JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Mat profile, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

Mat refused his breakfast this morning. In my house, this is a sign of the apocalypse. His tongue was peeking out of his mouth, and he went inside his carrier to be alone. I called the vet and after we ruled out anything serious, she said he probably has a cold. She recommended vitamin C drops for babies.

When he saw the medicine dropper he dashed away very fast, so he wasn’t weak or anything. I am an expert at administering vitamin drops to cats, I had practice with Koosi. A few years ago she was a little skinny, so the vet prescribed children’s vitamins with iron to improve her appetite. What you do is, you grasp the scruff of the neck with one hand and with the other, put the dropper in the cat’s mouth and squeeze. Mat was cranky, but he took the vitamins.

By 4pm Mat still hadn’t eaten, so I was getting worried. Then it occurred to me to offer him canned cat food, which has a stronger smell than kibble. In case he couldn’t smell because of the cold. He ate the entire can of tuna cat food. So we’re all fine.

The vitamin C drops reminded me to get an update on Ely’s condition. Last I saw him, he said his cardiologist told him he had a vitamin C deficiency, so he takes 5,000mg everyday. I called his manager, Day, who said Ely had an angioplasty today. He had chest pains during the concert and was rushed to the hospital. Tests showed it was not a heart attack, it was exhaustion and emotional stress. Further tests showed that an artery had some blockage, so an angioplasty was done. (He had angioplasty on two arteries last year following the heart attack. Since then he’s changed his lifestyle, and when I saw him and Diane a month ago, he looked younger than he did when the Eheads’ first album came out.) Day says he’s up and eating well. But this makes a heavy gig schedule unlikely.

 

Louvre photo by Rickyv, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

The winner of our caption-writing contest is lance, for not stating the obvious. That’s winner, not wiener. Please email your complete postal address in the Philippines to urban.matthias@gmail.com, and we’ll send you your prize.

Rouge Assassin, originally uploaded by saffysafina.

Snapped last year at a mall cineplex. Didn’t watch the movie, but I’m guessing it’s a fight to the death using cosmetics.

Where was it that I read that Facebook members spend an average of three hours a day on their Facebook accounts? I don’t know how they arrived at that number, but from personal observation it sounds correct. You go online to check some statistics, but before you do you decide to take a peek at your Facebook, it won’t take five minutes. You take note of the number of your friends, gloat at how many more friends you have than your friends (or wonder why you don’t have as many friends as they do), approve and disapprove requests for your friendship, send out toasts and pokes, check to see if your crush in high school is on Facebook, and before you know it, five hours have passed and you still don’t have those stats. 

I’m not on any social networking sites, but a few years ago my sister told me that there were three Jessica Zafras on Friendster. We knew they did not just happen to have the same name, because they used my column photo. I suspect they were little gay boys, who constitute a large part of my readership. My sister lodged a complaint, and I don’t know what happened after that.

Today a friend was telling me about looking up his high school crush on Facebook. He found someone with the same name, and checked out the photo. It was clearly not his old crush, but this other person was very attractive, so he decided to “friend” him anyway. Do you ever wonder how many people out there have the same name as you, and whether they’ve ever been mistaken for you?

It makes sense to be familiar with your namesakes, in case they become famous or, more importantly, infamous. Grover just mentioned that the immigration hold orders at airports don’t include dates of birth, so if you happen to be a namesake of someone who cannot leave the country, you’re not going anywhere, either. You’ll need a certificate to prove that you are not in fact that person. I know at least five Michael Tans, there must be a dozen William Chuas, and so on. 

Anyway, I thought of this experiment. Go to Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site, and find out how many people have the same name as you. Then send them all this message: “ARE YOU ME?” The next time they check their accounts, they will receive messages apparently from themselves, raising a question of identity. It’s ontological! It’s epistemological! It’s freaking weird!

If they reply to your message, be sure to let me know. Maybe you could be friends. Or you could be more than friends—you could date each other. You and yourself, it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

Write that caption, originally uploaded by saffysafina. 

What are Jay and Carlo talking about? Believe it or not they were discussing the dimensions of a cake Carlo was going to bake, so get your head out of the gutter. Still, this picture lends itself to all sorts of speculation, so write your own caption (or an entire conversation, if it’s a slow day at work). Example: “I think we can build a small hadron collider. . .”

Post it in Comments before Thursday. The author of the caption chosen by Jay and Carlo gets a hardcover copy of The Passion of Artemisia (Gentileschi), a fictional biography of the Italian baroque artist, by Susan Vreeland.  

Irony-on T-shirts, originally uploaded by 160507.

Brilliant cartoon, makes coffee spurt out of nose.