JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: Is this what Godard meant by “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”?

Heavy traffic to and from Tagaytay last Saturday, the highway clogged with private cars. The restaurants on Tagaytay Ridge full. Long queue for ice cream at FIC. Weekenders in sweaters and jackets, imagining they’re in Scotland. Saturday evening spent half an hour looking for parking space at Greenbelt. Greenbelt 3 restaurants packed. Sunday afternoon the restaurants were still packed, and there seemed to be more people strolling about than during the holiday season. What’s going on? Isn’t there supposed to be a financial meltdown?

Robin says it’s our Sharon Cuneta moment. You know those early Sharon movies like Bukas, Luluhod Ang Mga Tala (Tomorrow, The Stars Will Kneel), Bituing Walang Ningning (Star Without Luster), and Pasan Ko Ang Daigdig (I Carry The World), where the heroine is snubbed-oppressed-laughed at by the snooty upper class types, and she looks up at the sky and swears that she will have her day? Apparently that day has come.

The US, UK, Korea, the rich countries have been hit by the credit crunch, and their citizens are feeling the pain. The Philippines will feel it later, because in the first place it’s harder to get credit around here, and in the second place, we can’t really tell if we’re in a boom or a recession. Whenever the government announces that economic indicators are up, we don’t really notice. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; we scuttle from one financial crisis to another, and those of us who work for a living are just happy to pay our bills. (We hear that the rich lost tons of money in the Wall Street collapse and they whine about being poor, but poor to them may mean flying first class instead of taking the private jet.)

Fortunately, it’s harder to fall from the 30th floor than from the ground floor. In her movies, Sharon becomes rich and famous, so it’s her turn to snub-oppress-laugh at the snooty upper class types. We may not have become rich, but the rich countries have become sort of poor, so it’s almost the same thing! They’ve fallen from the 30th floor onto the basement parking level, so we can stand on the ground floor and sneer at them from this great height. Enjoy it.

“Of course, the biggest disappointment was Gore’s failure to handle Hurricane Katrina properly. Not only did the massive evacuation of New Orleans prove a costly and time-consuming overreaction, since the levees – fortified in 2003 – held up fine. The emergency management agency also took over 24 hours to set up trailers for evacuees along the Gulf Coast, leaving them without government housing assistance for a full day. And Gore’s decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men – but we didn’t need to see it…”

TA Frank’s alternate history of America, 2000-2008.

“I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. . .”

Hitchens bats for the return of “cat”.

The headlines wonder if Nasa has found life on Mars. Scientists have detected enormous amounts of methane from Mars. Evidence of life, possibly. Proof of life, not.

“But methane can be made by geological processes too. Huge amounts of the gas seep from deep ocean vents and from volcanoes without the help of life. What is intriguing is that for similar processes to do this on Mars, the planet must be far more geologically active than scientists thought. So far Nasa has no way of knowing whether its methane plumes are the collective emissions of billions of microbial Martians, or some more mundane process involving rocks and moisture. . .”

Sailors fighting in the dance hall. Oh man, look at those cavemen go. It’s the freakiest show.

Back on earth, paleontologist Peter Ward argues that nature is not intent on achieving harmonious balance, but is bent on self-destruction.

“The story of life on earth, in Ward’s reckoning, is a long series of suicide attempts. Four of the five major mass extinctions since the rise of animals, Ward says, were caused not by meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, but by bacteria, and twice, he argues, the planet was transformed into a nearly total ball of ice thanks to the voracious appetites of plants. In other words, it’s not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself. “Life is toxic,” Ward says. “It’s life that’s causing all the damn problems.” Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington and a scholar of the earth’s great extinctions, calls his model the Medea Hypothesis, after the mythological Greek sorceress who killed her own children.”

You walk past a cafe but you don’t eat when you’ve lived too long. See, Bowie covers almost everything.

Question: If it’s not yet a good time to buy property, is it a good time to travel? Do you think the options for budget travellers will become significantly cheaper in 2010 or do you think prices won’t go down drastically in the next 12 to 18 months?

Adams Myth: The cost of travelling will continue to fall with the price of oil. And you will get more bang for your buck if you visit countries whose currencies have depreciated against the Peso (e.g. Britain, Korea). The US Dollar may be strong, but the sales you are seeing there these days are unprecedented. This fire-sale situation will persist for at least a year.

Q. How do we approach buying a house? Do we treat it like an investment, or do we treat it like any other purchase that we use up (like a car, for instance). I always thought it was the latter but I keep hearing of a house being ‘an investment’.

AM. If it is a primary residence which you will never sell, the market value is less important. It is a home, more than an investment . . . until you bequeath it to your heirs. If it is a transitory dwelling or second home, you must treat it as an investment — i.e. you do not wish to get back less than what you paid for when you sell it. Hence, the buying considerations should be less emotional.

Q. Is it more practical/a good time for people with creative jobs (graphic/industrial/interior designers, etc.) to work overseas?

AM. It depends where and what you are looking for. If you are young and unattached, yes, both the money and the experience will make it worthwhile at almost any time. If attached and with kids, there are a host of other factors to consider.

Q. I have shares with a mutual fund which I bought 2 years ago–it’s currently valued at just 70% of the price I bought it for back then. Do you think it’s wise for me to leave it there and wait for the market to pick up? Or should I re-invest and maybe gain more than my poorly-performing mutual fund?

AM. Ideally, I would have to know what kind of mutual fund (fixed income, equities or balanced) and who is the manager. But all things being equal, I would (reluctantly) hold on to it. The financial markets may not look up for another year, but the prohibitive entry and exit costs in these funds makes it unwise to trade in and out of them.

Got a question for our fearless economist? Post it in Comments.

These are the questions Benjamin and Daisy have to deal with: How can we continue to be together if everyone sees you as a pedophile? Can romantic love survive if one must change the other’s diapers? (But doesn’t this happen to aged couples all the time?) Note to filmmakers: These are not romantic issues.

There’s really only one romantic issue: How will I live without you? The great movie romances answer this in different ways. “You’ll be brave and inspire your husband in the fight for freedom, which is more important than our happiness.” “I will betray all my friends because life means nothing to me without you.” “I don’t intend to, I’ll get you back, tomorrow is another day.” Or simply, “I won’t.” The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is curious indeed: it forgets that true love is itself a suspension of disbelief.

Suspend your disbelief, a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.