Fantasy What's a fantasy. What purpose does it serve? We devote large parcels of our lives dreaming these up and chasing after them. It parallels the pursuit of evening shadows that keep getting farther away till all fades into dark. We are unique as humans; meat mated with minds. We seek simple pleasures adorned by the mind's inventive tassels. If we are to strive for a consciousness not made murky by the fumes of desire arising from the more animistic parts, should we strip down fantasies into their elements to dissolve and delusions that block our view?

We chase fantasies all through our young adulthood. We might be far too self-absorbed to realize so, only to be forced to look through someone else's lens later on. Does that happen? I hope it does! Fantasies in movies, especially Bollywood ones, are absolute sucker punches derived from squeezing together every attribute attractive to man or woman. What do the people sitting in projector beam lit dark of the theater lust after? The stud with the expressive eyes and malleable facial expressions that constantly morph into quasi-equilibrium facets of love, stable barely long enough for us label before melting away? Or do they lust after the gorgeous girl who interestingly is often boringly attractive. The fantasies peddled to men seem far too predictable, and often nothing beyond the physically attractive. Brat packs sell independence and a surfeit of sex, which is again boring. Fantasies peddled in the package of the male protagonist are far more interesting and, it seems, numerous. A studly stubble, alternating with a clean chiseled chin, and abs if this is the post millennial generation--the older ones only needed anger and passion lasered from smoldering eyes. A glamorous occupation that allows for an indie fashion sense, some sweeping shots that zoom in from panoramic expansion into the intense and commandeering facial twitches of the actor. Then, more sweeping shots of starkly sterile European streets and the Alps and skyscrapers, a layering of machismo enabled by a fleet of stunt performers, and the deal clinching voice of Sukhwinder Singh. You have this fictional construction that absolutely hits every key on the neural keyboard and is enthralling, and continuing to hold you in thrall long after in the warmth of this figment's memories. Interesting, this thing that exists only in the interiors of our minds holds us so powerlessly captive. Is this unreachable fiction pulling us taut in different directions, or a balm that soothes the rude impression reality has made on our skins. Are we still that delicate and body-bound that things can so easily prick us so? Do fantasies disappoint us by providing an illusory context to reality? Or do they help keep our dreams, and by extension us, afloat by making vivid a hope that compels us to trudge on? And what is to be made of the weird misery of one who actually has it all? Or the placid hesitation of one who suddenly wakes up realizing any more would be in surplus?  ¶ 12:32 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  A pointed puzzle Here are two trend graphs for the same search phrase, but one for the US, and the other for the UK.







Can you guess the search phrase?

What data corpus would you need to automate the detection of this search phrase? That is, assuming you were looking to spit a plausible answer based on a high regression coefficient or something of that ilk.  ¶ 1:57 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The suspect messenger Sordid reality behind Dubai's gilded facade

Interesting article. I usually find the comments on such articles a little less prone to sampling bias; they offer the usual dissenting counterpoint and nuance. The truly interesting and amusing thing about the article is the author's domestic saga (assuming it is the same guy). And no, I am not going all Ad Hominem on him, for this. Found this dailymail screed by his ex-wife grousing about his marital infidelity and remarriage to a hot young thing. Reading the middle-east article, I had this vision of a young Britisher, possibly fresh enough to be outraged by the serrated edges of capitalism, but no, this guy seems to be quite the old English rogue.

And this one has many more interesting comments. Outrage is always more illuminating :)

How could my ex-husband Rod Liddle give his young floozy the white wedding I was denied - and make my children lie about it  ¶ 4:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  A review of Create Your Own Economy You can also find the review here. On skimming this book, your first reaction might be bemusement. What does this book have to do with the economy, when the most common theme threading the rather diverse chapters is autism? Only reading through will finally make you realize that the economy Tyler Cowen talks about is not the one defined classically ( and now in its death throes ?), but the one that broadband connectivity and non-rival goods have made possible. The goods we consume are increasingly virtual, indestructible in that they are bits of information, and yet ephemeral in value because of the low latency of cultural communication. Stuff becomes too passe, even retro-chic perhaps, all too soon. Lolcats are so 2008.

