JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Happy Birthday to Chus the Astonishing! May your path be strewn with adventure, great books, Rodrigo Santoros, excellent movies, trips to South America, Brazilian hotties, spectacular dinners, and good friends.

I found out only recently that on the month in which their birthdays fall, Fully Booked cardholders get a 40 percent discount on a single purchase. So what you do is, you find a friend with a discount card whose birthday is coming up, and you pool your purchases. Everybody happy. Chus got some moleskines (Last week the pocket notebook was P699, today it’s P820. Ah well, at least they’re here), an anthology of short stories, and Silk by Alessandro Baricco. Riccardo got a big shiny Jean Paul Goude book. I got The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart and Double Fault by Lionel Shriver. Both in keeping with my Russian reading theme for the year. Shteyngart is a Russian who emigrated to the US. Shriver is English, but Double Fault is about tennis, and my favorite tennis player is Russian.

Saffron Maratyevna Safina

Originally uploaded by Koosama.

The Australian Open starts on Monday. I’m tempted to have my cable reconnected, but will camp out at friends’ houses instead. My cats and I are rooting for Marat Safin, but we don’t consider it disloyal to also cheer on Roger Federer, our default setting, for a four-slam sweep. Marat was the last person to beat the Fed at the Australian, in 2005’s classic semifinal, en route to victory in the final. (He did not play last year due to injury.) In the first round Marat meets David Nalbandian, always a dangerous opponent, but the Russian tends to play brilliantly against the top players, and lose to those he should’ve beaten without breaking a sweat. Ah Marat, watching him is like reading a novel by Dostoevsky. If you’re in the mood for a novel about tennis, here’s a short list:
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – Not just amazing, but also useful as a coffee table.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani – Tennis in the afternoons on a lovely estate in Ferrara as fascists strut around and WWII looms.
Double Fault by Lionel Shriver – An earlier novel from the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin; the doomed marriage of two professional tennis players—she’s ranked in the 300s, he in the 800s.
My favorite tennis-related movie quote comes from A Room With A View. Cecil (Daniel Day-Lewis) learns that he’s being dumped and cries, “Because I wouldn’t play tennis with Freddy?”
Correction. Marat’s first round opponent was Benjamin Becker (no relation to Boris). Marat won in four sets (breathe). His second round opponent is Dudi Sela.

Corinna who has studied medicine and pastry lets off this rant about trans fat. (You notice how so many people in their 20s and 30s are keeling over from diseases we used to associate with older people?)
“Trans fat, or hydrogenated fat, which is in a LOT of foods we regularly eat, has been implicated in blocking up blood vessels. The human body cannot process hydrogenated fat, so it mucks things up inside like a silent layer of caulking in
your body, gumming things up. You don’t necessarily become overweight because of trans fat, but it does freaky things to your blood levels. No one wants to talk about it much, because this is an economic problem facing many a food business–shortening is way cheaper, hydrogenated fat is in many , if not all convenience products which are cheap and have a long shelf life. The alternatives to using hydrogenated fat and shortening are liquid oils, butter and lard, which are more expensive to store and buy, but it’s worth it.

“You’re better off using liquid oils, real butter and lard, but in moderation, rather than eating anything with shortening in it. The downside is that if every company tomorrow dumped out the hydrogenated fat products, we would see crates of food out in the dumps, and some food made without trans fat, such as bread rolls, stales faster.

“The terrifying thing about this whole trans fat issue is that the local and international food industry is so entrenched in using shortening in everything from pan de sal to Skyflakes to raisins to fried chicken and cheese curls, that nobody within the industry wants to raise hell and say, let’s all eat suman instead, with coconut oil. or, let’s all eat stuff prepared from scratch, baked in lola’s kitchen. Huh? most of us don’t have lolas who can still cook for us, right? The price of convenience, when we get most breads off a store shelf, or eat fast food.

“This is why there are so many cheap imported snack foods coming in, processed food all containing that modern specter of bad arteries, trans fat.

“Yes, everything in moderation, some people say, some people think that trans fat has a safe level, when it DOES NOT. I wish I had the studies to cite, but a good google scholar search will answer that question. Of course, the food companies don’t want you to know this, and neither do most bakeries or restaurants which use processed food products.”

Blood Diamond is a shapeless mash-up of Casablanca and every other movie about a shiny rock. Today’s Emotional Weather Report in the Star.

Ely Buendia is currently in the Intensive Care Unit of the Philippine Heart Center, recovering from a second angioplasty. He is expected to recover fully. Many thanks to Yan and Diane for the update.

Ely began having chest pains on Sunday afternoon when he and his band Pupil were on their way to a gig in Calamba, Laguna. He played the gig anyway. The band did a one-hour show before an audience of 5,000, and then they got in the van and took Ely to the Asian Hospital in Alabang. It turns out that he’d been having a heart attack for the last five hours. Doctors found an arterial blockage and performed an angioplasty. During the surgery they discovered another arterial blockage. Ely was moved to the Philippine Heart Center, and the second operation was done on Wednesday. Doctors found a third blockage, which was successfully repaired. They say that Ely will be up and about in no time, and recommend changes in his diet and exercise habits.

There have been vile insinuations about Ely’s illness, all of them untrue. Ely is 36 years old, happily married to Diane, with a child he is devoted to. If people persist in clinging to tired stereotypes about rock musicians, the hell with them; Ely has always resisted cliches, and he’s not about to become one. We wish Ely a speedy recovery; see you at the next gig.

As obsessive moviegoers we take great care in choosing the first film we will see on the big screen for the calendar year. This year it was a toss-up between Blood Diamond and Eragon. Eragon was the early frontrunner because it features swords and dragons. Also I am not a fan of Blood Diamond’s director Edward Zwick—I found Legends of the Fall hilarious (Brad Pitt shed enough tears to flood the trenches in WWI), and as for The Last Samurai, I am suspicious of vehicles created for Tom Cruise’s endless Oscar-whoring (I think his best performance was as the asshole motivational speaker in Magnolia). However, Leonardo DiCaprio has become interesting to us now that we can believe him as a man. Despite his efforts in Gangs of New York and The Aviator, we always thought of him as a pretty boy; then he amazed us in The Departed (though I’ll take Mark Wahlberg, thanks). Turns out that the way to make Leo manly onscreen is to have him look like he’s about to have three nervous breakdowns at the same time. Also, Eragon’s trailer had a B-movie-ness about it and the reviews have been awful, while critics have called DiCaprio the Meryl Streep of his generation for his convincing South African accent. So off we went to Blood Diamond. My review appears on Friday in the Star. By the way, Dolphy and Van Dolph sat in front of us at the last full show, so I had to maintain a respectful silence even when I wanted to say, “Amy good gorilla!” (from Congo, which was also about a diamond).