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Koosi: I would prefer not to have ants in my food, even if they are protein.

It’s still cool in the evening but summer is approaching: I know because the ants are back. They were swarming over the cats’ food bowls so I put the bowls on plates of water (to create a moat). Now the ants swarm over bits of kibble that fall out of the bowls. Koosi and Saffy are very neat eaters, but Mat eats like the Cookie Monster: Kibble! Harumnumnumnumnum, food flying.

Citronella still works on ants, although I’m tired of having everything smell like linen spray. I don’t want to kill the ants, I just want them to move somewhere else. Then ants attacked the allegedly antproof kibble dispenser—true, we’ve had that dispenser for 7 years, so whatever antproofing treatment it had must’ve worn out. Today I looked for an airtight, vacuum-sealed container to store dry cat food in. Sounds simple enough, but the ones I found at Rustan’s Supermarket and Make Room were ridiculously expensive. I got this at True Value, I hope it works.

I had to scour the shelves myself because the service at True Value in Rockwell is terrible; there were lots of sales clerks standing around, but no one even asked me why I’d been examining containers for half an hour. Guess they couldn’t be bothered with making a sale. Finally one supervisor-type noticed the customer, and he had to order a clerk to take the case down from the stack and show it to me for crying out loud.

William Blake, The Good and Evil Angels

Paul Bettany is exactly the actor I would cast as an angel: he has the pale, elongated, stern look of a William Blake painting. In Legion his archangel Michael is a bit too familiar with modern weaponry, and Gabriel (who resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger) has very sharp wings. God has grown tired of the humans again (which happens every eon or so) and decided to exterminate them. Gabriel of Annunciation fame obediently carries out the order; Michael of kicking Lucifer’s ass (see the Ginebra San Miguel bottle) fame refuses. He’s grown fond of people, those week, deeply flawed creatures who rise above themselves in terrible circumstances (and behave terribly when the going is good). Hey, an angel with free will.

Their battlefield is a diner, appropriately named Paradise Falls, in the dusty middle of nowhere. When the apocalypse happens—we don’t see it, but apparently it involves locusts and the end of TV, radio, phones and the internet (which would lead to mass suicide)—there is a picturesque group of humans marooned at the diner. All of them have issues to work out, and they will get worked out as they fend off a variety of possessed people, including a killer granny. With them is a very pregnant waitress whose child is supposed to be human race’s only hope—we only have Paul Bettany’s word for it, but we believe the accent. It turns out that when it comes to violence, angels are just as vicious as demons.

There’s an entire genre of movies and graphic novels about renegade angels, notably Prophecy, in which Viggo Mortensen’s Lucifer ate someone’s heart. I much prefer badass angels to the sweet smiling cherubs. Apart from the fact that they can’t buy outfits off the rack because wings require custom tailoring, there’s not a lot of official information about angels. They occasionally turn up in scripture to deliver messages (although Raphael is a major character in one of the Deuterocanonicals, The Book of Tobit) and in Revelations to freak people out. We’re each supposed to have a guardian angel; if this is so, I’d like the one with the semi-automatic weapons, please.

Directed by Scott Stewart, Legion also stars Lucas Black whom I remember as that kid who stole All The Pretty Horses from Matt Damon, Dennis Quaid without that grin, Kate Walsh, Tyrese Gibson, and Charles S. Dutton. It’s an entertaining action flick; smart of the filmmakers to frame it not as Good vs. Evil but as Strength vs. Weakness. I got to thinking about the quality of mercy. Compassion is usually portrayed as a weakness, but mercy is a kind of compassion that can only be dispensed by the strong. You can only be merciful towards those you can squash.

My rating: Tuna.

Today in the World Domination Tracker: Cities that have been colonized by Pinoys.

Sinned Gutierrez is in Doha, Qatar.

“This is the view from my fifth floor window of the Doha skyline at 9 am. I’ve called this place home since 2002. Look at all the construction. Hmm.”

Leah Laxa is in Auckland, New Zealand.

“This photo of the Auckland Central Business District includes just about the only buildings you’ll see in NZ’s largest city, population 1.3 million; the rest of is suburbs.”

Edu Niala is in Singapore.

“This is the back side of the 10-storey Iluma Mall in Singapore which opened in March 2009. Designed by a German firm, it stands out in an area full of traditional shops, old churches and ‘Baclaran-type’ stalls. The facade actually features a crystal mesh installation that illuminates at night, hence the name.

“What’s interesting is that the alley beside the mall is “Manila St”, something Filipino tourists may not necessarily notice when they come here.”

Attention: Filipinos living abroad. As our Agents of World Domination you are requested to send photographs of your current location to koosi.obrien@gmail.com.

Scary old age: Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

It creeps up on you imperceptibly—the tiny shock when you’re filling out a form and you have to compute the answer to “age”, the lone white hair sticking out on top of your head, running into classmates at the mall and being introduced to their tall, articulate children (They can speak now?!).

You shrug it off and console yourself with the observation that all the guys who were considered cute in school are now paunchy and losing their hair. Meanwhile you have to ask your stylist to layer your hair to make it less big or it will fill up the room. It was an excellent decision not to marry and have kids—not that you’d ever intended to get shackled for the purpose of expanding the gene pool. Your forehead is not ridged and creased like those of your contemporaries, and you can still move your eyebrows and face. Plus you’ll never feel the compulsion to read the text messages on your spouse’s phone or pay unannounced visits to the people in his directory.

But it continues creeping up on you and getting more and more conspicuous. Now you have to pretend not to notice that you just spent ten minutes plucking out white hairs from the back of your head using two mirrors and a spotlight. Now the vet says there’s really no need to have your cat spayed since she’s nine years old, which among felines is old. You raised her from kittenhood; what does that make you?

On the onset of age in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

Cats are supposed to be highly sensitive and able to sense things humans can’t. So in the middle of the night when Saffy starts staring at a spot on the wall, I pretend not to notice.

One goes to a Terry Gilliam movie burdened with expectations. It will be dazzling (Brazil), clever (12 Monkeys, inspired by La Jetée), surreal (Fisher King), frenetic (Baron Munchausen), weird (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and only sporadically coherent (Tidelands, The Brothers Grimm). You may not be able to explain it, but you will like it.

Gilliam’s latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, fulfilled all my expectations but one. It is coherent. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is the leader of a vagabond circus troupe that includes a wise little person (Verne Troyer, who was Mini-Me in the Austin Powers flicks), Parnassus’s beautiful daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), and Anton (Andrew Garfield), who is in love with Valentina. The Imaginarium is a “mirror” into another world, whose contents are determined by the traveler’s imagination. Parnassus turns out to be a very, very old man given to making wagers with the Devil (Tom Waits, who else); he’s about to lose the latest one. Then the troupe meets a man hanging by the neck under a bridge, and he has plans.

Imaginarium is the film Heath Ledger was doing at the time of his death, and it takes three fine actors to fill the vacancy: Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. Having four actors play the same role usually leads to confusion, but in this case it actually makes sense—the character’s appearance depends on the person who’s looking at him. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus feels like a big, fantastic pop-up book: the spectacle overwhelms the story, but do you really care?