How does one cope in this new economy defined by the transaction of small cultural bits like Youtube videos, phatic Facebook status updates, blogs, and tweets? Tyler Cowen suggests that people endowed with autistic cognitive styles, and he self-identifies as one, are well positioned to take advantage of this incarnation of the economy.

Much like his blog Marginal Revolution, which is remarkable in its eclecticism and frequency of updates and perhaps demonstrative of the information ordering abilities of an autistic cognitive style, the book offers a smorgasbord of cultural bits, but these bits also ultimately make for a meaty thought stew. In ten diverse chapters, Cowen flits from a comparison of marriage to modern culture, to an analytical demonstration of Sherlock Holmes's autistic ways. Rather than simply and linearly describing the chapters, I will point to some of the many bits that interested and provoked me into exploring further.

Cowen suggests that "culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And ultimately, it has become nobler as well an more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life". There's obviously no mathematical derivation of this statement, but it plausibly extracts meaning from the dizzyingly fast changes broadband connectivity have wrought in the last decade. Youtube may have pushed attention spans downwards; The New York Time recently reported on how even porn has had to do away with its already minimal narrative to accommodate the new distribution channel and its consumptive consequences. However, Youtube also allows us to (almost) costlessly glimpse a one-man-band street performer in Croatia or an exceptionally talented Filipino amateur's mashup of the NBA playoffs (look for renhigotrare). At the risk of making this argument uni-dimensional, it is in ways increasing the variance of cultural quality we can experience, while possibly lowering the mean. Is that true? Who knows, the internet just got started with us.

The internet also already is a recognizable if distant cousin of the experience machine postulated by Robert Nozick that Cowen discusses elsewhere. Nozick wondered if we would choose fantasy over reality if this machine delivered fantasies tailored to dovetail into the most deep-seated of our desires. The old blue pill or the red pill question; will we crowd out the real organic world with a dense and enveloping collage of these cultural bits? Cowen's critique is reflected in the 11.5 million World of Warcraft players who log in daily to inhabit a fantasy landscape, slay monsters, and complete magical quests. We are perhaps neurologically diverse enough to allow for every argument and critique to find supporting exemplars. Cowen does suggest this, and possibly comes closest to describing why the book concerns the economy, in stating that "more and more art forms will be directed at pleasing people with unusual neurologies as cultural production becomes more diverse".


Most intriguing of the hypotheses in the book is the "audacious" prediction offered in the last chapter. Disclosing it will be a disservice to you and the author--pick up the book if only for this one--but it does remind me of the short story The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges. In it Borges describes the predicament of Troglodytes who, escaping the inevitability of death that makes us precious and pathetic, become ascetics devoted to the now unparalleled complexity of thought. Cowen offers a related, economic analysis inflected take on the future of the universe itself.  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Regrettable Reviews In this advanced age of low-latency connectivity, one must really strive hard to find objects to derive pleasure from. Luckily for me, and similar others who derive a certain thrill from schadenfreude and gleefully stabbing at others' mistakes, I've discovered a new hobby: Finding negative reviews of iconic movies fit to be part of the canon. Check these out.

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

...soars with its feet in the air -- the rest crash-lands.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

Silly and dense!

Any guesses on the movie under the microscope? Here's another hint.

A blast of Holly-Kong glitz that never approaches the stylistic cohesiveness of, say, John Woo's Face/Off or the charisma of that film's propulsive star John Travolta.

....

It is the tenth anniversary of this movie. To have watched it back then, and not come away delighted, you had to be something of a ... I think the other gleefully obnoxious folks commenting on the rotten reviews piece the answer together.

How much of this appreciation is a positive feedback reinforcement of a good movie? Does it truly rise above greatness on its own merit, or is it propelled into the rarer atmosphere by consumers hungry for epochal anchors?  ¶ 4:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Tittering about twitter? My initial thoughts on T when it came out were that it should be pit in ridiculousness rumblemania matchup against that other dead-on-arrival video blog-comment enabler seesmic (It allows blowhards in pajamas to scrunch into a camera and pontificate; after 12 million dollars they realized there wasn't yet a market for such exalted levels of narcissism).

