JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

For months we’d been walking past the “Inutak” food stand outside the supermarket. The other day we finally tried it.

Inutak is a sticky rice cake slathered with coconut cream. It’s very rich and evil, meaning we approve enthusiastically. Inside it looks like a smooth sapin-sapin/halayang ube. We’re guessing the name “inutak” comes from the brain/marrow-like texture of its top layer.

Many years ago, our friend Tina wondered why no one has come up with a dessert of dried mango slices dipped in chocolate. After many years of pointless searching, she found it.

It’s intense and insanely brilliant. On their own, dried mango and chocolate are good; together they are awesome squared.

Are you thinking what we’re thinking? This is an instrument of world domination! With this weapon, we would crush all competition.

Why am I bringing this up again? Because the real test of a theory is whether it can accommodate discoveries made after the theory was formulated.

Read my column Emotional Weather Report today in the Philippine Star.

In Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

We will sniff out the slightest trace of Pinoy-ness in a foreign celebrity, and claim them as one of us. But there are Filipinos outside of the entertainment industry who deserve the kind of recognition we only give celebrities. I mean the people whose work helps us to understand why the world is the way it is, who make the universe seem a little less vast and mysterious.

I asked my friend Michael Purugganan, the Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics at New York University, a recent Guggenheim fellow, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to make a list of famous contemporary scientists who are Filipino or of Filipino descent.

“That’s actually a difficult list,” Michael said. “No Filipino has won the Nobel and few scientists make it to the public consciousness (there are very few Stephen Jay Goulds or Richard Dawkinses). This would be my personal list, but only because I have heard of them or know them.”

In the Philippines we begin with the late Leonard Co. Our premiere botanist and plant conservation biologist was killed in an alleged military encounter last November in Leyte. There are at least four species named after him by his colleagues abroad. He was well-loved and is greatly missed.

Cora de Ungria, head of the DNA Analysis Laboratory at UP, almost single-handedly built up the DNA forensics database in the country. Her work has been crucial in tracing the genetic evolution of the Filipino people.

Photo: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a swirling storm seen for over 300 years, since the beginning of telescopic observations. But in February 2006, planetary imager Christopher Go noticed it had been joined by Red Spot Jr – formed as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the remarkable reddish hue. This sharp Hubble Space Telescope image showing the two salmon-colored Jovian storms was recorded in April. About half the size of the original Red Spot, Red Spot Jr. is similar in diameter to planet Earth. Seen here below and left of the ancient storm system, it trails the Great Red Spot by about an hour as the planet rotates from left to right. While astronomers still don’t exactly understand why Jupiter’s red spots are red, they do think the appearance of Red Spot Jr. provides evidence for climate change on the Solar System’s ruling gas giant. Photo from the NASA APOD Archive.
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Dalaga. 150 Franklin St., nr. Greenpoint Ave., Greenpoint; 718-389-4049

Dalaga NYC in New York Magazine’s Best of New York Shopping 2010 issue.

Does anyone remember the serial killer Andrew Cunanan? If you don’t, then he has been justly punished. Cunanan killed to become famous. Lots of people kill for fame, but he did it literally, murdering several people on a killing spree across the United States to his most famous victim, the designer Gianni Versace.

Here’s the weird part. When Cunanan first hit the news, the American media did not mention his ethnicity. He was an American. If I’m not mistaken it was the Filipinos who came out and declared that he was of Filipino descent, his father being a Bulakeño. From then on he was a Fil-American. Even weirder: various characters in Manila claimed to have been his lover. Oh fame, what we would do to have it, even fake a connection to a serial killer.

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We do that—find an ethnic connection to international celebrities. Even minor celebrities. So we’re coming up with an annual Did You Know They Were Pinoy? list to keep track of all the famous people we’re claiming as our own. Except that we’re limiting the field to persons of Filipino descent who have actually done something extraordinary. (Whether you think they deserve it or have a genius agent is beside the point.) Yes, people who worked for their fame (instead of killing or marrying it).

This being our first annual list we begin with the “classics”. We’re focusing on the entertainment industry to start, but will expand the list to include athletes such as Neil Etheridge in football and Craig Davies in rugby.

Why are Pac-Man and Charice not on this list? Because everyone already knows they’re PInoy.

Photo: Cinematographer Matthew Libatique and director Darren Aronofsky on the set of The Black Swan. Read Matthew Libatique’s interview in American Cinematographer.

Read the list while listening to this. N.E.R.D. & Daft Punk, Hypnotize U (Nero Remix)

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A 22-year-old Filipino architecture student “beat” Sim City, the difficult but very popular computer simulation game. Using the geometry of the Buddhist “Wheel of Life and Death”, Vicente Ocasla designed a totalitarian city-state populated by 6 million Sims that will last 50,000 in-game years. Watch the video he posted on YouTube and decide whether you want to live in Magnasanti.

Read The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City in Vice.

Thanks to Butch for the alert.