Landscape by Google

While browsing the internet for more inane reads, I accidentally discovered that the Manila City Hall is shaped like a coffin with a cross when viewed from above. See for yourself here.

According to this page in the threads of Pinoy Tambayan: "The original Manila City Hall was a rambling structure made of Oregon pine. It sat on the same site as today’s structure and lasted till the late 1930s when an Antonio Toledo-designed structure replaced it."

Somebody else said that the architect responsible for the reconstruction wanted a memorial for those who perished during the Second World War, when the city hall was turned into a Japanese garrison and lots of people died, especially on the clock tower side.

There's also a testimonial to the place's haunted status. A bunch of guys on the night shift working on a project decided to go ghost-hunting, but they didn't even get to the 5th floor. One of the ghost hunters screamed, and while the building security knew they were there, the security people opted to wait for them in the first floor. They didn't want to go up because of the creepiness of the place.

I wish I knew this when I played GRO during our department's international conference a couple of weeks ago. I sat in the back of a van with some of the participants and I can tell you, my vocabulary level dropped to the level of 'Hey Joe, you wanna buy watch? Me love you long time." (I was apparently not alone. For some reason most of us younger instructors found ourselves using very basic sentence structures. We all wanted to tell our guests that usually we were engaging conversationalists, but our collective syntax short-circuited just then. I digress.) All I could say when we passed by City Hall was that it was built in the late 1930s, got bombed and rebuilt again. Not much help really.

But really, the things that you learn from Google. Just simply fascinating. I don't mind I spent a few minutes on the web for it.

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Reading Anna Karenina in Africa

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech takes a jab at the internet for its seduction of a whole generation with its many "inanities:" "[E]ven quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

Aray.

Okay, I felt alluded to. But I think that comment was less about about dissing the internet, but more about how reading books and experiencing great literature really satisfies a hunger for knowledge. A huge part of her speech tells about the difficulties of getting books, what more a proper education, in Africa, where a book may cost one several months' wages. But still, people read books, a third of Anna Karenina at a time, like that young woman waiting for her ration of water in a store.

Buti pa nga yung babaeng iyon nakatapos ng 1/3 ng Anna Karenina, which I can't claim for myself. And I probably have more books than entire villages in Africa. I'm the downfall of the human race. Pero oks pa rin, kasi sabi ni Lessing there's a storyteller deep inside all of us.

Now if only that storyteller quits blogging and starts to work on her bloody thesis. Gah.

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How to get yourself depressed. Not.

Here's something guaranteed to deliver a low blow to the your already down self-esteem: what other people accomplished when they were your age. Here's mine:

The Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his revolutionary theory of the atom.

French novelist George Sand published her first novel, Indiana.

Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto.

British physician Thomas Wakley began publishing The Lancet.

Jamaican reggae composer/performer Bob Marley recorded "I Shot the Sheriff."

Nuclear plant lab tech Karen Silkwood died in a car crash on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter and a union official to document her allegations about falsified quality control reports.

French naturalist Jean B. Lamarck coined the word biology to encompass the studies of botany and zoology.

Radio DJ Brent McCoy killed a mouse, seemingly by staring at it, in his living room.

College graduate and licensed therapist Katie moved back in with her parents to muck stalls on their farm and fold her dad's underwear, still warm from the dryer.


Now except for the last two, all the others are something I can't do and don't really care much about doing. I remember reading a similar list a few years ago, and became really sad that Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 24 or something. Somebody else said that if you haven't done anything spectacular or world-changing by age 30, perhaps you never will. That gives me a few more years. Not that I'm counting on it. I'll probably look at this post by then and consider myself bonkers.

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How to lose ten pounds

This girl complained of stomach pains and when the doctors opened her up, they found a ten pound hairball. It was a mass of black, curly hair, and measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches, the doctors said. Turns out she has a condition known as trichophagia, a compulsion to eat one's own hair.

Ten pounds is exactly the amount of weight I wish to shed, but not this way. Gah.

Badger Sleep Balm

It's two in the morning, it's raining steadily and I'm still wide awake. This is perfect blanket weather, and it makes me wish that I should have checked this out at the mall before I went home the other day:



A dreamy night balm rich with precious oils to calm, encourage, cheer and relax poetic badgers and other restless wanderers. Just rub a little balm under nose, on lips, on temples or other pulse points. Or use the oil for after-bath moisturizing or soothing massage. The aroma does the work. Rosemary is the traditional herb for clear thinking, confidence, and memory. Bergamot is mentally uplifting. Ginger is strengthening and confidence-inducing. Balsam Fir is refreshing, like a walk in the woods. Lavender is the traditional sleep herb; fresh and relaxing. But Sleep Balm doesn't make you sleepy! It helps quiet your thoughts, then you fall asleep naturally.

My Sleepytime Tea hasn't been working well for me the last few weeks again. Even the supposedly "calming" body wash used to do the trick, but not right now. So while I was out with friends last weekend, we stayed almost the entire time in a coffee shop, talking and flipping through magazines. There was an article on how to sleep better and I saw this product there.



The Bedtime soap bar also seems interesting. Their website has a few testimonials from insomniacs and call me a sucker for advertising, but I would want to try this out. I distinctly remember seeing some Badger products in Rustans. I might not even wait for Christmas for this.