Why, I wondered, would anyone be interested in something as banal and vain. While I am sure there are geniuses who can consistently condense wisdom into 140 character gems, about 9 billion of the rest aren't.

And yet, Twitter rocketed into the public sphere. Some dude on CNN stands by a screen with scrolling tweets and shags. Or something like that, I've only watched it on mute in Airports, restaurants, and my gym.

And then, Oprah, the one remaining arbiter of monolithic cultural significance, launched into it. The twitter subscription graph looks like a cliff upside down. Given all this madness, I was compelled, obliged by my duty towards sharp and current cultural critiques, to give it a try. And so I fleshed out yet another digital avatar, epigrammasai

After about a month of sporadically trying this new protocol, and trying to make sense of it, I still think the Onion article was on the mark.

But that's too cavalier. I don't have friends who twitter much, and following celebrities--I followed Mindy Kaling and Neal Gaiman, both literary spark plugs in their own right. And then I unfollowed. Their everyday banalities are not much more interesting. --. Yes, to continue, following celebrities was a drag. But then again, I am not the kind who reads People and I suspect that their readership might attribute a higher value to this magnified and possibly unfiltered view that celebs permit.

Also, twitter is the first protocol that allows for a supereasy way to track the number of people interested in you, and celebrities who transact in the currency of fame must find this intoxicating, even necessary. Blogs have RSS feeds and webpages have counters, but you need to be somewhat of a technophile to understand and use these (And that explains why RSS never really took off). Twitter on the other hand has a detailed viewership count built in. CNN and that Demi Moore plaything even engaged in a visible risible fight to follower count supremacy.

Twitter obviously helped spread the word on the Iran election aftermath, but even this shows how the underlying protocol could be focused better. What twitter aided could simply be allowed by baking in an option of publishing texts made by any and every mobile user. These could be anonymyzed by default (How do Twitter identities help anyways?). Twitter's true strength shine through when instant, decentralized group formation is required, whether at the small scale of organizing meetups of a few tens or protesting unfair elections by the tens of thousands. Groups and group identities coalesce and melt in the space of a hashtag. That truly is revolutionary.

And yet, on a daily basis, Twitter's perhaps useful in broadcasting links (but I have Reddit for that) or narrowcasting links (I don't have a fan following. Yet) or sharing links (My friends shoo my emails into spam folders anyways). Ardent twitterers must therefore be tweeting for some other reason. Is it the most effective way to navel gaze and communicate in some new age form of a constant celebratory campfire? Omphaloskeptic, now here is a pertinent username for you if you are inclined to dive in.
In the interest of objectivity, I must perhaps add a counter explanation. It is also possible that my extreme levels of narcissism were offended by the lack of interest in my tweets as demonstrated rather cruelly by my stagnant follower count. (Such a cold lack of interest hasn't stopped me from blogging, and I've valiantly hung on for five years! But then there's no cold harsh negative feedback of reader enthusiasm that I cannot ignore...)

And finally, an exciting new development in my life means that I will have to use Twitter in the future and must continue to restrain this pessimistic sour grape sentiments and chug along.

Oh wait, that wasn't final. I have also observed a healthy number of Af-Am twitterers, more than I've ever stumbled across in blogs. Is this simply because searching on Twitter is far easier and allows for effortless access to people's networks? More grist for this profitless publishing mill...

Update: And what do you know? After having snobbishly railed against its uselessness in Pundit-like fashion, I am now hooked to the million specks of phatic beeps it continuously pipes into my browser. It really is the rawest precursor of Matrix-ian brain plugs isn't it? As some commenter on marginal revolution said, it still does seem like all positive externalities and no play making @Jack an accidental altruist.  ¶ 11:50 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The Chasedown Noun Chasedown
1. The chilling spectacle of a supremely gifted predator calculating the precise twin trajectories of itself and its lithe prey before launching its shiny unfurled musculature into the skies and ripping the very life force from the bewildered prey's grasp. Also very dispiriting for other conspecifics watching helplessly from the sidelines.

