that is why Pacquaio is making such a buzz: he delivers. The fight game is slowly relearning some of its old habits – like the best fighting the best. This is not out of any concern for the fans or the legacy of the sport, but an admission by TV moguls and promoters that professional boxing is losing its lustre. For years, TV, with the limp co-operation of the sanctioning bodies, has pandered to the tactics of rival matchmakers, whose overriding concern has been to keep their star money-earners apart until they could no longer credibly do so…Since the most recent, and hopefully final, retirement of Mayweather, Pacquaio has inherited the mantle of the best fighter in the world, pound for pound.”

I don’t check my bag at airports, but insist on lugging it with me on the plane. I travel light anyway—one benefit of a) not following fashion, and b) being regarded as a kind of weirdo/eccentric—and upon landing I get out of the airport faster. Sounds very practical, no? but this is just a side-effect of paranoia. I have this fear that my luggage will be lost forever, and I’ll be wandering a foreign country without a change of clothes and my stuffed leopard Guga.

This fear is not unfounded. I once took a connecting flight from Paris to Rome. In Rome I stood at the carousel and waited for my suitcase. I watched the bags go round and round on the conveyor, to be seized and taken away by the other passengers. I saw a lot of bags, I waited, I counted the good-looking guys getting their luggage (the percentage is higher in Italy) and waited. Finally I looked up and I was the only person in the arrivals hall, there was one sad suitcase left turning, and it wasn’t mine.

The airline rep was very reassuring—apparently my suitcase had been spotted sipping a kir in a cafe on Saint Germain—but you know how it is when people are lying to you, and you know they’re lying to you but you want to believe them, and they know you know they’re lying to you, but they don’t know what else to do and they actually start believing in what they’re saying? Yes, like a relationship. It took me several hundred calls to Alitalia to retrieve my suitcase, but four days later it followed me to a town near the Austrian border. This is a happy ending as lost luggage stories go—you should hear Ige’s lost luggage epic/operas—but now I can’t let my suitcase out of my sight.

I remember seeing a CNN feature about a warehouse in Arizona (or another US city) where lost luggage ends up.  There’s a plot for a novel: Imagine what they’ve got in there. Apparently the stuff is sold off, so if you’ve ever lost a suitcase in transit, rest assured that total strangers have pawed over your underwear.

So I have this paranoia. But I also have these episodes of what-the-hellness in which I  figure, What’s the worst that could happen? If it happens, then you have nothing left to be afraid of. Embrace randomness. I took the shuttle to Kowloon station, where they check your baggage even before you get to the airport, and I thought, What the hell?

At NAIA I watched the carousel with mounting dread, certain that my suitcase had vanished without a trace. Or worse, that it was visiting St. Petersburg or Budapest without me.  Then my bag materialized on the conveyor belt and everything was fine. (Of course for the true pessimist, this is an omen that a whammy is about to hit.) Does this mean I’m going to check my bags from now on? No.

Speaking of Italy, the Italian football team narrowly avoided elimination at Euro 2008, scraping past France 2-0.  Luca Toni must’ve had a dozen attempts, but no score. On one hand it’s terrible that the reigning world champions were so close to an exit; on the other hand, we get drama.

This Sporting Life, originally uploaded by 160507.

You love the movies, you love rugby, here’s a movie about rugby. “The British New Wave of the late ’50s and early ’60s, much like its more loudly heralded French counterpart, arose from filmmakers who rejected the bourgeois timidity of their national cinema and strove to liberate the form. Alongside fellow directors like Karel Reisz (Saturday Night And Sunday Morning) and Tony Richardson (The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner), Lindsay Anderson released a “Free Cinema” manifesto which advocated productions outside the system—made on the cheap and in black-and-white—that cast an eye on the ordinary struggles of working-class Brits. These “kitchen-sink” melodramas would henceforth become a hallmark of British cinema, and none was better than Anderson’s 1963 debut feature, This Sporting Life, which is all raw nerves and volcanic emotion.” (Scott Tobias in the Onion A.V. Club)

Richard Dawkins reviews God Is Not Great in the Times Literary Supplement.

“There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but…”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and
me, he concluded, “and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”…

Elsewhere: Incroyable! England storms into Rugby World Cup final on Jonny Wilkinson’s boot. And Stephen Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times.

This is for Scrat, reduced to a zombie state by the shock loss of the New Zealand All Blacks at the Rugby World Cup.

Great—another four years of self-flagellation.

I know it’s been your dream to see them play in the flesh. You even got tickets to the final way in advance. Why compound the trauma of your heroes’ loss by watching two other teams fight for the title? Give me the tickets, I’ll go to France. It’s the least I can do as a friend.