I am also waiting for Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, a film about former child prodigies. Although I sincerely doubt it will ever reach Manila theaters unless it gets nominated and/or wins an Oscar. Anderson is not related at all to Poul Thomas, boyfriend of uhm, Fiona Apple and director of Magnolia which starred Tom Cruise, who is starring in the upcoming Cameron Crowe movie. Vanilla Sky is adapted from Alejandro Amenabar's Abre Los Ojos. I have more faith in the original film, because although Crowe is a capable enough director, he doesn't seem to know how to end his movies. On the other hand, Amenabar also directed Penelope Cruz in the original Spanish version, and has also directed Cruise's former spouse Nicole Kidman in The Others. And if all that six-degrees line of reasoning still fails: Tom Cruise really looks purty in the poster.

I've already seen a poster for Sa tree lex, the true story of a Thai male volleyball team that competes in the national championships in 1996 with a team consisting mostly of gays, transvestites and transsexuals. The US title is Iron Ladies (2000), and whoever is the distributor for this film found a new way to create publicity for the movie:

The poster still features the bodies of the original Thai cast, but the heads have been replaced with those of the Pinoy actors who dubbed the dialogue into what I'll presume to be Filipino. The actors include those typically associated with gay roles: Eric Quizon, Wowie de Guzman, Jeffrey Quizon, John Lapus. Aiza Seguerra will provide the voice of the team’s coach. I cannot find a copy online of the altered poster, but you can find the original right here.

Has anyone out there seen the new Visa commercial with Zhang Ziyi? Kind of Crouching Tigeresque, and it's really kickass.

My capacity to eat meat, particularly pork, has been on the wane for a while. Going all-veggie can be difficult, and I’ll definitely miss my meat. You can only eat so many ketsup-slathered burgers in your life, and when you think about it, everything just tastes like chicken anyway -- or another culture’s best friend is another culture’s lunch.

My attempt to spend Bonifacio Day away from a mall did not succeed. It started fine though, and with lots of happy food: I dragged my girl posse all the way to Diliman for lunch at the fabulous Likha-Diwa sa Gulod. Then we went to the mythical lagoon, where all sorts of, uhm, fossils are said to turn up in the morning cleanups. It was quite crowded though, and most of them were high school kids practicing some really mean dance steps. So we repaired to Odd Manila and just tinkered about. They even have CDs and vinyls now, a café, and even found some cat chimes for a friend.

In the late afternoon though, it seemed like rain. We had some errands though, which we could have bought outside the shoebox confines of a mall. The prospect of zipping around the city in a cab, in the traffic-infested streets was too much. So the mall. I’ve never seen so many goddamned people in my life. I swear, we could all lead less stressful lives if we just spent some time outdoors for a change. But then again, I think I’m allergic to crowds.

Everything is an act, a performance, albeit the masks are carefully chosen. The existence of this blog is a proof of that. But sometimes, even I am amazed at my own gullibility. Of course, it could have been worse. I realize I will always be anxious, so my tag of the moment will have to be: All lies lead to the truth.

Beatle George Harrison died of cancer barely a week before John Lennon's 21st death anniversary.

Have you ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Separation? Now imagine the game in reverse with a sexual twist and try to work out how many people have you really slept with:

If you have slept with, say, 10 people, and they have each slept with 10 people, that means that you are less than two degrees of separation away from 100 people, four degrees away from 10,000 men, and six degrees away from a whopping 1,000,000 sexual partners.

So unless you have been a virgin and plan to be for the rest of your life, you will always be part of somebody else's six degrees. After safe comes safer, but no one way is ever the safest. Just a thought to be considered in our virus filled world.

Everyone seemed to be willing the clock to hurtle past midnight so we could embarrass her by singing off-key, loudly at the already crowded Tapika Cafe in Katipunan. Part of our amusement was trying to spot Jasper (from the cell phone ad) from the horde of teenagers parading past us. After the singing, most of the group started fidgeting, and nodding off. Maybe it had to do with being there early or lack of sleep or we're just plainly getting old. We were all raring to do our Cinderella acts, but it really had been a fun night.

Oh, I doubt if she'd be reading this, but: Happy birthday, G------, who still refuses to tell me the other letters of her name.

In the observance of World AIDS Day 2001, join all the other bloggers, Link and Think: help spread information about the disease, its treatment, those we have lost and those who survive. Because AIDS is not over and because you can make a difference.