Who is I?

You may wonder sometimes who is supposed to be saying the verses. Is it the Author, that strange but uninteresting person, or is it Christopher Robin, or some other boy or girl, or Nurse, or Hoo? If I had followed Mr. Wordsworth's plan I could have explained this each time; but as it is, you will have to decide for yourselves.

Padgett Powell's critically acclaimed new book The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? is composed entirely of questions - a provocatively mysterious one being Who’s asking the questions? Seriously, that is a thought which could keep me up at night: in a work of fiction that is not written in the first person, who is the omniscient narrator?

In works of journalism and non fiction, we can often easily assume that the narrator and the author are one and the same; we can also easily accept that the thoughts in poetry belong to the poet. The water gets somewhat murky when one turns to narrative fiction, though. Is the narrator some kind of a god of the universe being described in the book? (It would not be irrelevant to note at this point that some of the earliest works of fiction written by humanity is literally considered the be the word of god.)

My friend Dylan would probably scoff - 'because fiction is an artifact, the narrator is simply the narrator', he would say, refusing to assign any greater ontological depth to it. I am not sure I agree completely, though. In fact, I would probably posit that the search for a self in the narrator lies at the heart of much of postmodern literary philosophy & techniques.

P.S. While we are on the subject, I was watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail the other day and it struck me again how this near-perfect gem can serve as a primer for those interested in the use of postmodernist techniques in popular culture.

P.P.S. In case you were wondering, Powell does have an answer to his own question - "Well let me use some of my rich French: C'est moi. Why be coy about it? That's me."

What, Me Worry?

'Why do you worry so much about things that are not in your control?', my friend Dennis asked as I was complaining to him about the possibly insufficient 50-minute layover in Atlanta on my Argentina trip. My immediate, gut feeling response was (and is, and will be), 'That's precisely why I worry, because it is not in my control; if it was, then I wouldn't waste my time worrying and would try to fix what was bothering me instead.' He didn't quite agree, and we argued for the rest of the car ride; the scope of our discussion kept getting wider as we went back and forth until we had to stop because we had reached our destination.

But clearly we both felt we had more to say, as evidenced by this subsequent email exchange (Dennis' messages are in red, and my responses in blue).

You know, the whole conversation could have been skipped if you had just said what you said at the end at the beginning. My comment that started the whole thing was something like "You know, you worry way too much about things out of your control" (in response to you worrying about your flight). If you had just said, like you did at the end, "I'm the type of person that does worry too much, but I don't really intend to change that" The conversation goes down a different path.

Yeah, I agree. But I do think some other interesting points came up in the argument. For example, suppose a close friend or relative is really sick and in the hospital. I have done everything in my power to help them, but the situation is now completely out of my control. Speaking completely rationally, it would be totally wasteful to worry any more. But I think if I wasn't consumed with worry, that would make me a horrible person. If I said OK, I have done everything I could, now it's out of my control, so there is no sense in worrying about this any more, that would be terrible. Just like, if I was sick, I would want my loved ones to be worried about me even if the situation was out of their control.

I think this occasional choice of emotion over rationality is one of the things that makes us human. I think I was trying to argue against the point that all wasteful emotions should be eliminated. In this case - worrying about a sick loved one may be technically wasteful, but I don't think we want humans to be rational to that extent.

I would not consider that wasteful because there is always more research, there are things that one can always do. You may not be able to prevent death but can do things to assist your loved one, make them feel better. Again, worry in this instance, not completely wasteful because it affects your decision and course of action.

Maybe it's our definition of "wasteful". I am not suggesting getting rid of all emotion, nor do I expect everyone/anyone to be able to control all emotion. However, emotion that has no benefit on any scale, should be minimized or one should try to minimize them. The only caveat would be that the effort put forth to minimize them causes more strain than one would gain eliminating that useless worry.

I do agree that part of our argument stems from the difference in our interpretation of the word wasteful. However, going by your statement that 'there are things that one can always do', there would be almost nothing that could be considered truly wasteful.

For example, in my case, because I am worried that my 50-minute layover may not be enough time, I will take a number of steps: I will try to get a seat in the front of the plane (as suggested by you); I will make sure that my carry-on bag is not heavy or bulky; I will do some prior research to make sure that I am familiar with the airport and the gates so I know exactly where to go; I won't go to the restroom during the transit unless absolutely necessary; I won't stop to get any food or a snack even if I am hungry... etc. This list is important because I wouldn't have to take any of these steps if my layover was, say, 2 hours. So I am minimizing the risk of missing my connection as a direct result of my worry, and thus it has value to me. The word 'minimize' is key here - I could never completely eliminate the risk of missing the connection, so that effort would be futile.

