If aliens were observing social patterns of earthlings, their report would read something like this - the younglings discard waste products from their intestines, which are emitted out through fissures on the back of their bodies. Curiously the male's social standing among other human beings is determined by how many times, how quickly and how desirously he cleans the youngling's intestinal discard. Cleaning the backside of younglings and removing intestinal waste with passion and love shows that the male is progressive, sensitive, caring and responsible.
Humor is Hard
As the suicide bombers killed the infidels and went to heaven, they were not unhappy that the virgins were not veiled.
Treating Kids
I grew up in a drastically different environment in India. I was slapped in school by the teachers, at home by my parents. And I was a good student and quite obedient. The general understanding was that the teachers and the parents wanted to discipline their children and the stick did the trick. And this was normal as almost every kid was treated similarly. Growing up in a lower middle class family, my mom borrowed money for my monthly tuition. I didn't buy those 'group photos' clicked every year with all the students of the class. Most of the time I didn't even bother to inform my parents of it as it would cost them. The family of six slept in 2 rooms and my prized possession of a table lamp came in when I was 13.
I'm a strong advocate against force, be it verbal or physical towards children. It took some maturity for my emotional bruises to heal and see the love of my parents. But when compliments are used like 'pass the salt', what actually will the child think of itself? By treating every reading session an achievement, aren't we inflating the actual effort involved and thereby boosting the ego of the child? Do they even evaluate if their accomplishment is age-worthy? What would happen to their self-confidence when they're competing with much smarter kids later in life and there's nobody patting their backs?
Why?
Sometime after the 14-year-old retired actor and chimpanzee Travis Herold was shot and beheaded by Stamford, Connecticut, police in connection with an aggravated assault against 55-year-old Charla Nash, but before former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick finished serving a federal prison sentence for conspiring to violate the civil rights of dogs, South Korean scientists announced the birth of a beagle that glows in the dark.
One of Dorr’s examples is John Mays, Jr., a black juvenile sentenced in 1923 to an eighteen-year prison term for the attempted rape of a white girl. His employer, A. A. Sizer, petitioned the Virginia governor for clemency, arguing that Mays, who was religious and educated, “comes of our best negro stock.” His victim, meanwhile, “comes from our lowest breed of poor whites. . . . Her mother is utterly immoral and without principle; and this child has been accustomed from her very babyhood to behold scenes of the grossest immorality. None of our welfare work affects her, she is brazenly immoral.”
The reference to the mother was important. “Though Sizer did not directly impugn the victim herself, direct evidence was unnecessary during the heyday of eugenic family studies,” Dorr writes. “The victim, coming from the same inferior ‘stock,’ would likely share her mother’s moral character.” The argument worked: Mays was released from prison in 1930.
Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education, tolerance and building independent institutions such as a judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few Tehran-style protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing Iraq, they prefer stagnation to the chaos that change might bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent passivity. As our special report in this issue argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching consequences.
In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when.
* I don't have anything against long articles. If anything, I have a tiny bias towards them for they usually explore a topic in great detail. But when it comes to current affairs and observations, there's usually a lot of stuff going around and it's better when the word count is limited to 500. And The Economist does it superbly without losing any depth or clarity.
Slamming Open the Door
Cinema Liberties
Aghast
Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”
Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”
Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”
Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”
Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”
Arattai Arangam
Paid Analysis
But how else will they be different from the newspapers of today (or a couple of years ago)? What of value will be missing? The lists tend to reflect the subjective tastes of the listmakers. But typically these lists include 1) local and community news; 2) international news (in particular that iconic Baghdad bureau); 3) investigative and "enterprise" journalism at all levels; and 4) serendipity—stories you stumble across as you turn the pages of a newspaper. (No one seems overly alarmed about national news or about commentary and analysis of any sort. As a paid-up member of the commentariat, I note this bitterly but without comment. It would be hard to argue that there is a shortage of opinions on the Internet.)Mike, let me assure you. I'm alarmed. I know that the web is abound with opinions and a great chunk of them are unbelievably naive and absurd. Most of those who take news seriously invariably value the editorial page too. Although most of the opinion articles published today are reflections of their bosses' political/environmental/economic affiliations, they're nevertheless informed and present at least one side of the argument convincingly. And this is very important for me to stay away from confirmation bias. And in cases of columnists like David Brooks - a conservative writing for a somewhat center-left paper, their opinions and the comments that ensue for their pieces are too invigorating to be lost to a bad business model.