  ¶ 3:41 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Building boundaries from bits: class and distinctions in this digital age Miguel Garcia, a class valedictorian accepted by 13 eager colleges, felt like an outsider at Harvard and Boston.com explores the reasons. The reason is predictable and yet poignant when seen through his eyes. Class disparity. Scholarships are not immediate levelers in a world inundated with numerous methods of signaling--seasonal junkets, clothing, transportation, you name it and there is an exclusive and exclusionary way to indulge that it. Cultural transplants face this too, though it might not strike one as prejudiced. All this is by way of introducing not the article over at Boston.com, but the rather fascinating diversity of opinion in the comments section. Some empathize with Miguel's struggle, while others snicker at the tragedy! of not being able to afford a suit as they remind Miguel to look at the bigger picture in which he inhabits that most desirable island of elites, an address that is sure to open all kinds of doors later. ( And still other commentators sniff a an anti-Harvard bias in these articles of this kind.)

Why are so many differing perspectives held? Or to have a different perspective on that question, why are all these people right? Humans are labeling fetishists, and yet rail against otherness. The general unspoken and strongly held consensus is: Exclusion is wrong especially if it is done on the basis of wealth. Brash Boston Brahmins. And yet we readily glue multiple labels on, even literal ones like brands, and feel free to typecast on their basis. It may even be necessary to prevent a cognitive overload. How can you greet every stranger with tabula rasa and patiently tabulate his or her characteristics without recourse to any guesses. Labels allow guesses and we are constantly refining our own labels to make it easier for people to guess our location in the culture space. Some labels like intelligent and knowledgeable are acquired, while others are stiched on, maybe loosely, at birth. Acquired labels for reason are more defensible and people have no qualms about bashing others over the head with these. I do this myself when I see moronic comments on Youtube. Perhaps I shouldn't, or perhaps I should better understand the true reasons for this disdain.

Labels allow us to gravitate faster towards a community based on commonalities. Is it wrong for physicsts to interact mainly with physicists? Or Scrabble enthusiasts, or knitting fans? Class provides similarly ready labels, but these are harder to acquire, or at least were, but they stand for commonalities nonetheless. And all these different forms of shared understanding and appreciation seem to provide that same warmth of connection and allow for that state of flow us social beings need. Those who support and empathize with Miguel seem to share a background, while those who do not see Miguel as a different grain hewn from the same rock. It is scale-space theory applied to society.

The digital society makes it so much easier, dizzingly easier, to erect and formalize communities, connections, and boundaries that the question of otherness pops up more often. The comments section on the Boston article allows these different perspectives to wrestle and recognize difference. Pornographic websites force the entire spectrum of sexual identities into visual arrays, asking consumers to piece together their own, and Facebook compels us to recognize and approve any sentiment of connection another individual might perceive by friending him. Twitter breaks this symmetry and allows us to follow and peer in, but also creates and defines transient commonalities every second with hashtags and searchable labels. Where are we headed? Will this ebb and flow of friction between boundaries lead to an understanding of this fundamental need to connect allowing for more fluid and (for lack of a better word) compassionate understanding, or isolate us into ever small groups ending in the unit cult? Repositories of cultural fragments like Youtube allow everyone to join in, but embedding of these cultural fragments in walled gardens and moated forts allows for a shared stagnant identity that one can luxuriate or wallow in. What will we make of these dueling forces?  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Entertaining Excerpts (Morbidly)

Baechler described 4 distinct types of suicide: escapist, aggressive, oblative, and ludic. The ludic type is subdivided into the “ordeal” and the “game.” The “ordeal” refers to risking one’s life to prove oneself to oneself or to seek the judgment of others. He postulates that participants in Russian roulette desire to prove something by challenging probability: A “winner” of this activity is alive; survival rests in the hands of fate. The customary attributes of a successful sportsman, specifically, skill, bravery, and intelligence, play no role. Baechler’s suicide as a “game” involves the sole purpose of playing with one’s life in recognition of the chance of a fatality. The ultimate stakes of life versus death constitute the thrilling appeal of Russian roulette.

link Via Kottke  ¶ 12:52 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Dan Ariely: On our buggy moral code

Dan Ariely's Blog

Dan talks about the pitfalls of handling tokens that are exchangeable for money, but removed from the implicit affective relationships that have been forged with the concept of money. Credit card users surely face this. What is insidious about credit cards is that the motor action accompanying a purchase remains the same, no matter the amount being forked over. Real paper money forces you to make a stronger motor correlation. More money implies more bills, or bigger bills.