Kawaii in a box

I was looking at bento boxes when I saw this:



Here's the full description: "A great two-tiered bento set with bottom lid and chopsticks featuring Totoro from the wildly popular My Neighbor Totoro anime. This is a very well made sealing bento that will fit nicely into your bag or compartmentalized lifestyle because of its handy vertical arrangement. Includes elastic strap for keeping your sauces and surrounding stainables safe from leakage. Awwwwingly cute with two 3D Totoros on the front, and of course the effervescent soot sprites. Approximately 3 inches by 3.5 inches. Microwave safe!"

Three inches! $24 para sa lalagyan ng Dewberry ito.

But, no, kahit nagrereklamo sa kamahalan ang lola, may I look pa rin at the other products. Candidate sa usefulness ito:



Maliit pa rin at 5.5 by 3.5 inches. Para kang kumain ng second to the smallest sized index card.

Like, I totally dig this more understated one:



Might be the aluminum. At any rate, $18 is still a huge amount to pay for a lunch box. So this remains in my wants, but not necessarily needs list.

But while looking at that website, I came across something almost inexplicable:



It's not just oil blot paper, it's the Hello Kitty Oil Absorption Paper *Gem*:

Sanrio helps you maintain your peak and shiny cuteness with these Hello Kitty Oil Absorption Paper sheets -- because, after all, how can you be cute when your face is all oily? A popular Japanese health care product, Aburatori Gami (literally "Oil-Taking Paper"), are commonly sold in convenience stores. An essential cuteness care item. 50 sheets. Easily fits into any bag or purse for your convenience. This purchase is for the pack with an illustration of Kitty-chan with gems in the background.

Sa halagang $3, puwede mo nang punasan ang anumang mantikang inilabas sa mukha mo ng kinain mo. O di ba bongga? Kasi yan lang talaga ang rason na naisip ko kung bakit kasama yan sa webpage na puro lunch boxes. Feeling ko nga naligaw ito, dapat pang-Hello Kitty Hell siya.

My So-Called Influences

The question I dread the most in creative writing classes is that eventually you get asked, "So who were your influences?" I made a complete rat of myself last Saturday morning with such an earnest and rambling response. I totally forgot to list down My So-Called Life.

And oh, I read in an article that Alicia Silverstone almost played Angela Chase. That would have been totally wrong. I liked Alicia Silverstone, but My So-Called Life trumps Clueless any day in my book. People just want to murder Claire Danes now, but if there's one thing she got right, it's how to play an insecure and in love teenager from the mid-90s.

I mean, I can live in a deserted island without Gatsby and Great Expectations if I have in my possession the complete series DVD of My So-Called Life. Six discs, 19 episodes, 1110 minutes. With audio commentary on six episodes. Plus a behind the scenes docu, My So-Called Life Story. And Amazon is selling it for $49.99. Can you say Christmas wishlist? I can totally live without the previous DVD set with the lunch box, thank you. If there's one thing you'll buy for me on Amazon, this is it. Go now, go!

How to Win a National Book Award

According to New York Magazine, this is how you can win the Oscars of the publishing world in five easy steps:

1. Don't be a young debut novelist
2. Do Aim for World-Historical Significance
3. Don't Write Short Stories
4. Do Be a Literary Insider
5. Do Expand Your Demo(graphic)

I haven't read it yet, but this year's front runner and eventual winner is Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam War novel. Everyone expected him to win anyway, as he got 3 of the 5 easy steps. I had read a couple of his short stories anthologized in Best of collections, and Jesus' Son sounds interesting.

Moore on Polanski

Tangentially related to the previous Ira Levin post, an unearthed article from the New York Times archive, from the Watching Movies With series. This one features Julianne Moore on Rosemary's Baby, as directed by Roman Polanski, and on how he balances horror from the mundane and comedy:

"Polanski keeps yanking us back and forth between cheerful and frightened. You keep getting these little dabs of comedy, all the way through. Ruth Gordon and the other neighbors are basically played for comic effect. That's how the horror is introduced in this movie, as comedy. It's never the dominant tone, but it's there. It's like in 'Macbeth,' you know? Somehow it makes the horror even more horrible."

Also from the same 2001 series, Woody Allen on Shane.

Ira Levin, R.I.P.

Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby and Stepford Wives, passed away at 78. For some reason, I feel this more than Norman Mailer's passing. Admittedly, Mailer was more entertaining to watch, but I was bored to tears trying to read his work. Meanwhile, I read and watched most of Levin's works.

Levin himself was never really bothered that he wasn't considered a heavy weight literary novelist in his time. Some critics also confined his work to genre: "Combining elements of several genres — mystery, Gothic horror, science fiction and the techno-thriller — Mr. Levin’s novels conjured up a world full of quietly looming menace, in which anything could happen to anyone at any time. In short, the Ira Levin universe was a great deal like the real one, only more so: more starkly terrifying, more exquisitely mundane."

He did that quite effectively, I think. So much so that he was able to really infiltrate popular imagination. What he wasn't thrilled about was the upsurge of Satanism that seemed to occupy popular culture since Mia Farrow spawned the devil's son. But given that, I'd think he was amused that "Stepford" is now used as an adjective. At least I use it. He didn't ask me for any royalties though.