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The winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.6: Let’s hear from the villains is amoysafeguard. Clever and succinct always beats melodramatic contortions.

Congratulations, amoysafeguard, please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when your prize is ready.

Update: amoysafeguard, your prize will be ready for claiming on Tuesday, 23 August at the Customer Service counter, National Bookstore, Power Plant, Rockwell, Makati. Enjoy your books.

Your challenge this week is to save words from extinction. Visit savethewords.org and look at the words that are in danger of being dropped from the English language. Then use as many of those words as you can (a minimum of 5) in a 500-word story about anything.

No tricks. The story cannot be about words. No “I adopted the words pamphagous and jussulent” or tales of the Spelling Bee, please. The words have to mean something.

Deadline: Sunday, 21 August 2011 at 11.59. The prize is this thesaurus (of course).

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Has anyone else noticed the abundance of shots of Daniel Craig’s backside in chaps in Cowboys and Aliens? That’s not a complaint, it’s the only thing that prevented us from walking out of the movie. We love Daniel Craggy.

Adjectives for Cowboys and Aliens, based on the cult graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, directed by Jon Favreau, written by a bunch of people we don’t care to recognize, starring well-known actors whose performances call to mind what Alfred Hitchcock said about actors, and costing ridiculous sums of money with nothing to show for it:

Stupid. Yes the plot is absurd but it was full of possibilities the filmmakers chose to ignore.

Boring. We were reduced to wishing Daniel Craig would turn around.

Joyless. Steven Spielberg produced this??

A movie can survive one out of three, even two out of three, but not all three. Skip it.

On a recent visit to Save The Words, a site which promotes the use of words threatened with extinction, we adopted the first two that leapt out at us:

which means “eating or consuming everything” and

which means “full of broth or soup”. By adopting these words we commit to using them as often as we can. Later it occurred to us that both words are concerned with eating.

Last Thursday we attended the opening of the Complementary Medicine Center at St Luke’s in Bonifacio Global City. As Consolata and I were leaving the building we saw the media massed in driveway, cameras aimed at the doors.

“Dammit,” I said, “My serfs have leaked my whereabouts to the paps again.”

“It’s so hard to get good help these days,” sighed Consolata, presenting his favorite angle to the lenses.

“But wait,” I recalled, “I don’t have serfs.”

No, the media were waiting for the husband of the former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to leave the hospital for his appearance at the Senate committee hearing on corruption. The Arroyos are under investigation for alleged pamphagous behavior on many jussulent deals, including the purchase of helicopters. (My adopted words would live longer if their applications go beyond the culinary.)

That morning it had been reported that the former president’s scheduled surgery had been postponed due to an infection. By lunchtime we had all received the text joke about second-hand implants at least thrice. People can be so uncharitable. Would they be kinder if the medical emergencies did not always coincide with summons from the Senate? Probably not.

“Next we will hear that the former president’s condition will require medical treatment abroad,” Kermit said at dinner (where, pamphagous eater that I am I had the porchetta, the cheese, and the M&Ms). How cynical we are. Yesterday’s headline: “Docs advise GMA to get treatment abroad, says camp.” The news would be more jussulent if it weren’t totally expected.

The second of the Boysen KNOxOUT Project: EDSA (Everyone Deserves Safe Air) artworks rendered in air-cleaning paint can now be seen at the Edsa Ortigas flyover.

Baby Imperial and Coco Anne composed the work, a mathematical/abstract “description” of the Edsa Revolution of 1986.

Boysen KNOxOUT Project: EDSA is the world’s first large-scale public art project using paints that can clean noxious air pollutants.
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It’s disconcerting to see photos and videos of the London riots, first of all because it’s London. How could it happen there? Books and movies have conditioned us to believe that Londoners are polite, reserved and well-behaved. These are the people who were so calm and brave while Hitler bombed their city every day in the Blitz. After the bus bombings in 2005 they did not freak out; they collected themselves and resumed their regular lives. Either something has changed (the Blitz generation is dead), or pop culture has lied to us again.

When I saw the pictures I was reminded of Alfonso Cuaron’s bleak, beautiful 2006 film, Children of Men. Based on the P.D. James novel, Children of Men is set in a grim near-future where society has collapsed and anarchy reigns. The human race is facing extinction: no one has given birth in 18 years, and the youngest person on earth has just died. Cuaron takes us through a London of smashed storefronts, burning cars, the wreckage of buildings, thugs armed with bludgeons. So last week’s events in London were oddly familiar.

Except that humans are still reproducing (particularly in the third world, including the Philippines, where population growth strains available resources), the British government is functioning, and despite the economic downturn the UK is still a rich country that many Filipinos, especially nurses, hope to migrate to. The people starting fires and looting shops in London were not starving, or they would be stealing food, milk, basic necessities. Graphic evidence tells us that they were looting electronics stores, athletic supplies shops, luxury boutiques. As one courageous woman told the mob, they didn’t come together to fight for a cause, they were just taking down a shoe store.
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is by Takako Iwasa of Cat Prin: The Tailor of A Cat, and now there’s a book on her feline fashion.

While our cats approve of cats as monarchs, they themselves refuse to wear clothes (unless it is very cold).
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