This effect might be stronger in those making the leap from cash to cards. (I suspect that there is also a perceptual difference (aside from the obvious factual one) between credit cards and debit cards. Do debit cards automatically elicit visual episodes of logging on to see dangerously depleted balances? ).

Technology, in making the process easier, may also make it easier for us to spend. In fact, it makes it easier for us to consume by eliminating or relegating the concept of spending to a quick swipe of a magnetic strip. Technology, however, can also help resuscitate the connection. Will an iphone app that automatically pops up your balance, not as a number, but as a bar or other spatial entity presented in the context of your preset savings goals, also shown as a spatial entity, nudge us into being a bit more careful? I guess it is interesting that these technological advances will have to come from outside the bank or credit card issuer as it isn't in their interest to make the consumer more prudent.

Update: Jonah Lehrer points to some studies that look at recklessness induced by the abstractions that are credit cards.

  ¶ 6:43 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Preemptive apologies for excessive basketballography But this has to be said. The NBA playoff adverts have been great. Last year's "there can only be one" series was directed by the creative couple behind Little Miss Sunshine. I haven't been able to discover the agency behind these :





The foreground figure extraction is beautifully done; wonder how they accomplish it.  ¶ 7:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Artest is Awesome   ¶ 11:36 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Entitlement Being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple. source  ¶ 7:02 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Funny tube copypasta 99.5% of all teens would cry if the Jonas brothers were on a 20 story building about to jump.The other 0.5% would bring a chair and popcorn.Copy and Paste if your one of those 0.5%

I just noticed while trying to attribute this that the Tube doesn't permalink comments. Why come? But this should be easy enough to Google.

I also just realized that I am not a teen anymore. Every passing second changes culture on the outside, and the neural webs on the inside. Bit by bit that teen spirit becomes distant, opaquer, and ultimately impenetrable. And thus the hour glass flips...  ¶ 6:33 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Sakshat, the ten dollar laptop Updated (see footnote)

Ten dollars? How are they going to pull that off? If the website that probably defaults as the homepage is any indication, they might ship this with a coarse screen or a no-screen TV pluggable. Text on TV screens is obviously a concern, and hence the absolutely bizarre synced narrative that sounds like it was mecha-turked to be read into cheap microphones?

Despite all that, this could still work. We are nothing if not ingenious in working around technological obstacles. What is the most common use of this laptop going to be? IIT Madras was involved in the project. If past projects are any indication, this will involve some crazy, creative, but ultimately workable hacks.

Western design is hobbled by aesthetic constraints. Developing nations can't afford that a lot of the times and something that just works, however pathetically inefficient it is, would still be a lot better than nothing. I know nothing of the OLPC design, but I would speculate that having it conform to current ideals of what a laptop is, added to the cost.

And now the government, or whatever sleazy agency was responsible for the 10 dollar stunt, has backpedaled and ordered 250,000 OLPC laptops. This is both infuriating and heartening. Infuriating because of the ineptitude it highlights, and heartening because the whole cycle starting at bombastic blunder and ending in a bashful backing off did not take the usual decade. But still, 250,000 OLPC laptops is a lot of money; the kind of amount that screams scam and ghapla when the Indian beauracratic machinery is involved. I am expecting some unexpected setbacks here.  ¶ 12:23 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  He's Attorney James Sokolove James Sokolove is an almost avuncular presence in my life. He was there for me when I first moved to Boston in 2002 and his soothing voice was still calming me and assuring safety right until I got rid of my TV sometime last year.

Every New Englander knows him from his ads on TV, but I never thought of Googling him to look up his back story, which turns out to be pretty damn interesting; goes to show that there's a tale under every unturned rock.

The most fascinating part? His firm doesn't actually take on any cases, but simply passes them on for a juicy affiliate fee to other lawyers who are too chicken to indulge in the (apparently) morally dubious business of advertising on TV!

Full Story


And, of course, the commercial on the Tube :)

  ¶ 11:57 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  What about the Baileys?