So, going by the 'there are things that one can always do' thought process, I am truly at a loss to think of any situation at all where worrying would not lead to at least coming up with some steps that would minimize the risk of an undesirable outcome.

Of course, if your point is that 'Simply worrying about anything without actually making any effort or taking any steps to try and solve the problem & minimize the risk is wasteful', then I am completely in agreement. However, it is still true that there will always be people who tend to over-worry and will do so even when they realize that it is counter-productive - and for whom the effort to stop worrying will actually cause more strain.

Update: Nothing went wrong with the trip. My flight from SFO to ATL was late, but I still had just enough time to get on the plane to EZE; my passport was almost stolen on a very crowded Subte (underground train) in Buenos Aires; and US airport security didn't allow me to bring back a small bottle of coconut milk I had bought in Argentina. But other than that, everything was quite hunky dory.

Ask & Tell

I am not a morning person. Regardless of how early I may go to bed, few things hurt more than having to get up in the morning. (If I have an early morning engagement, it's often easier for me to stay up all night rather than having to go through the strain of a premature awakening.) When my alarm goes off, I usually stumble out of bed, turn it off, turn the radio on, and fall back into the arms of sweet slumber once again. Except a few weeks ago, when this story (about a possible reversal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy) on Morning Edition made me almost hysterical with laughter, to the point where it was no longer possible to stay asleep any more.

Tom BOWMAN (Pentagon correspondent): We also expect [Secretary Gates] to say that discharges of gay service members have dropped quite a bit in President Obama's first year in office, as much as 30 percent.

Renee MONTAGNE (host): And why is that?

BOWMAN: Well, we really don't know for sure. What we do know, of course, is the president has said - both as a candidate and as commander-in-chief - he wants to do away with this policy. And that may have had an effect within the military, sort of a ripple effect.

I have to say, though, that I am not entirely happy with the 'ripple effect' explanation. Maybe we can blame the reduced discharges on global warming?

Complete Transcript of the story.

And now for something completely different: in case you feel that the juvenile nature of this post could not go any farther, here is a comment I heard at a recent IT managers' meeting: We need to change our procedure so we always take a dump first.

Finally (I promise, this is the last one), another sexually ambiguous statement overheard at work: I am so excited - I am going to ride my horse bareback today!

OK, I swear this is truly the last one - a recent exchange witnessed at the friendly neighborhood home and auto insurance shop. My friend, to his insurance agent: So, you have all my paperwork, correct? Do I need to stop by and see you any more? Insurance agent: Only if you want me to service you.

An I for an I

We kind of joke around here, ‘What is it like to be John Wray?’

I wish I was rich and famous; I wish I was intelligent and attractive; I wish I was witty and charming; these are, I would imagine, fairly common things to wish for, as, I would also suspect, would be: I wish I was a/an <insert your favorite literary or scientific award here> prize winner; I wish I directed the <most successful/best reviewed> movie of all time; I wish I was the <monarch/head of state> of a country of my choice. So far so good, except for the fact that I have just started feeling somewhat more inadequate than usual because I am none of the above, but we are approaching a slippery slope and things can get pretty complicated rather fast.

What is it like to truly be someone else? What would it really mean, for example, if I wished that I was Douglas Hofstadter? Humans are discrete beings with their individual discrete consciousness; we are not the Borg, or, at least, do not seem to be aware of it if we are. Actually, come to think of it, Hofstadter may not completely agree with me here, because his vision of consciousness includes the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to precisely one; however, since he has also been known to constantly stress the concrete while avoiding the abstract, he may not find a further analysis (of what my wish to be DH truly implies) to be absolutely without any merit. Do I simply want to look like him or maybe assume parts of his personality traits and achievements that I feel I lack? Because anything beyond that gets rather tricky: if I were to truly become him, would the me-that-had-wanted-this even know it or care any more? Would only the part of me that wanted this somehow be left intact (possibly to approve of and revel in this transformation), and the rest would be all him? (But in that case either the pre- or the post-metamorphosis me, I don't think it quite matters which at this point, could still split hairs and say that I had not completely become him.) And what of Hofstadter himself - if I became him, what would become of him? Maybe all we have to do is to convince him to want to be me (I understand that this would require a whole lot of convincing, but let's assume it momentarily for the sake of argument and in the interest of scientific advancement and intellectual discourse), and then we could all be happy without having to change anything at all.