Silly Crazy
MSV: Swimming pool patheengala!
Mouli: Naan pakkadha swimming poola. America fulla swimming pooldhan.
MSV: Appa car ellam enga pogum?
Incorrigible
Olivia, as a Hindu I am glad that you say, “…Even on your skin, the diversity of bacteria is prodigious. If you were to have your hands sampled, you’d probably find that each fingertip has a distinct set of residents; your palms probably also differ markedly from each other, each home to more than 150 species, but with fewer than 20 percent of the species the same. And if you’re a woman, odds are you’ll have more species than the man next to you. Why should this be? So far, no one knows…”
Although the subject is vast, in brief, the above perhaps could help realize it as the basis also arrived at by the ancients who developed the art/ science of ‘Palmistry’ that is practiced since time immemorial. Each finger and gaps between those are believed to represent different members of our solar system such that both palms represent two hemispheres, eastern and the western. In which, in the males, the lines on the right palm are believed to represent his likely behaviour as an independent individual, while the left palm indicates the likely effects of other external influences during the life-span and, hence, need to read both palms and predictions made based on the predominant lines on either palms, whereas, in females, the reverse is believed applicable…
Why We Eat Junk
In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.
“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.
To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance....
If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.
Link via Amit Varma.Bollywood actor Shiney Ahuja's lawyer on Tuesday gave a new angle to the case, claiming that the victim of the alleged rape belongs to a lower caste, which is "aggressive" in nature....
Elaborating his version of "consensual sex", Shivde argued that if Ahuja had tried to rape the victim, she could have "definitely" resisted. "She belongs to a lower caste, which is aggressive by nature, and she wouldn't have submitted herself so easily. They are known for being aggressive," Shivde said.
Reviews, Length & Presentation
Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t.
Orwell is important here less for the topics he wrote about — although subjects such as poverty and oppression are obviously significant — than for the observational and anti-theoretical way in which he endeavored to write about them.
MJ
You are known as a liberal Muslim. Why don't you see the sexual emotions of hundreds and thousands of people around us? If your son or daughter would have been gay how would you have addressed the topic?If my daughter or son would have been such, I would have definitely counsel them. I would have explained them this is unnatural and inhuman. Because this will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race. This (legal right to have sex with the same sex) cannot come under the definition of 'freedom'. All kinds of freedom have some moral context or ethics. We have to follow those ethics.
Nature of Crime
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
Un-subtitled
On Reading & Writing
Anjali Arrives
Whoa
Facebook Bashing
Rare Voice
I smiled back: ‘Tell me brother Ashfaq, how did you respond to the 7/7 event in Britain?’
‘I prayed for the well being of all Muslims,’ he said proudly.
‘Of course, you did,’ I said, with a smile of resignation. ‘But, being a good Muslim, did you also pray for the non-Muslims who died in the suicide attacks?’
Ashfaq went into the trance mode once again. ‘Brother Nadeem …are you by any chance a non-Sunni?’
I laughed out loud: ‘Brother Ashfaq, are you by any chance an idiot?’
Ashfaq went all serious: ‘You don’t have to get offensive, brother.’
‘Ashfaq, what sort of a question was that?’ I said. ‘Am from this sect or a that sect of Islam? I was talking about something a lot more meaningful than sectarian.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Islam is for all mankind.’
‘Fine,’ I replied, ‘but how do you plan to prove this? Wouldn’t you rather set a more reasonable and intellectual example in this respect rather than a ritualistic one, or worse, a violent one, like that of the fanatics?’
‘I am not a fanatic,’ he said, his eyes now ogling repressed anger.
I offered him a cigarette.
‘I told you I don’t smoke,’ he said, politely pushing away the offer.
‘You may as well now,’ I said. ‘You have already missed your prayers.’He worriedly looked at his wrist watch: ‘That’s correct. I did.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I smiled. ‘You wont burn in hell for this.’
‘You are right, brother, I wont …’ he replied, and then in a quiet but foreboding tone, added: ‘But you will.’