He first shone in the public eye when anointed a "hot prospect" while still in eighth grade, by Bob Knight. According to Wikipedia, he was drafted 44th by Indiana, and then cut after one year on the injured list. However, he is still big in Indiana.

Damon Bailey sounds like a nice, not-too-bitter guy though...

  ¶ 2:09 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The news distillation process The New York Times is publishing pro- skilled immigration articles to go along with Obama's political maneuvering. A recent article had this amusing, obviously exaggerated account of an engineer's ingenuity.

"the company’s map-making team faced a problem that even the best and brightest could not solve. Maps produced by the service were taking too long to download and appear on phones. Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. Mr. Mavinkurve used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering and an understanding of graphics [emphasis mine] to find a solution that had eluded the rest of the team."

Sharp-eyed Redditers are obviously not going to let something that juicy pass by unmolested :)

Redditer millstone provided this hilarious reconstruction of the editing process leading into the luminous outcome:

And, of course, this being Reddit, the Graphic Guru in question, Sanjay, stops by to corroborate the account :)

Sanjay here. This is exactly what happened. Completely serious. I was mortified when I read this!

link  ¶ 9:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Odd one out


Only one dog in this picture doesn't mind vegan hippie-enforced Yoga.

And it is not the one wagging her tail.  ¶ 10:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Watching hoops mashups on the Tube is my favorite between-work blocks indulgence. This Tubester has elevated a grungy basement genre into an artform.  ¶ 9:44 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Sampling Bias Bitten During summer vacations, Chamberlain worked as a bellhop in Kutsher's Hotel. Red Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics, spotted the talented teenager there and had him play 1-on-1 against Kansas University standout and national champion, B. H. Born, elected the Most Valuable Player of the 1953 NCAA Finals. Chamberlain won 25–10; Born was so dejected that he gave up a promising NBA career and became a tractor engineer ("If there were high school kids that good, I figured I wasn't going to make it to the pros").

From the Wilt Chamberlain bio. Many other interesting tidbits in there.  ¶ 3:34 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Playoffs!

Don't watch it here if you are not on a smartphone. The widescreen HD version is awesome.  ¶ 7:24 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Vikram Pandit and the Indian mafia The phrase Indian mafia does appear in the article. It was also used in a humorous, unknow  ¶ 2:58 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Ghettodawg Chamillionaire This latest offering from Danny Boyle is a visual feast. Set in gritty West Baltimore, the protagonist Jamaal comes of age during the crack epidemic of the early nineties. The director is unflinching in showing Jamaal's horrific childhood lived in sumptuously saturated shots of dilapidated brownstones, boarded doors, and urinated alleys. An 8 year old Jamaal fleeing the projects while his parents are being slaughtered by a rival gang, or Jamaal being subject to unspeakable sexual indignities during his time at a foster home-- Danny Boyle almost makes us squirm in our plush seats. But virtuoso that he is, the scenes are shot at a rapid clip and set to pulsating hip-hop beats that are synchronously lively and pop-menacing
Particularly magical and joyous are the scenes where Jamaal and his brother, after finding their way to New York City, manage to reinvent themselves as guides, picking up an impeccable east coast preppie accent in the process.
Oh Danny Boyle! An utterly unlettered black kid from West Baltimore donning an east coast preppie accent? You never fail to amaze!
The movie skirts surreality at all times and heartily indulges in the buffet of caviar battered fried chicken and magical realism when Jamaal manages to find his way into Regis Philbin's hot seat while working as a mortgage repackager at Fannie Mae. In a deliciously inspired sequence of lucky strokes, the questions asked of Jamaal resonate soundly with memories from his absent-childhood. Jamaal instantly recognizes Richard Wagner as the composer of The Ride of the Valkyries as that was the ringtone the drug dealers he worked with set up as a code on their burners.
And so, the movie titillates, pleases, pleasures, in ways so desperately sought in these uncertain economic times. As I gushingly committed my trembling pen and fluttering heart to pen an ecstatic review, the theater jived and grooved to the song sequence in the closing titles. Without giving too much away, I will add that Soulja Boy, High School Musical, and Miley Cyrus combine swimmingly well!

