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…even when she was kidnapped by extraterrestrials.

While watching the Scully video, this started playing in our head.

We think of it as the Philippine Science High School anthem, not that “Crests and troughs of the sea of life that flows/Thy light our beacon be” crap.

Speaking of science, here’s the trailer for The Imitation Game, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing. He also played Stephen Hawking and is currently Sherlock so he must get a pick of the big brain characters. Because he has the facial shape of a Zeta Reticulan.

He’s not that into you, Keira!

You realize he was the villain in Atonement? Secondary, if you count Briony as the main bad guy.

This is our new favorite T-shirt. We acquired it at great cost. Not that it’s expensive, but we had to lose in order to get it. Recently we challenged Rene to a Don’t Buy Anything Contest, in which the player who refrains from spending anything in a store wins. We thought we were a shoo-in, since we weren’t feeling covetous at the time. Our mistake was setting the challenge in Uniqlo, where it is difficult for us not to buy anything because the stuff is so practical and the prices so sane. We could ignore the collaboration with Ines de la Fressange because the dress requires ironing, but this Italian Star Wars T-shirt…

“Isn’t this brilliant?” we cried. “Luke and Leia look like characters in those Italian sword-and-sandal flicks. We don’t recall Luke Skywalker getting topless in Star Wars.”

“Or bottomless,” Ricky pointed out. “He’s not wearing pants.”

The shirt is even more brilliant than we thought! We’re going to wear it till it falls apart. According to the Museo Fermo Immagine blog, the movie poster illustration is by the Sicilian artist Michelangelo Papuzza.

We had no idea what The Reflecting Skin was about; we only got a copy because Viggo Mortensen is in it. In this instance our shallowness paid off: The Reflecting Skin is weird, gorgeous, and not likely to be forgotten.

Childhood is frequently depicted as the most wonderful time of anyone’s life: it’s over too fast, and then life is downhill all the way. But that’s because it’s viewed through the lens of nostalgia. This 1990 film written and directed by Philip Ridley presents childhood through the eyes of a child, and while it is certainly full of wonder it is also terrifying and brutal.

Little Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) lives with his worn-out parents in the rural American Midwest in the 1950s. They await the return of their eldest son Cameron (Viggo), who had fought in the Pacific. Given that WWII has been over for years, you have to wonder what’s taking Cameron so long—and then you realize that amidst these golden fields of gently swaying wheat under endless blue skies (beautifully photographed by Dick Pope), there is nothing. But through a child’s eyes (accompanied by Nick Bicat’s haunting Handel-esque score), this sun-bleached world is teeming with monsters and angels.

Cameron: Why don’t you go play with your friends?
Seth: They’re all dead.

There is a spate of killings in the area—the killers appear to be a gang of youths going round in a Cadillac. Seth is convinced that the murderers are vampires; his prime suspect is a widow (Lindsay Duncan) who lives alone with her husband’s personal effects, animal skulls and weapons from whaler ancestors. We’re never really sure. You could view The Reflecting Skin as a nightmare of childhood, or as a vampire movie without the fangs and blood (If you can imagine a cross between Tree of Life and Fright Night).

Then Cameron finally comes home and falls in love with the widow.

The pace is stately, but every frame radiates foreboding. How could we miss this film when it first came out? Now we have to see it again and again.

via Geekologie.

Last week we spotted this in the window of a toy store:

The Death Star. In Legos. For just under Php40,000.

We hate the child who gets this for a present. That child will lose the pieces within days. Then again, the child who gets this Lego Death Star probably won’t get to play with it. He or she is merely the excuse for buying it. It’s for the parents ha ha. (That’s what kids are for.)

Dream diary by Roman Muradov, via biblioklept.

We don’t seem to. We’re sure that at some point in our 8 or 9 hours of sleep every night (This is our real talent, sleeping) we have dreams, but when we wake up we usually don’t remember a single one. Which is too bad because the few we do remember would make some weird short stories. We’ve tried ordering ourselves to recall our dreams, and keeping a notebook by the bed, to no avail. (On the other hand we remember stories our friends have forgotten they told us years ago.)

But if we get up after dawn to go to the bathroom and then go back to sleep, we remember the dreams we have in the next 2-3 hours.

The dream we remember most vividly is the one where a vampire flies into the kitchen while we’re having breakfast with our parents. We had it when we were 10 or so. In the dream the vampire grabs us, and in our terror we look at our mother and father, and they wave, “Buh-bye! Buh-bye!”

Egg pie! We haven’t had egg pie since the school cafeteria. When we spotted this at the supermarket we had to get it.

It tastes exactly as we remember: the slightly cloying flavor of custard encased in cardboard. We took a bite and remembered the small stationery store on the ground floor of our grade school building, where we went almost everyday to sniff erasers. And the chaos at the canteen at recess time, when hundreds of little girls would shout “Manang manang manang” at the beleaguered attendants behind the snack counters. And the ire of the teacher when we corrected her spelling of “yacht” and she tried to intimidate us by summoning the dictionary.

Other cut-rate madeleines: Hi-Ro, Hello, Mallows, Flat Tops, Curly Tops.

Actual madeleines are sold at Brasserie CiCou in Greenhills. Butch says there’s a Japanese bakery near Metropolitan Avenue Makati that makes madeleines, but they’re more Murakamian than Proustian.