On Government's Support for Arts
Today the [NEA] is careful to fund nothing more controversial than bilingual puppetry epics. And given the glut of cultural opportunities that now bedevil us, its status as a nurturer of the arts is less pronounced than its status as an agent of state-sponsored moral engineering. Now, it exists largely to reinforce the notion that musicals are somehow more inherently suited to nourishing the roots of our culture than sitcom pilots. That ballet is a greater part of our national heritage than burlesque. That mediocre opera singers deserve more support than our best gangsta rappers.
What are the ramifications of spending tax-payers money on encouraging a rapper who writes misogynistic lyrics and the beauty of getting high on drugs? Should the government support Seinfeld-like comedians to come up with Seinfeld-like sitcoms? Is 'what is art?' a less significant question than 'who defines what art is?' ? If 'art' & 'culture' is mainstream and if they already make money out of it, why should the government sponsor? What next, NEA supporting Hollywood studios?
But then, why do mediocre opera singers (never been to one) deserve a financial pat-on-the-back while thousands of wannabe-cinema-stars live in their cars? Is an older art form (ballet, 'classical' music, theater, etc) inherently a better form of art than today's (Hollywood, rap, video games, etc) even though the mass cannot understand or appreciate that? If something doesn't have an audience (or has a sagging audience) why should the government intervene and prop it up -- should not the market force do its job and wipe away what's not needed?
Ineffective Special Effects
[Ridley Scott's] aesthetic and political purposes are in tension: How upset can we be about a deadly explosion when Scott has labored so mightily to make it look cool? Though evidently intended to straddle the divide between action thriller and geopolitical fable, when pushed, Body of Lies tumbles into the former genre.I've often felt this director's divide between sticking to the flow & tone of the film and making the most of special effects. I've seen behind-the-scene works on what goes into creating a crash or an explosion. When so much money and time is spent by the stunt team, it only seems natural to justify their efforts by showing the 'action' from various angles, repeat with slow-motions. But if it's not an outright action movie whose target audience are juvenile boys, the multiple-angle-slo-mo shots only dilute the intensity of narration.
UO - 2
The motives for being so recruited to serve another country vary. The recruit may be in debt, in a bitter marriage, passed over for promotion, revolted by his own regime, or simply lust for a new life and plenty of money. He may be recruited through his own weaknesses, sexual or homosexual, or simply by sweet talk and flattery.
Intellectual Compartmentalization
We have a problem at the moment, which is that too few people go on from school to study science at university. The point here is not about making more scientists necessarily, but making more people who are competent to observe what's happening in science, to be interested in reading about it, to keep abreast of developments, to be excited by what is happening in science.He's concerned that there aren't enough people who are educated and/or interested enough to observe what's going on in our laboratories today. But wait, compare that with ISRO rocket scientists who invoke the blessings of Tirupati god before a space flight. Talk of intellectual compartmentalization; these guys are on top.
Informed Decisions
Food should be both sustenance and pleasure. The demand that we constantly check our desires against some government-imposed calorie-related target robs us of this joy, replacing it with guilt and fear instead; such schemes serve no other purpose than to persuade us that we must trust in the advice of the health authorities.Rob states that checking the calorie count robs us of the pleasure of eating and leaves us with guilt and fear. Does he mean that the average man has to eat more than the recommended calories/meal in order to derive pleasure out of eating? Rob's essentially implying that the government's stipulations for calories/meal are much less than what one needs to eat in order to remain healthy. Come on, we're dealing with first world countries and nobody (at least an overwhelming majority) is going to die of malnutrition.Rather than labeling everything we eat with calorie and fat contents, a far healthier attitude would be to leave us to make up our own minds about what we consume. We should be lickin’ our fingers, not counting calories on them.
This point rings close to this piece I wrote about a year ago -- how scientific authority is in some circles trying to replace moral & religious authorities. But now, I agree with one of the comments (by Viswanathan) there. He wrote "The shades of fun ( or pain) of owning up responsibilities can still be there, even under the illumination by science. Science can tell us the dangers of excess calories,or excess alcohol or that of tobacco. Knowing fully well the facts, one can still over eat, drink or smoke.The burden of responsibility is only heightened- not lessened- by knowledge."
There's nobody from the local health office sitting next to you watching how many calories you gobble when you stack up your double cheese burgers. You are warned, now it's upto you.
What Women Want?
In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that’s needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don’t aim at the mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of power and control, but they don’t, for the most part, manufacture wanting. And for men, they don’t need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn’t do much to create a conscious sense of desire.
.........
For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving.
