JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

This week’s free books and their would-be owners are:

Pravda by Edward Docx – scrippsy
Peace Kills by P.J. O’Rourke -niks
Salon.com’s Wanderlust – sugarcages
Emily the Strange – gamboagan
Dance Dance Dance – turmukoy

These winners have exactly seven days, from Tuesday, June 23 to Monday, June 29, to pick up their prizes/have their prizes picked up at Wild Ginger, the Asian restaurant at the basement of Power Plant Mall in Rockwell. Any time from 11 am to 8 pm will be fine; look for Nida or Marge.

If the winners do not pick up their books, we’ll assign them to the next entries in the queue.

R. Zamora Linmark (Zack) is reading Lorca by Leslie Stainton and Face, poems by Sherman Alexie.

Teddy Locsin is reading Journey to the End of the Night by the noxious Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the Ralph Manheim translation, The Forever War, classic science-fiction by Joe Haldane Haldeman (confused him with the geneticist), and Sartre: The Philosopher of the 20th Century by Bernard-Henri Levy.

Noel Orosa is reading The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction by Stephen King, and The Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono. Also rereading Save Me The Waltz by that crazy woman Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

Ely Buendia is reading the graphic novel Ex Machina by Brian Vaughan and looking for good books on architecture if you have any recommendations.

Gerry Torres is reading The Conde Nast Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places, including Shirley Hazzard on Capri, Philip Gourevitch on Tanzania, Gregor von Rezzori on Rumania, and Simon Winchester on Mt. Pinatubo.

Ricky Villabona is reading Awakening to the Sacred by Lama Surya Das and the Whodunnit anthology edited by Philip Pullman. He is also reading the DK travel guide to Jerusalem and the Holy Lands because he’s going to watch Madonna in concert (again). Ricky says there aren’t many guides to Israel in our bookstores. Does anyone know a good travel guide to Israel? (Don’t say the Bible.)

I’m reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (see his wonderful essay, The Limits of Control), and Ways of Seeing by John Berger, the design of which stopped me in my tracks. The text begins on the cover.

At 88, Ray Bradbury fights for his local library. Listen to the man who wrote Fahrenheit 451. If we ever have to live out that scenario, I will be Fahrenheit 451.

At the 2009 Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner, John Hodgman spoke on the age-old war between jocks and nerds.

He poses the questions: Is Barack Obama truly nerdcore, or just pretending? Are those prosthetic ears?

Obama responds with the Vulcan salute.

It warms my vestigial heart to hear Dune jokes. And for the poor illiterates among us, the answers are Shai Hulud, thumper, and the water of life.

Hodgman proceeds to ask: Is Barack Obama the Kwisatz Haderach?

Can he be in many places at once? Can he see all possible futures?

We’ll be watching.

Thanks to Fenring for the alert. I was just having a discussion via text with Andy on my personal campaign to turn chosen targets into geeks. ‘When the two wealthiest people are genuine geeks and the ‘leader of the free world’ has geeky ears and swats flies on camera, you know geekiness has set in for sure,’ he said. ‘It’s going mainstream.’

Andy, Andy, Andy, you are obviously not a geek. You have not been through the wars with us. You have always been friends with the jocks, you are one of the popular people. The true geeks know that we may be ascendant today because the world needs us, and it may even be fashionable to be a geek for now hence the bizarre sight of the ‘cool people’ adopting our manners, but a time will come when people will turn against us. It has happened throughout history and it will happen again. For now we enjoy public acceptance and even admiration, but we know how things turn out. We live in the future.

In the NYT Magazine Cynthia Gorney asks: Can Rafael Nadal survive his own grueling style of tennis?

Dinna was telling us about the Vogue article which discussed the training regimen ‘Uncle Toni’ put Nadal through as a child, hitting scraggly balls in mud and awful conditions. It sounds like child abuse to me (and tennis parents are notoriously pushy). Maybe Nadal fans should sue to get custody of Rafa because he’s literally being worn out. (He’s 23 but seems younger.)

I find that many Nadal fans leap at the idea. This is one of the differences between Nadal fans and Federer fans. Nadal fans want to touch their idol and squeeze his muscles. We would not dream of touching The Fed, we are not worthy, we are sweaty plebs, we would have to get a really good stylist first. He is more Idea than flesh.

The mantra is: Elegance and subtlety may be beaten by strength and tenacity, but elegance and subtlety last longer.

Leonard Mlodinow has a great piece in his Happy Days NYT blog on our need for control, even the illusion of it, and how we deal with losing that illusion. Killer opening, bringing in a cat.

My mother had always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn’t a house cat – it couldn’t have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, in a forced-labor camp the Nazis set up in Poland, the country where my mother was born and raised. Back then she was as emaciated as the cat, but still she shared her food with it. It gave her comfort she said, and it was a way of fighting back, to help this animal that, like her, the Germans planned to let die.

The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that survival in Nazi concentration camps depended on “one’s ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action, to keep control of some important aspects of one’s life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.” Studies suggest that, even in normal conditions, to be happy, humans must feel in control. We are currently confronting economic hardship that, though a far cry from the horrors of World War II, has eroded the feeling of self-determination for many of us. . .

Mlodinow teaches randomness at Caltech, authored the bestselling book The Drunkard’s Walk, and was a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

View from the hotel on Stamford Road after midnight.

Sportists, a French dance-sports-hiphop outfit at the Sony-Ericsson event. The one on the left reminds me of Guga Kuerten, or maybe it’s just the bandana.

Dunking is impressive in the context of a tough basketball game, especially if it’s the game-winning last-second shot, but with trampolines it’s just showing off.

The roast pork at La Forketta in Dempsey Hill, washed down with a good Barolo. Excellent and lethal, will lay off food for a while. Many of the staff at La Forketta are Pinoy. One of the great things about meeting Pinoy OFWs in restaurants and hotels all over the world is that you have inside information on what’s really good on the menu. At a buffet yesterday afternoon a Pinoy server discreetly warned us of the fake adobo (looked like adobo, tasted like cardboard).

After this trip I’m going to quarantine myself to make sure I haven’t caught anything pandemicky. It’s not so much the illness that worries one as the embarrassment. That’s why the media has taken to calling it H1N1 instead of its original piggy name, which sounds like a judgment on the afflicted (‘You must’ve brought it on yourself by eating a giant slab of roast pork that was crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside.’)