Skipping stones won't break my bones

Trust the French to devote to something as world changing as discovering the best way to skip a stone. This New York Times article was part of The Year in Ideas series which came out last December, but I only got to browse it now. There's apparently a world record in stone skipping: 40 skips, set in 2002 by Kurt Steiner. If you aim to break that, you must throw a stone four inches in diameter at roughly 60kph, and at an angle of around 10 degrees.

That's what French scientists Lyderic Bocquet and Christophe Clanet discovered when they made a robot throw metal discs in an unpertubed water tank. I don't know if this foray into the physics of stone skipping has anything to do with a certain stone skipping French lass, but at least, now we know. So the next time you pick up those stones by the beach, choose one that's four inches wide and you better throw it 10 degrees sharp.

Win a date with Psychic Poet!

This goes out to all the girls (or guys) out there who are afraid to be alone this coming VD:

Psychic Poet (Not to be confused with psychicpants, although perhaps we can start such a campaign. Hehe.), 25 years old from Israel, is auctioning himself off for a "Magical Date," all expenses paid, this coming Valentines Day. The date includes "a Rose and a first copy of my Poetry Book "Legend Named Juli@".

Here's a glimpse of what's in store for you on that "Magical Date":

I promise not to take things fast,
I don't want to cause your heart to blast.
I'll listen to your words carefully,
considering tomorrow I may be writing my life story.

Romantic evening that I want to end on your porch,
as I kiss you good-bye and we start again to flirt."

Current bid at $8.50. O, ano pang hinihintay n'yo? Bid na!

Malcolm Gladwell Day

Today is Malcolm Gladwell Day.

I promised my friend a copy of Gladwell's The Tipping Point for Christmas. I saw hardbound edition of it at National's fourth floor, but put off buying it. When I came back for it, I couldn't find it in the rubble that was National's shelves.

Mr. Gladwell would have chastised me against the procrastination and told me to get the book in that split second that I considered it. The more time you give someone to rationalize a decision, more doubts would come it and he would shy away from that gut feel decision. In this Nerve interview, Gladwell explains that our "adaptive unconscious" is more powerful than our everyday conscious decision. There is wisdom in our snap decisions.

After many searches, I finally found a copy of The Tipping Point at Powerbooks in Megamall. I spent most of today alternating between that book and excerpts from Malcolm's follow up book, Blink.

Multo sa CNB

Earlier in my 10-11.30 Eng10 class, way up at the top floor of the CAL New Building, we were having a lively exchange regarding the public use of space and the history of the megamalls. According to Vicente Rafael, public spaces are defined by the "civil society," and has a tendency to migrate around the metropolis. Thus, Escolta was the place to be during the 1920s, but you wouldn't be found dead hanging out there in the 60s--you'd rather be rolling skating in Ali Mall. But then Cubao died and Makati was the new new Escolta, and now Cubao is the new Greenbelt.

So public spaces have a long history of use--i.e., all those Catholic school rumors about how they were formerly graveyards and/or Japanese garrisons where people were decapitated and now haunt the present buildings. Urban edifices also generate legends, like that of the snake in the dressing rooms of a certain mall in Ortigas. Or how leaders built huge concrete monuments in their names and then pour concrete all over everything. But if it's a new building, chances are there won't be any hauntings.

The door tentatively opened a crack. We all waited who would dare come in when there's only half an hour left of class time and after a quiz. No one came in.

"Oooh, do we have a visitor?"

I asked the big boy at the back of the room to close the door again. He stood up and made a big business out of shutting it. All the while, we uneasily joked about how we might just prove the belief wrong. I remembered this post by psychicpants about how this professor was talking to the air. Something like, "Get out of this room. You don't belong here anymore."

Just then there was a movement (a stirring perhaps?) and then the door was pushed open and aside, as if someone (or something) got irked and walked out.

It took a nanosecond for our screams to register and arms and legs fled to cling to the window grills, taking cover. I found myself entangled with the token Korean in class, who seemed quite unsure of what was happening.

"What was that?"

"The wind, maybe?"

"But there was no wind. And all the fans are off."

"Holy sh*t!"

"Then it must be---"

More screams and we were ready to jump out at any sign of a chair or table lifting, an aparition. But I was still the teacher, after all. I tried to give the class back a semblance of normality while I disentangled myself from the Korean.

"Okay, time for your homework."

They scrambled for paper and pens, but we all stared at the gaping door, waiting for shadows and suppressed laughter to ring down the hallways, the crisp high fives for a prank well done, but there was none.

Love on the Quiet

The UK Guardian gives us a tale wherein the fiance breaks it off with his girlfriend when he walks in on her doing the nasty with her biological dad. And she finds it a normal thing to do. Can sex between blood relations ever be acceptable? The reality of genetic sexual attraction (GSA) is slowly creeping into public consciousness primarily because of the talk that equates consensual incest with gay sex.

On one hand, there's the situation wherein siblings or fully conscious relatives get it on with each other. (Parang Flowers in the Attic, which people keep on telling me to read, but I haven't seen a copy of it in your friendly neighborhood Booksale bins.) On the other hand, in the age of sperm donorship, it is possible for two people to meet up and have an affair and then realize than they're related. According to experts, if you were separated at birth (or something like that), there's a high 50% chance that you will get obssessed with your sibling and/or very close relative.

So apparently, this isn't soap opera territory anymore, like amnesia and killing people. But given the chance, if you were allowed to marry your sibling, would you do it? A huge majority still says 'Eewww, hell no!' but then again, in some states, if said parties can't procreate anymore, maybe they'd be allowed to.