The Joys of Senseless Regulations
Felony charge? Yes, technically a passenger tried to overpower an airplane crew. But what were the circumstances? I know that the lawyers are quite pumped up on caffeine in the U.S - anybody forget the Korean laundry owner who was sued $54 million over a lost pant? But not many know that the poor guy spent $100000 on fighting the law suit which eventually left him, obviously, poor, and drove him out of business. The law makers in the name of beefing up security can't disengage their common senses. Laws & rules help regulate the society. But their enforcements should be based on practical judgments.A man who says he desperately needed to use an airplane bathroom after eating something bad in Honduras faces a felony charge after being accused of twisting a flight attendant’s arm to get to the lavatory, the F.B.I. said.
Joao Correa, 43, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he had a bathroom emergency 30 minutes into a March 28 Delta Air Lines flight from San Pedro Sula to Atlanta but found the single coach aisle on the Boeing 737 blocked by a beverage cart. He said he asked whether he could use the lavatory in business class but was told no.
When the cart wasn’t moved after a few minutes, Mr. Correa said, he ran for the business-class lavatory. He said the flight attendant put up her arm to block him and he grabbed it to keep his balance.
Oddly Enough
A Russian karate expert has been charged with beating to death a 61-year-old woman and her son, whom he accused of infecting his wife with lice, an investigator said Friday.The drunk 26-year-old burst into a neighboring room in his hostel Tuesday and used karate moves to kill the pair, state investigator Eduard Abdullin said...
I know it's cruel to lighten up such a sad incident. But I wonder what the wife of the karate 'expert' said to him when he came to his room after killing them.
PS: I have the word expert in quotes because he can't be one. Karate and loads of other martial arts heavily insist on self-control and defense before you begin an assault. In fact, one of my schoolmates said that his karate master asked his students to run fast as they can if they find themselves in a confrontation / unfriendly situation.
Irony
Experimental Animals
Military researchers have dressed live pigs in body armor and strapped them into Humvee simulators that were then blown up with explosives to study the link between roadside bomb blasts and brain injury.Pigs as crash test dummies? Okay, so a safety assurance team strapped a living pig, pressed the accelerator pedal and let the car dash into a wall? The anatomy of a pig is so different from that of a human being, I wonder how a crash test and the injuries sustained by a pig provided meaningful information as to the relevant safety adjustments to be made for humans. In the other case, the military must have it's reasons. But from a layman's point of view, an armored pig blown away by a bomb will be torn away differently from that of a human being. I'm not sure how one can conclude the effectiveness of the armor from inferences based on pigs' brains.
......
U.S. car companies used live animals, including pigs, for crash tests until the early 1990s. They stopped after protests from animal rights groups.
PS: I'm not against using live animals for such experiments. We've had lab rats, rabbits, cows and pigs getting injected with new formulas before they're tried on human beings. I believe they have contributed to a lot of life-saving drugs in use today. And for most of the world, 'humane treatment' of animals is mostly in regard to cats and dogs not cows or chickens which end up on a lunch menu. (Yes, there are organizations that fight for decent living conditions and 'humane' killing techniques of these animals before they're cooked, but I don't see it far away from being an experimental punch-bag).
Recovery Trend
The most likely outcome is not a V-shaped recovery (which is the current official consensus) or a U-shaped recovery (which is closer to the private sector consensus), but rather an L, in which there is a steep fall and then a struggle to recover. A “lost decade” for the world economy is quite possible. There will be some episodes of incipient recovery, as there were in Japan during the 1990s, but this will prove very hard to sustain.Please note that there's no recovery in 'L', but only a struggle for recovery.
Dead Body of Knowledge
Someday, they’ll need to keep their cool when a baby is lodged wrong in a mother’s birth canal; when a bone breaks through a patient’s skin; when someone’s face is burned beyond recognition. Doctors do have normal reactions to these situations; the composure that we strive to keep under stressful circumstances is not innate. It has to be learned. The discomfort of taking a blade to a dead man’s skin helps doctors-in-training figure out how to cope, without the risk of intruding on a live patient’s feelings — or worse, his health. We learn to heal the living by first dismantling the dead.