In a somewhat unrelated note, what if I had multiple personalities, and one of them wished that it was one of the other ones - how would that work out? Would it be happy that it already was, or miserable that it could never be?

Note: The figure accompanying this post is a slightly modified version of a parquet deformation called "I at the Center" created by David Oleson at Carnegie-Mellon in 1964. It is one of Hofstadter's favorites, and the following is what he has to say about it in Metamagical Themas, his 1985 collection of essays originally written for the Scientific American. At the very center of a mesh is an I - an ego; touching it are other things - other I's - very much like the central I, but not quite the same and not quite as simple; then as one goes further and further out, the variety of I's multiplies. To me this symbolizes a web of human interconnections. Each of us is at the very center of our personal web, and each of us thinks, "I am the most normal, sensible, comprehensible individual." And our identity - our "shape" in personality space - springs largely from the way we are embedded in that network - which is to say, from the identities (shapes) of the people we are closest to. This means that we help to define others' identities even as they help to define our own.

When We Were Very Young

Twitter beats love, reports NPR. 'When did twitter take over the Universe?' asks the Baltimore Sun, and the Huffington Post inquires if twitter is more addictive than facebook. Even though some skeptics question whether anyone is listening, everyone, apparently, is tweeting.

Which should not surprise me at all, since this is exactly what the venerable seer and prophet A. A. Milne had predicted more than 85 years ago in his inspired poem Corner-of-the-Street.

xxxDown by the corner of the street,
xxxxWhere the three roads meet,
xxxxxxAnd the feet
Of the people as they pass go "Tweet-tweet-tweet--"
Who comes tripping round the corner of the street?
xxxOne pair of shoes which are Nurse's;
xxxOne pair of slippers which are Percy's...
xxxxxxTweet! Tweet! Tweet!

Rooster-Licking Parent-Fornicator!

Is it scary that I find this to be almost equally revolting as well as appealing, both oddly repulsive and compelling at the same time? Sometimes an uploaded digital image says so much more than just a thousand words & is so pure that it doesn't require any annotation - and, in any case, I am too busy rolling on the floor hysterically laughing my ass off right now to even attempt any further commentary.

A moderate amount of research reveals that a chicken flavored version is also available (see the complete line here), apparently for the discerning consumer who would appreciate the delicate difference in taste. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should confess at this point that I had at one time contemplated - not entirely in jest - a scratch and sniff product line that would market, shall we say, the various personal odors of celebrities.

Feeding Blue

In 2001, the philosopher Roger-Pol Droit published his book Astonish Yourself! (subtitled 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life), which is based on the premise that philosophical insight is achieved when one looks at everyday actions - which are usually taken for granted - from a slightly different perspective. The simple exercises in this book, while at once playful and profound, irreverent and wise, have the potential to challenge and shake many of our preconceived notions about the meaning of words, the stability of the outside world, and even our sense of identity. The idea, through these mostly simple everyday adventures, is to provoke tiny moments of awareness that produce astonishment and encourage us to explore further.

Take this quirky example (#13) - Drink While Urinating: just have a large glass of water at hand and start drinking when you begin to urinate (trying, as far as possible, to drink the water straight down without pausing). The sensation is quite bizarre, as Droit points out: The water you evacuate seems to be synchronized with that entering your mouth. In a few seconds you will feel directly wired, from throat to urethra, from stomach to bladder - a physiology that is impossible but that you inuit, directly and unquestionably, to be real.

One of the most intriguing experiments, for me, is #64: Look for a Blue Food. I had never realized that while there is a phenomenal amount of blue on earth (which even looks blue as seen from space) and food exists in all colors, there is nothing blue to eat in nature. Droit calls this a very straightforward and yet a very considerable mystery, and there is a suggestion that we may have even evolved to find blue food repulsive; it is as if we can't digest the sky, the ocean, or the planet itself.

Which makes the following fact even more interesting than it already is: according to a study published July 27, 2009, by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a derivative of the common food coloring Blue Number One (found in M&M's and Gatorade) was found to reverse paralysis in rats and, unlike existing treatments, there was no toxic clinical side effect other than a somewhat adorable blue skin and eyes. The substance may someday be the first major intervention available for people with spinal cord trauma, said study co-author Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York. (But until then, she suggested that patients with spinal cord injuries might want to drink blue Gatorade.)

