JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Moleskine, we’re through. I have been a loyal Moleskine user since 2006, and I have enough Moleskines to pad the walls of my apartment. I have written entire books in Moleskines.

The high price of your notebooks I can endure, though it seems more and more ridiculous given the prices of other notebooks of comparable quality whose paper is better than yours. But for years, despite our entreaties, you have been putting out Limited Edition notebooks in lined paper only, with NO PLAIN PAPER options.

I DO NOT LIKE LINED PAPER. This world has enough rules as it is. So goodbye, Moleskine, I loved you, but IT’S OVER.

The price of this entire stack of 13 notebooks from Muji and Miniso with blank pages is less than the price of a single Moleskine notebook. Their paper is as good as the paper Moleskine uses.

Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe, my first new book in five years, is finally out! (All the other Twisted books are out of print, making this the only Twisted book!) In photo (L-R): Deo, Allan, and Evan, who hosted the short program and took tons of photos.

We had a book launch and signing at Fully Booked on Bonifacio High Street in BGC last Saturday. Watch video of the Twisted Travels launch at Instagram TV, @jessicazafrascats.

Thank you to everyone who endured hellish weekend traffic to come to the event. I hope you tried the Czech beer and Polish vodka. We ran out of books!

To buy copies of Twisted Travels Central Europe online use these links:

Shopee

Lazada

You can also get them direct from Visprint here. Use this link for foreign orders.

Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe is published by Visprint with Discover Central Europe and the Embassies of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in the Philippines. In the photo from left: Joanna from the Polish Embassy, me in the same dress I’m wearing in the author photo on the book’s inside back cover, Benjamin of the Czech Embassy, Gabor of the Hungarian Embassy, and my very patient and altogether excellent publisher Nida Ramirez, overlord of Visprint.

The mastermind of this project, Ambassador Jaroslav Olsa of the Czech Republic, could not be at the launch because he had urgent business to attend to in Prague.

The book launch was a meeting of everyone in my phone directory, including my favorite human beings and readers. This is my gene pool (L-R): my nieces Mika and Dany (as in Daenerys), my brother-in-law Bryan, and my sister Cookie.
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Demograpi

Leo Abaya takes the big data about the world we live in and translates them into human terms, extracting the truth from the cold, hard facts. Demograpi, Atbp is brilliant.

Detail from Demograpi

Another detail from Demograpi

Missing Slider. Spot the fuck-you.

Mga Nakabusal Na Saksi (Silenced Witnesses). How are witnesses silenced? By ripping their eyes out.

Demograpi, Atbp is on view at Tin-Aw Art Gallery until mid-November. Tin-Aw is at Somerset Olympia (across the hall from Old Swiss Inn) on Makati Avenue (beside the Peninsula Manila). The gallery is open Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 6pm.

Twisted Travels: Rambles in Central Europe will be launched on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2-5 p.m. at Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street, BGC. Twisted Travels will be available at Fully Booked, Shopee.ph, Lazada.com.ph, National Bookstore, and Powerbooks.

We arrived in Prague in the early afternoon and were fetched by our tour guide Zoran, who announced that taxi drivers were on strike against Uber, there were violent clashes in the city, and massive traffic jams. This is perhaps not the welcome one wants at the beginning of a packed tour, but it set a bleakly comic tone for the whole trip. There was some discussion in the team as to who our guide looked like. He resembled:

a. the original host of The Crystal Maze
b. one of the War Boys from Mad Max Fury Road
c. the vocalist of the ’80s group Right Said Fred of “I’m Too Sexy” fame
d. Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men
e. Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise

Read an excerpt.

Every week we post a quote from the Twisted series, which turns 25 next year.

Thanks to www.wesellit.ph for powering the Twisted25 project!

This goes out to every normal-seeming person who, in the grip of passion, turns into a completely different creature. Basically I turn into The Hulk. Question: Which one is the real you?

Noel went to see Bradley Cooper’s new movie A Star Is Born with high expectations because he has to defend the legacy of Barbra Streisand. I went to see it with low expectations because I am suspicious of movies that get rave reviews. What did we think?

This was supposed to be the third episode, but I decided to get it out while the movie is in theatres.

My guest Noel Orosa, one of my favorite humans, is a regional creative director at an ad agency in Singapore. We recorded this podcast at his hotel room in Manila while waiting for his room service order of pancit canton and adobo.

Thanks to Nexus Technologies for supporting our podcast! I’m getting the hang of recording anywhere, but this time I was too far from the microphone. That’ll be fixed next time.

You can get our podcast on Podbean
https://therealjessicarulestheuniverse.podbean.com/