The Chinese Control
As for what you can and cannot watch, watch what you can watch, and don't watch what you cannot watch.China has traded its citizens' freedom by promising steady growth. After all, the communist government executed the greatest transformation from poverty to middle-class in recorded history, all in less than 30 years. As it happens during every recession, the segment that was recently inducted into the middle-class will slide back and suffer most. It won't be just the loss of material things, but also a social identity - being able to send the kids to a better school, buy better dresses, live in a better house, drive a better bike - all of these will now undergo a downgrade.
Massive unemployment has many moving back from cities to the rural areas and they're not going to be happy to see their new found luxury disappear while their freedom remains stifled. Above mentioned quote reflects the attitude of the Chinese authorities. People put up with it as long as they kept pacing up the social/financial ladder. Now that the economy is taking them for a ride, I wonder how long will it be before a social unrest erupts. I've read news items reporting pockets of violence. If the government keeps crushing valid protests and overpowering the common man in all walks of life and also has the temerity to not responsibly address their actions, it will only be a matter of time before the next mass movement announces itself.
The Big Takeover
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"
But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
It Isn't Your Day Dear
But as terrified cashiers prepared to hand over a bundle of notes, Mr Stewart calmly walked up to the robber and said: "It's April the 1st isn't it mate? It's April Fool's Day".
When Davidson said to him "I've got a gun I will shoot you", Andrew replied "go on then shoot me" and grabbed the bag from his hands.
He opened it in front of staff and after seeing it was empty sat down and carried on reading his paper, Exeter Crown Court heard.
Davison fled the scene but was later arrested and has now pleaded guilty to affray.
Elegy
UO
Bharath Bhavan
I wait in their lounge for 15 minutes. I step out of the restaurant a couple of times just convey the management that I'm expecting someone and if only they would let me use their phone they could get my business. No, they're unmoved. After 40 minutes I tell one of the servers again that may be he's desperately trying to get to the restaurant and he needs directions - no, it's as if somebody's trying to get somewhere, not their place. After 50 minutes of sitting, standing, walking and flipping through junk magazines when I said that I'll have to leave, the guy at the counter said 'Okay'. This was immensely infuriating. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that if they had let me call, I would have guided my friend and they would have earned our business, not only this time, but subsequent visits too.
I've had bad experiences at many Indian restaurants in America. The most common complaint being the cleanliness of toilets - you're greeted with a smell that takes you back to some of the train stations in India. There's a marked difference in the way the servers treat Indians and Americans - smirk vs smile. They can't handle crowds - as the restaurant gets loaded, the wait time increases and the server snaps at your questions on how long it will be before you get your food. Sometimes I've had to ask multiple times for my water glass to be refilled. I've gotten my bill when I'm only half-way through my food. There have been cases where I was overcharged or given another party's bill. Of course there have been upset stomachs, loud TV, slippery floors without the 'Caution Wet' sign, buffet boxes that are empty... If only they could amend some of these complaints, the experience offered by an Indian restaurant would be richer.
Double-Game Players
Life & Times of Common Man - Now Available in Hardcover
When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it..One of the comments:
This is a brilliant idea. I have some old family diaries and love reading them - the loss of ephemeral daily information about life passing, not for me (or even my children) but for grandchildren is one of the things that worry me about the way I use sites like this..Clive Thompson, a blogger observes:
Every tiny piece seems daft or meaningless, but -- when you add them all up you get a curiously rich sense of someone's existence.This reminds me of the Up series:
The 'Up' is a series of documentaries that have been following a group of children who were seven years old (in 1964) for every seven years. It seems like wishful thinking for an average film enthusiast to be able to voyeur a handful of lives at periodic intervals.I'm not lamenting that the volume of our private spheres has shrunk and spilled into the public spheres. Of course, by blogging I'm opening up myself - I'm telling you all what I think of this and that. Twitter is the next level in exposure - what I'm eating now, where I went last night, etc. There's a strange sense of heaviness I feel.
Moral Financial Responsibility
After 9/11 Bush urges everyone to go shopping. China has been buying U.S treasury bonds left and right, the Federal Reserve has a relaxed lending standard all in effect making credit dirt cheap. The banks just wanted to dole out loans to anyone who would nod their heads. And nod, many did. A black woman from Southern California said "As I stepped out of church, these two guys came to me and said 'Your home loan is approved'. And I thought 'Hallelujah, it's a miracle' ". She bought it. One Mexican immigrant said it was his American dream to own a home and he didn't have to produce his tax papers or salary certificate. Just state his income and his loan was approved. Another family with 4 kids wanted to jump early on the home-owner bandwagon as the prices were skyrocketing.