And you know what else? The rats in the experiment also enjoyed improved bladder control - which would not only be a big deal for humans with spinal cord injuries, but would also be rather helpful should one desire to try out the first experiment described in this post!

Article in National Geographic

With the Help of International Filmmakers

What first caught my eye was the name: an item song called Akira Kurosawa in what looked like an eminently forgettable typical masala Bollywood B-movie? And, just as I had suspected, I was hooked right from the first guttural shriek of 'Tarantino!' For the next couple days I couldn't stop myself from playing the song over and over again while uncontrollably & hysterically giggling the whole time. I have probably regained my composure somewhat since that initial shock, but the song is still constantly playing in a loop within my subconscious. This is a keeper.

Not that a mere listing of the lyrics can do it any justice, since the catchy foot tapping tune and all the voice effects have to be heard to be properly savored; however, here they are, for mainly academic interest (and also because I am a little obsessive compulsive). It is curious that Bertolucci is the only director to be mentioned separately in two different places, and there are as many as four Japanese directors who merit inclusion in the pantheon. Also, in a bit of breaking news, Danny Boyle apparently missed out on being in the song due to bad timing: since the song was composed before Slumdog Millionaire made him such a household name in India, Ranjit (director/lyricist) and Siddharth Suhas (composers) opted for Woody Allen instead, who was thought to be much better known. Also, for all of you wondering whether this song is supposed to make any sense at all, here is what has been provided by the way of an explanation: It's a tribal song and thus the lyrics were supposed to be gibberish. However, Ranjit's idea was to make the song with the help of international filmmakers rather than gibberish.

Tarantino Wilder Capra
Ozu Bertolucci Peckinpah
Fellini Visconti Oshima
Coppola Coppola

Wyler Hitchcock Wajda
Mizoguchi de Palma
Wyler Hitchcock Wajda
Brian de Palma

Akira Kurosawa Vittorio de Sica (repeats 4 times)

Bertolucci Bertolucci Lumet Aha Lumet
Bertolucci Bertolucci Oh...
Sergio Leone Sergio Leone Truffaut Aha Truffaut
Sergio Leone Sergio Leone Oh...

Woody Allen Woody Allen B. DeMille C B. DeMille
Woody Allen Woody Allen Oh...
Milos Forman Milos Forman Godard Aha Godard
Milos Forman Milos Forman Oh...

Film: Chintu Ji (2009)
Director: Ranjit Kapoor
Singer: Anushka Manchandani
Lyrics: Ranjit Kapoor
Composer: Siddharth Suhas

Why is Danny Boyle's name missing?
Listen to full song: YouTube, bollyfm, radioreloaded

Is That A Broomstick Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

It's official, The New Yorker says, hormones are now coursing through every corridor in Hogwarts. More than just the corridors, apparently: am I the only person who finds this image mildly offensive but mostly just mind numbingly (and hopefully unintentionally) ROTFL hilarious? (Especially when you factor in the expression on poor Rupert Grint's face and the way he is holding his, er, broomstick and thrusting into the strategically placed orifice.) I can honestly say that this scene provided possibly the only fleeting moment of pleasure, if one can call it that, in what was otherwise more than two and a half hours of almost unadulterated torture. As Richard Metzger tells it like it is: Well, there is simply no beating around the bush about this one. No mitigating factors. Nope, none. The new Harry Potter film, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is absolutely fucking terrible. Not a disaster, just a total bore, which is worse. (Read the rest of his review here.)

To be fair, it is not like absolutely no one is picking up on the subtext here. Anthony Lane points out in his New Yorker review that Dumbledore himself seems to have a quiet thing for Harry, forever putting an arm around his shoulder. “Wands out, Harry,” he commands. And according to this rather amusing compendium of examples of its use in popular culture, the or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me trope never did directly occur in the Harry Potter series but at least one fan thinks that it should have.