Siiigh  ¶ 12:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Slumdogs Article in The New Yorker by Katherine Boo

"...This was the marvel of many great twenty-first-century cities, including New York and Washington, whose levels of inequality now match those of Abidjan and Nairobi. Maybe they should have looked like [violent video game] Metal Slug 3. Instead, ingenious social constructions--democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences--were keeping things more or less in order."
(link)

Why is it that I haven't come across any Indian journalists writing about class resentment. Is it considered too obvious, simple-minded, socialist? Arvind Adiga's White Tiger does, but in an almost garishly caricatured fashion. And it is fiction. All that Valentine's day fundie brouhaha probably stems from some resentment towards the excessively rich and lavishly consumerist. India is only nascently capitalist and one can't attribute riches and assuage resentment by reminding oneself that the wealth being flaunted and uglily consumed was made justly and through channels open to all.
In India, that is still far from true.  ¶ 6:49 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Allen Stanford reveals the secrets behind his sucess 4. What event will touch off the next economic crisis?
Poor global leadership, nuclear or biological war, man's inhumanity toward man, greed, religious intolerance, exponential growth of human enterprises. I could go on, but they are all overshadowed by global climate change--the environmental time bomb that began ticking with the start of the Industrial Age. I am not talking about saving earth. I'm talking about saving civilization. For the next generation to have a future, we--as nearly 7 billion people living on a planet with finite resources--must immediately begin the process of restructuring the global economy before we reach the tipping point of massive market failure and the collapse of social, economic and government structure. I strongly encourage everyone to read Plan B 3.0 by Lester Brown. (More)

Via

I first became suspicious when I heard he was pouring money into a twenty20 match involving England. Picking the most boring international team isn't a sign of business savvy! :)
  ¶ 10:07 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The Indian Railway King: Hathi ko cheetah bana diya How did India’s Huey Long become its Jack Welch?

NEW DELHI—In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.

The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek....(More)  ¶ 12:01 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

  Dilution of quality in social aggregators   ¶ 11:27 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The art of the highlight reel This video so wonderfully captures the drama that is basketball; the greatness at its center and the rightful idolatry. NBA, like every other behemoth, might have been late to the Youtube cultural but they are catching up. I guess background mood music is another cultural fork that is here to stay; it runs right through LeBrawn's monologue.

  ¶ 10:50 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Deconstructing A Disgraced Chairman Indian journalists, and fledgling writers of Indian descent in general, have this amusing tendency to chunk words on the fly and repeatedly abuse these newly minted phrase. The terrorist attacks in India gave renewed vigor to that periodically dusted civic cry "Enough is enough", and now the Satyam controversy gives us disgraced chairman. This may have a lot to do with Indians (and perhaps other ex-colonies where English is lingua economica) coming in contact with more infrequent words in peculiar usage, and not having a more general definition of that word handy. Contrast this usage with the more diverse adjectival nomenclature applied in Bernie Madoff's case

Cognitive chunking of words into phrases removes conscious access to member words. The phrase becomes a convenient label for an event or a set of events, making it likelier for the event to be viewed non-introspectively in the guise of a spectator. The phrase disgraced chairman then makes it harder to introspect on the fall from grace and the commonalities it might share with traditional Indian business practices. Greasing official government cogs was a part of these practices. The high tech boom made us feel that with this new economic wave also swept out these parasitic practices, at least from certain arenas, but this saga of disgrace reminds us how hard it really is to wiggle these off.

Other instance of disgraced that have entered collective memory as a subconscious modifier are interesting too.



These are probably American trends, and almost all modify groups often in the focus of cultural battles. What does that tell us?  ¶ 12:56 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Witness, finally Lebron James was simply spectacular in last night's game against the Celtics. Boston's in a woeful slump, but that shouldn't detract from the intensity with which King James lorded over Pierce and the rest. They simply withered in the face of that relentless offensive onslaught and rebounding. Watch the play at 1:10 where he steals a pass from Pierce and then races back with two Celtics in pursuit, does a behind the back exchange to the left to cut one defender out, and then a left-handed layup from a crazy angle to beat the other one. Divine



recap at nba.com  ¶ 1:25 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Candidate Job Under Stimulus Employment Creation Program   ¶ 11:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post