I'm just chewing on this because I had to reread Kathyryn Harrison's The Kiss some weeks back and most of the articles coming out on GSA mention the book. The Kiss was a memoir which came out in 1997, and chronicled the author's affair with her father starting at age 20. It more or less verifies what the experts (the so few of them) who did say that close blood relatives separated at birth have the tendency to have GSA.

Hail blood and gore

The UK's Total Film magazine came out with their list of 50 Greatest Movie Deaths in their July 2004 issue. You get to pick your preferred death scene as #50, and then it proceeds to give you, in reversed chronological order the blood and gore which seemed to be one of the more pertinent criteria. Action and horror movies dominated the list that included Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch , the pre-Passion Mel Gibson's Braveheart, a smattering of Ahnold and Freddie Kruger, and Bruce Willis with a wee bit more hair.

Among those listed, I like Quentin Tarantino's Resorvoir Dogs which contains the best ear cutting scene ever, Drew Barrymore hanging from the garage door in Scream, Rutger Hauer's "tears in rain" speech in Bladerunner, and Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty's bullet dance in Bonnie and Clyde.

The best death moment of all time is that iconic shower scene from the 1960 Psycho (definitely not the Gus Van Sant)
The list is supposed to encompass all of cinema history, but of course, there will always be something left out.

My personal blood and gore cinema favorite is the decapitation scene from 1984's Karnal. Karnal is set in a rural Pinoy town called Mulawin in the 1930s. While there are no bird people at war, what's there is a catty cast of small town folks who raise their eyebrows when Narcing (the pre-action hero Philip Salvador) brings home a wife from Manila, the despachadora Puring, who eeriely looks like Narcing's suicidal but now dead mother. Puring catches the fancy of her father-in-law Gusting (I don't know why they all end their names with -ing. Maybe they fancy themselves as a family of gerunds? Nyahaha.), and there's this father-son tug of war over the same woman. Gusting makes a pass at Puring, Puring is caught with Gorio the deaf-mute guy played by the very young Joel Torre, and things come to a head and that makes Narcing furious. Philip Salvador swings that bolo and down the ground rolls Vic Silayan's head. If that's not gory enough for you, I wouldn't know. The last scene pictures the lone survivor of that family, Doray, scurrying out of that town, never to be heard from again.

I particularly like this movie because everything is so understated. The time and space it creates is so suffocating, you would understand why everyone speaks in an almost whisper. And when the violence finally breaks out, in a vibrang spurting of blood, it makes sense. Karnal is one of my Top 3 Marilou Diaz Abaya -al movies, the other two being Moral and Brutal. When she came out with Rizal, it's not the same anymore.

History for free

Some weeks back, I bit my thumb on The New York Times' decision to charge for their online content in a near discernible future.

The news is a more viable currency than history, which is why it is mind boggling that news sites like The New York Times chooses to charge readers extra for trying to access their archives and give the fresh items away for free.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing analyzes this news/history dichotomy and traces the decision to charge for archives access to a deal with a search service for newsrooms. He also points us to Dan Gillmor who predicts a more radical approach to grassroots journalism: these news services will eventually open up their archives, and will find that it will not only increase traffic, but it will also be more valuable in the long run to charge people for the current news and just give history away for free.

The Greatest Essay Ever Written

The research paper writing class, otherwise known as Eng 10, is hands down the most troubling and debilitating you can ever have in any given semester. Excluding the fact that people don't really know when are where to put those, commas, and exclamation points!!!, you'd get brilliants nuggets of wisdom, like the classic "Gagamboy is nothing but a second grate trying hard copycat of Spiderman."

But this one has got to take the cake. I present you with Planes, Trains and Plantains: The Greatest Essay Ever Written about Oedipus, starring Lou Gehrig, Dr. Dre and a cast of a thousand cuss words in a stunning tale of sex, google and the works cited list.

I dig Page 3.

Twin beds for Twentysomethings

Douglas Coupland, author of Life After God among other things, talks g Room about his (not really) new book Eleonor Rigby and why your twenties is a good time for going mental:

You're stuck finding your own way and not quite sure who's good or evil, who's using you, "Is it me or is it the alcohol?" And in the midst of all this, you're feeling totally disconnected from a lot of people. Are you clinically depressed? No! You're just lonely, and no one told you what it was or how to identify it, the shapes or colors or forms of it, so you think you're going mental. And because people tend to hang out with people their own age, everyone around you looks great, like they all just stepped out of a shampoo commercial or something, so you think, "They couldn't possibly be experiencing all this crappy shit that's inside of me." Before you even discuss it with people, you've already shut yourself down.

I don't know about you, but I do know about me. Now some people out there in their twenties might be slap happy and, well, that's good for them. I never claimed to be a cheerful person, so there.

If there's one thing that Coupland sees as a bright thing, it's the vast unclaimed world of online dating. He claims that it eradicated loneliness by a long shot. And also, he claims that blogging is not good for writing fiction. Your paragraphs tend to be the length of a single post. A blog novel then?

Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?

This article which appeared in 1961 predicted that by the time the new millenium swings by, everything would be so easy we'd all probably "die with boredom."

We'll be eating nutrient pills, there will be no more colds, and people will be generally healthier. We'll enjoy 24 hour work weeks, and the status symbol du jour would be home computers helping us with housechores and taking care of the kids.

If this came through, what would happen to our League of Longkatoots who send mondo dollars to keep our economy afloat? Maybe it's a probably a good thing all those predictions did not come true. Not.