The Sound of Silence

Talking without speaking, hearing without listening: read these words aloud in your mind silently. I still haven't been able to completely wrap my brain around the fact that this is even possible. Isn't sound, and our perception of it, a purely physical phenomenon? Physical waves have to physically excite certain internal parts of our ears which would then translate to the sensation of hearing. How can we possibly perceive sound without this activity, then? Especially when I can actually even say it softly or loudly with varying pitch and intensity - but all of it internally, without really making any audible noise. (And thus the reverse paradox: when you say things aloud in your mind, do you make a sound?) I mean, what does sound even mean if it's not a result of molecular disturbances in the ear cavity? What makes it more strange is that I am unable to recreate this with the other four senses (six, if one includes motion and balance). I can certainly remember a face, but I cannot actually see it with my eyes closed; I can bring up the memory of a touch or a taste or a smell, but cannot voluntarily recreate the specific feeling in the absence of the actual physical stimulus. So what makes sound different? How is it that I can actually recreate the neural pathways in the brain that produces hearing (if that is really what is going on) when the actual source is absent? Going even further, when we read a word, are we necessarily always making the sound in our brains? Do we ever just read, or are we always reading aloud silently without being conscious of it? What do congenitally deaf people feel when they read? Can we isolate the sound of the letter A from the letter itself and perceive them separately? No, I don't have the answers; all I can do is silently wonder, turn, and toss.

Oh, and for those of you already bored out of minds by this entry (you know who you are), here is a hilarious parody of the Simon & Garfunkel classic that inspired the title.

Cover Story

Satyajit Ray designed every single cover of the Bengali literary magazine Ekshan starting with its very first issue in 1962 until his death about 30 years later, and this little montage above is a small sample of a few of those sublime covers. Among all film makers, Ray is my personal favorite, and the empathy I feel with the body of his work is difficult to quantify or describe. Ray was my own personal film school while I was growing up in a small town with no access to international cinema, and I couldn't have asked for anyone better. In this era of specialization, he was the last true auteur who kept a detailed eye on each and every aspect of his films, from scripting and pre-production to post-production and even designing most of the publicity material. As Andrew Robinson, one of his biographers, explains: "Ray has a strong claim to be the most versatile of film-makers. He was personally immersed in every aspect of production. He wrote the scripts of all his films, which were often original or near-original screenplays. He designed the effortlessly convincing sets and costumes down to the smallest details. He acted out the roles for the actors and actresses with consummate nuance. He operated the camera throughout the shooting (after 1963). He edited each frame of the film. He even composed and recorded the music after scoring it in a mixture of western and Indian notation, for all but his earliest films." However, as if that wasn't enough, he was so much more than the complete film maker; that he was an extraordinary composer and prolific author is now somewhat well known, but many of his admirers outside of Bengal still don't know that he was an amazing graphic designer, and almost single-handedly revolutionized book cover designs in the Bengali publishing industry.

His cover designs for Ekshan never fail to amaze me to this day; working with just three letters of the Bengali alphabet and usually just two colors, he managed to build a repertoire of tremendous diversity and freshness. It almost seems to me that a parallel could be drawn between the range of these covers and his oeuvre as a film maker, in the manner in which he almost effortlessly managed to scale the heights of artistic excellence repeatedly while working under unbelievable technical and financial constraints.

More Ekshan covers here.

The Global Politics of Shit

The Big Necessity (subtitled Adventures in the World of Human Waste, in the UK, and The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, in the US) by Rose George, which has been called 'The most unforgettable book to pass through the publishing pipeline in years' by Mary Roach, is unquestionably one of the best books of recent times; very funny, very scary, and occasionally truly tragic.

If you are like most people, you are probably already disgusted; you have turned up your nose, your body and mind is on high alert, and you are secretly thinking that I have a scatological fetish. (I may or may not be a scat freak, but that is irrelevant.) In fact, Rose herself has, by now, had to spend many months answering the question of why she decided to write this book. In spite of the fact that defecation is as much a fact of life as breathing (everyone does it, after all, and an average human spends three years of their life going to the toilet), it is considered to be very lowly unlike most other body-related functions. Indeed, rules governing defecation exist in every culture at every period in history and may even be the foundation of civilization since potty training is nothing but an attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society. The result of this neglect is clear: 2.6 billion people in the world have no sanitation (four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box) and poor sanitation causes one in ten of the world's illnesses with fecally contaminated water killing a child every 15 seconds.

