JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Our latest books, Geeks Vs. Jocks—a collection of our articles on tennis, rugby and more death-defying games such as politics, and The Stories So Far, our new short stories, will be available at the end of the year in e-book form. There’s been a delay because we’re finicky, but they are definitely coming.

The print edition appears next year. Buy the e-book and get a discount on the hardback. Yes, hardback. (Our books have never appeared in hardcover, a lingering frustration we can now address.)

In the meantime, if you’re looking for holiday presents for friends who are sympathetic to the cause of World Domination or whom you wish to convert, or if you just need to stop thinking about what to get people for Xmas, give them the gift of Twisted. We’ll even sign the books for them.

Fill out the order form below and email it to saffron.safin@gmail.com. Our elves will get back to you within the day to confirm your order.

ORDER FORM – Twisted

You can pick up and pay for your orders at Nexus Technologies, G/F Don Pablo Building, Amorsolo St (between De la Rosa and Rufino Sts), Makati City, near Makati Medical Center. Part of our sales will go to Nexus’s Yolanda Relief Fund.

This offer is good till 30 December 2013 or until our stocks last.

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Thank you for your inquiries. Each book (newsprint, brand new) is Php200. Yes, we can ship complete sets of Twisted (10 books) abroad, provided all the books are in stock. If you’re ordering Twisted from another country, you should probably buy at least 10 books or the shipping cost will exceed the cost of the books.

Babagwa by Jason Paul Laxamana (Boboy says it’s BA-bag-wa, not Ba-bag-WAH or Ba-BAG-wa) is a movie about internet scam artists who find their marks on Facebook.

Our friend Renly is an IT guy.

So we asked Renly to review Babagwa from the perspective of an IT professional. Kind of an expert opinion.

Babagwa reviewed by Renly the IT guy

I ended up multitasking as I was watching the screener. Sorry, we IT professionals tend to work this way. I guess the only way to do this is in bullet points.

Okay, so:
* Nice, a Pinoy movie about catfishing!
* I liked Greg, Marney, and Neri. They seemed like real people.
* People catfish for a variety of reasons; too bad the filmmakers picked the least plausible one (for money) as the primary motivation in the film.
* They could have spent more time showing different catfish techniques and behaviors…Sana tinodo na nila. An explicitly gruesome ending for the scammer as a sex slave, de lata (sa steel drum) or stewed genitalia (soup No. 5) would’ve been more interesting to me.

We should have Quick Change reviewed by a transwoman, Badil by a small-town election operator, The Guerilla is a Poet by an NPA rebel, Sonata by an opera singer, Ang Turkey Man ay Pabo Rin by a Pinay married to a foreigner, Puti by an art forger, and so on.

An on-again-off-again scandal that the Italian press has called VatiLeaks burst into the open on Friday with the arrest by Vatican gendarmes of a man, identified in news reports as Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, who the Vatican said was in possession of confidential documents and was suspected of leaking private letters, some of which were addressed to Pope Benedict XVI.

The arrest follows by a day the ouster of the president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, amid conflicts over how to bring the secretive institution in line with international transparency standards and days after the publication of a sensational book, “Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI,” in which the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, aided by “Maria,” discloses a huge cache of private Vatican correspondence, many revealing clashes over the management at the Vatican bank and allegations of corruption and cronyism.

Read In Vatican scandal, a whodunit of a suspect in the NYT.

Granimator wallpaper by RickyV

What line/s from any of our books, columns, articles or blogs would you like to see on a T-shirt?

P.S. “I’m not doubting your honor, I’m denying its existence” would look great on a T-shirt. We would buy that T-shirt in all available colors. Unfortunately we don’t own that line, George R.R. Martin (or HBO) does.

We mean something we wrote ourselves. Sorry.

The coffee with readers at Caffe Nero on Tooley Street was so much fun that it became dinner at Nicholson’s on Southwark by the river and ended with drinks at the 184-year-old Globe Tavern on Bedale Street off Borough. Not bad for a bunch of people who had just met. Here we are at the Globe (from left): Will, Cielo, me, Tess, Anthony and Shivaun. Not in photo: Claire, Ryan and Bodhi.

Thanks for the company and the stories! Everyone who turned up at this meet-and-greet works in the mental health, nursing and biomedical sectors, so it was just like group therapy.

According to Will this elevator at Canary Wharf appears in the Jude Law movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Caffe Nero on Tooley Street near Tower Bridge, 4ish to 7ish. (Ooh near a dungeon! Perfect venue.)
We have your books (if you made a reservation). If you didn’t, come anyway for the chitchat and you can claim your book in Manila.