The going was good. As the house prices kept going upward, these people refinanced their loans and built a swimming pool, bought furniture, paid off credit card debts, refurbished their backyard….. Had anyone sane seen this footage in 2006, it would still have been obvious that this was an accident waiting to happen. Buyers just assumed that their home equity is a balloon that'll never pop and they could live a comfortable life by not moving their butt, but by just refinancing their home loans. Wall St was ravenous, because small credit unions and municpalities and city mayors all over Europe who fully didn't understand what a CDO is or how safe/risky they were, just eagerly piled them up. As long as someone was buying, why stop selling, thought the financial engineers at Wall St. Eventually, sub-prime guys and the CDO buyers were slapped. As their house value collapsed and their mortgage loomed they realized they can't make their ends meet. The fine prints in their loan agreements were now emboldened - they had signed on to conditions that they weren't aware of previously.
This bubble and the growth associated with it is based on magical mathematical models. Nothing was invented or produced that could sustain growth. It was pure consumption made possible by the Chinese & Fed on the assumption that home values can only go North. Alan Greenspan said that he believed banks would regulate themselves in their own interest. As we now know, they were blinded by greed. He said that if he had raised the interest rate thereby choking the flow of credit, it would essentially have killed the economic engine and brought the unemployment rate to 10%, to which the Congress would definitely have not agreed. The SEC was on the sidelines when it should have been an active player monitoring and regulating. And the rating agencies stamped AAA on almost any derivative.
The black woman said "I'm stupid, but they (lenders) are guilty". No dear, you're not just plain stupid, you're humongously stupid, monumentally stupid, criminally stupid. Spend less than you earn - is that so whacky? Borrow money only if you can repay - is it nonsensical? If you're making the biggest investment of your life, like buying a home, why not read the fine prints in the mortgage document? The Wall St executive said, when asked if he felt guilty for making money on stupid people "No. Nobody put a gun to their head and asked them to sign the papers." That's right, but that also spotlights his moral blackhole. It's like raping a woman who is blind, deaf and mute. 'If you can easily get away, why not do it?' was his attitude. Technically, he can't be blamed as what he was doing was absolutely legal.
In Bruges
I'll borrow the services of IMDb's memorable quotes for this movie to relive the pleasure of the dialogues:
Ray: Murder, father.
Priest: Why did you murder someone, Raymond?
Ray: For money, father.
Priest: For money? You murdered someone for money?
Ray: Yes, father. Not out of anger. Not out of nothing. For money.
Priest: Who did you murder for money, Raymond?
Ray: You, father.
Priest: I'm sorry?
Ray: I said you, father. What are you, deaf?
I've heard such lines in other movies before, but the 'What are you, deaf?' is a part of characterization. Ray, brilliantly played by Colin Farrell, is doing his first job as a hitman and he's annoyed at having to answer him victim twice.
Here's another scene, this time Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and Ray are in a shootout and there's a pregnant woman in their middle. Now, since they both are men of principle, they wouldn't want to shock or harm her in any way. This is what they exchange
Ray: Harry, I've got an idea.
Harry: What?
Ray: My room faces out the canal, right? I'm going to go back to me room, jump into the canal, see if I can swim to the other side and escape.
Harry: All right.
Ray: If you go outside around the corner, you can shoot at me from there and try to get me. That way we'll leave this lady and her baby out of the whole entire thing.
Harry: You completely promise to jump into the canal? I don't want to run out there, come back in ten minutes, and find you fucking hiding in a cupboard.
Ray: I completely promise, Harry. I'm not going to risk having another little kid dying on me.
Harry: So, hang on - I go outside and I go which way? Right or left?
Ray: [upset] You go right, don't you? You can see it from the doorway! It's a big fucking canal!
Harry: All right. Jesus. I only just got here, haven't I? Okay, on the count of one, two, three, go. Okay?
Ray: Okay.
[long pause]
Ray: What? Who says one, two, three?
Harry: Well you say it.
Oh, it's brilliantly black.