In 2007, readers of the British medical Journal chose sanitation to be the biggest medical milestone of the last 200 years. The toilet is probably the single biggest variable in increasing human life span: proper disposal of human excreta can reduce diarrhea by nearly 40% and modern sanitation has added 20 years to the average human life. But even the reality of the rich toileted people can be a myth, and the affluent have a bigger effluent problem than they may care to admit. While most Westerners put the thought of human waste out of their minds once they flush it out of their sight, it makes sense to scratch under the surface of this complacency. Until about three years ago, Milan, Italy's cultural capital, discharged its raw sewage into the river Lambro; Brussels, the EU's administrative seat, only started building a sewage treatment plant in 2003; In the United States, 1.7 million people have no sanitation (and that does not just mean that they have no toilet in their house - even an outhouse that empties into a rickety drain counts as sanitation; it means that they have nothing).

And yet the subject remains unmentionable. Even though defecation, and the rules governing it, easily encompass the whole spectrum of human behavior, it takes a brave academic to address it and discussing it openly is probably the last true taboo. Sex and death may have both become conversational, but not shit; Steven Pinker, in his explanation of taboo words, explains how the acceptability of excreta-related words such as spit, snot, fart, piss, and shit are approximately in the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public.

Sigmund Freud, who thought the study of excretion essential and its neglect a stupidity, wrote that humanity's wiser course would undoubtedly be to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as possible. The Big Necessity fills a very big necessity by attempting to do just that.

Illusions of Grandeur

It's not every day that someone calls me a Ph.D. and a CFA, and mentions Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky in the same breath as yours truly. If only all spammers knew how effective a little flattery can be!

Incidentally, and almost completely irrelevantly, a trio of psychologists at the University of Waterloo in Canada have found that couples are most satisfied with their relationship when partners see each other through rose-colored glasses; mutual delusion & a certain degree of self-deception result in the happiest relationships. (Don't ask. This fact just came up in a Google search I did with the title of this post.)

I <3 xkcd!

I, completely and totally and irrevocably, heart Randall Munroe. Randall is just this guy who, in his spare time, climbs things, opens strange doors, and goes to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so he can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable (at frat parties he does the same thing, but the other way around). His favorite astronomical entity are the Pleiades, and oh, he also draws this webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language full-time, supporting himself from merchandise sale (so go buy something already). Which is all for the best, if you ask me, because I cannot - and indeed do not - want to imagine a life without a regular dose of xkcd to keep me grounded, happy, and sane. Actually, I don't know that there is anything I could write about it here that could possibly add to its appeal. I mean, its a no-brainer; if you already count yourself among its legions of fiercely dedicated fans then I would just be preaching to a very passionate choir, and, if you are unaware of it (because, come on, if you were aware of it then you would be in the former group, duh) then I actually envy you because now you would have the chance to blow your world by experiencing the awesomeness that xkcd is for the very first time.

So what is it that brought me out of years of blogging hibernation? Well, just when I thought that things couldn't get any better, I find out that the comics (all of them) have mouseover text! How cool is that!! (Alright, you don't have to tell me that all of you knew this already, and, like always, I am once again the last one to find out.) But look at the silver lining though, now I get to go back and enjoy my favorite ones all over again, and finally get answers to some of life's persistent questions that I have always had about a few of the strips. It's almost like finding a previously unknown Easter egg in a dearly beloved DVD. Or the Universe turning from black and white to color while you were asleep. You know, one of those.

Some of my favorite xkcd strips, in no particular order:
Students (I still have this dream all the time.)
TED talk (I stay awake nights thinking about this problem.)
Angular Momentum (This is perfect - It appeals almost equally to the science nerd as well as the romantic in me.)
Useless (I did major in Statistics, after all.)
Dream Girl (This one still makes me cry every time I look at it...)

Update: And now, the xkcd book! Also, on a dissenting note, here is someone who thinks that xkcd sucks.

Intuition, Integrity, Character, Light

Christopher Doyle has been called the greatest cinematographer working in the movies today and also the most idiosyncratic, and is known for his perfectionism and eccentricity. I first came under the hypnotic spell of his lens when I realized that my love for Wong Kar-wai's movies had almost as much to do with Doyle's involvement with them than anything else (indeed, some wonder if Doyle hasn't been more integral to the success of Wong's films than Wong himself). Credited with essentially inventing the dominant vernacular of pan-Asian pop with Wong Kar-wai, and responsible for some of the most stunning images in modern cinema - blurry, frenetic street scenes, retro-styled couples in delirious clinches, grand historical vistas set off by swathes of saturated color - Doyle has developed a certain signature that is unique. He has the uncanny and apparently effortless talent to easily bathe his images in lush, almost supernaturally beautiful, colors and lights, but is also equally adept at catching the harsh and jarring fluorescence of a neon-drenched and essentially lonely and isolated urban existence, often in the same frame. Known for using extreme angles and vanguard color grading, his camera can be both an impassive observer of great and scattered urban and natural landscapes, and also a gentle voyeur probing into the deepest privacies of his subjects resulting in iconic portraits of sorrow and solitude.

