Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 63

Tonight on Teditorial: Teddyboy Locsin takes on Duterte

Fell deeds awake. Now for wrath. Name-checks the Vikings, Tolstoy, Proust, T.S. Eliot. Words matter.

Chilis and traffic

Chilis in a celadon bowl by Butch Perez Atasco (Traffic jam) by Jay Lozada

The card catalog is officially dead.

Read it in The Smithsonian. I want one of those card catalog shelves. They’re the perfect size for keeping small things, like earrings and hairbands, even eyeglasses. A couple of years ago, when Chus was in New York, I asked him to go to the New York Public Library and take a picture of the […]

Vinyl: When rock and roll ruled the world

The two-hour premiere is actually the newest film by Martin Scorsese, and it feels a lot like Goodfellas. A grisly murder is committed, a body is stuffed in the trunk and driven to the suburbs, and when the trunk is slammed you expect someone to look at the camera and say, “As far back as […]

The Huntsman: Winter’s War is pretty and pretty pointless.

Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron in one of their many scenes that look like spreads for Vogue Antarctica I’ve never seen Frozen, but I suspect they ripped it off.

Jake Gyllenhaal continues his quest for awesomeness in Demolition

Jake Gyllenhaal continues his quest to have the widest-ranging body of work among his peers in Demolition, a comedy about grief by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild). Jake plays a Wall Street guy who loses his wife but does not know how to grieve or be angry. So everything becomes a metaphor to him. […]

Happy Birthday, Drogon! Today he is The Oracle.

We don’t know Drogon’s exact date of birth. He just showed up on our doorstep three years ago, when he was about a year old. Shortly afterwards our eldest cat Koosi died at age 14, and following the Roman Church’s practice of taking a date of significance to the pagans and assigning it to a […]

Daredevil vs The Punisher, Elektra, Foggy and everyone in Season 2

In the first few episodes Jon Bernthal makes us think the show is called Marvel’s The Punisher. DAREDEVIL, the vigilante of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, is not the biggest badass in this season of the Netflix series that bears his name. He’s not even the second. More like the fourth or fifth. However you may […]

Is this poem racist, or is it mocking foodie culture?

Chow mein photo from norecipes.com Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet? by Calvin Trillin Have they run out of provinces yet? If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret. Long ago, there was just Cantonese. (Long ago, we were easy to please.) But then food from Szechuan came our way, Making Cantonese strictly passé. Szechuanese […]

Signs that The Singularity is here: AlphaGo has something like intuitive sense

Since the earliest days of computing, computers have been used to search out ways of optimizing known functions. Deep Blue’s approach was just that: a search aimed at optimizing a function whose form, while complex, mostly expressed existing chess knowledge. It was clever about how it did this search, but it wasn’t that different from […]