Comedy IQ
The greater visibility of male comedians reflects a greater investment of intellectual energy by men of all walks of life in keeping each other amused. It is now a truism that men never talk to each other about things that matter. Most of what takes place when men are together is phatic communication, intended to build fellowship rather than intimacy. This kind of communication is sometimes derided by women as meaningless, but it is actually functional, because it draws the group together. Men who drink, play and joke together are boon companions, who hang together for fun. He laughs loudest who laughs last; one joke kicks off another. The man who cannot hold his own in repartee will even learn other men's jokes off by heart, so that he can fill a void in the general banter. Women famously cannot learn jokes. If they try, they invariably bugger up the punchline. The male teller of jokes is driving towards his reward, the laughter of his mates. The woman who messes up the same joke does so because her concentration is not sharpened by that need. She is not less intelligent, simply less concerned.Though sense of humor is innate, boys, well before they become men, work on creating and polishing jokes - making up situations, delivering them with a certain flair, one-line quips and sometimes even slapstick. Not generating laughs could be taken as a failure of one's execution, which is why men assess the humor level of the audience in a party before they delve into their lines. When they find someone else on a roll they just don't barge into the joke-fest, but instead play a wait & watch game starting with a few 'accompanying lines' that acknowledge the other person's quality of humor. If a joke doesn't click on live performances, stand-up comedians make fun of those bad jokes and ridicule themselves as a form of saying sorry.
I've met some funny women and they all were naturals. They weren't keenly bent on making me laugh, but it was just the way they spoke that carried us into a funny situation. Germaine affirms my belief that women aren't as funny as men because they simply don't care much about the success of their jokes. Just like any art, humor is improved through practice. And men practice. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view: men with a good sense of humor are perceived to be socially adept by women, which in a twisted way translates into the man's ability to make a living and hence a stable relationship. This is one area where emotional investment from a man is generally greater than that of a woman.
Medical Technology Vs Empathy
Ah, Death, you son of a bitch. You and your brothers, Disease and Aging, have tormented us since we became aware of Time. And we have worked like crazy trying to develop ways of extending Time so as to hold off the inevitable.By likening the human body to a collection of cells Eric Fisch states that we have lost, or rapidly losing, our emotional and psychological faculties. We don't empathize anymore, he's afraid. I agree with him that the human body is a biological machine and the clock starts ticking the moment an egg is fertilized. But scientific advancements in the field of medicine have not merely delayed death but reduced suffering, prevented diseases thereby improving the quality of life. Technology has not only extended our stay, but made it more enjoyable.
..scientific advancements focus on rapid repair of malfunctioning parts...
Lower forms of this techno-wish are what fuel the beauty industry.
If the body can be made better by robotics will it enhance our ability to experience empathy?
We fetish-ize the idea of systemic and technological developments geared towards dealing with the problems of fixing our bodies but have only managed to obscure the emotional and psychological underpinnings.
I think of our emotional and our physical capabilities as somewhat mutually exclusive. Fixing the body has definitely not killed our ability to enjoy the sunshine, appreciate a movie, hate a pedophile... if someone were capable of these to begin with, when they step out of a hospital in a better physical condition, they should still be capable. Eric's ultimate accusation is that technology has made robots out of humans, which I think is baseless. You think of a kiss as a collision of lips and an exchange of saliva? Are love and hatred just electrochemical reactions inside the brain? Did you say that that girl acting crazy is just responding to hormonal changes?
Eric's thought that we should embrace disease, aging and death without any resistance is nonsense. Death is inevitable, but why is that we move away from a speeding car? His aversion towards the beauty industry (propped up by medical technology) is in logical progression. I don't know if he has only boob jobs in mind or also the 10-year old boy who suffered a third-degree burn and needs skin transplantation requiring the services of beauty industry. Does Eric realize that what people think about their looks affects their confidence, in turn their emotional faculties?
I was really surprised to see such a piece published in Edge - which aims for a third culture, an integration of scientific and literary intellectuals. I have no idea of Eric Fischl's accomplishments as a painter/sculptor. But this piece shouldn't stand beside Dawkins' and Dennett's.
Wired & Slate
There are so many questions, right after watching the CNN (What are mortgage backed securities? What's currency manipulation? Who is Keynes?) And there are answers on the web if a topic is perceived to be important. But there isn't much material online for questions that linger after watching Jay Leno. Funny & weird news items aren't taken seriously enough by the mainstream media. Slate & Wired are two among the handful of portals that are attentive to such marginalized audience who enjoy short, clear and easy to read articles on current affairs and culture.