Doyle's own life is as exciting as any epic blockbuster; brought up in suburban Sydney, he left Australia at the age of 18 to join the merchant navy. After three years traveling the world on a Norwegian ship, he came ashore again, and lived in India (working as an oil driller), Israel (cow herder) and Thailand (doctor of Chinese medicine) before gravitating to Taiwan, where he shot his first 35mm film, Edward Yang's That Day on the Beach, for which he won the Best Cinematography Award in the 1983 Asia-Pacific Film Festival. He now lives in Hong Kong, and considers himself to be an honorary Asian.

Here is the voice of the master himself, culled from various interviews over the years.

"Anybody who works with me knows what shit they're in for. They know he's had a beer for breakfast. They know he doesn't give a shit about certain technical aspects. They know he's a little bit out of synch, and he'll probably throw a spanner in the works. Or why would you bother calling me?"

"That (realizing that he was a professional cinematographer) scared the shit out of me. We were just playing around before. So I ran away to France to try and learn competence, and I realised it was all bullshit. You only need a little bit of technical knowledge. Most people can get it in a couple of months. The training of the eye is the real job, and that takes forever."

"I think if you get one image per film that actually works, it's better than average. Who's going to forget Maggie Cheung walking up those stairs (in In the Mood for Love)? Everything else is working towards that; it is a consolidation of ideas into an image."

"You make more mistakes. That's the point. You engage with your mistakes. You have to learn faster, quicker and more often and you'll never learn enough and you never get self-complacent. You know that learning is a never-ending process and you know that you never know enough. You trust things like intuition, or integrity, or character or light."

"Hollywood reminds me why I want to do Asian cinema. I think love is a cultural event. Language is a cultural experience. The films we make come from the culture we feel comfortable engaging with."

"I started making films in Asia, in Taiwan. I started making Chinese-language films so, yeah, I regard myself as a Chinese filmmaker, but I just happen to be white, or pink, actually. It's kind of like a delayed adolescence. I feel I grew up there. I was in my thirties by the time I was growing up. I still haven't grown up. It's just more familiar."

“I usually say that the three of us — that means the art director, William Chang, Wong Kar-Wai, and myself — are a menage-a-trois. It’s a very comfortable and incestuous relationship. Over the years, there’s developed a great deal of complicity and trust. We’re stuck with each other basically. Our visual taste is so similar now.”

"I’m a great fan of jazz music, and as you can see Wong Kar-Wai is obviously quite interested in different kinds of music. I think, at last, we get into—well, what I’ve always dreamed of doing is making films, like jazz music, just jamming. That’s very much how we work. It’s really like a jam session."

Pure and Simple

An Oscar Wilde action figure - that is just so four-letter-word-ing amazingly awesome supercool kickass! And it even comes with a little bio-line and a list of quotations on the box. What will they think of next, really? Seriously, though, what cracks me up more than anything else is the 'choking hazard' warning, especially given the fact that the doll comes with bendable knees.

In Bad Taste

John Waters has come a long way from his days as the high priest of trashy bad taste and has almost crossed over to the respectable mainstream - after all, none other than John Travolta reprises Divine's role in the Hollywood remake of the Tony-award winning Broadway musical adaptation of Waters' 1988 film Hairspray. However, fans of the "Pope of Trash" and "Prince of Puke" need not panic just yet. Though he now describes himself as a filthy elder, he is still very much the quintessential enfant terrible, maybe not quite enfant any more, but certainly still very terrible, refusing to grow up and always willing to shock and provoke outrage.

A Date with John Waters is his Valentine's Day treat for all his fans, and has been described as 'a chance to curl up on the director's couch and let him touch you a little inappropriately'. While one could complain that the eclectic and bizarre collection actually reveals impeccably good taste, much like his previous compilation A John Waters Christmas, I would say that the cover photograph alone (reclining with a very come hither look and a dirty collar - the shirt came from a thrift shop - shot by Marsha Resnick at the Dovil film festival in France, circa 1976) makes this album a must-have. And the fact that he has promised to bring us Breaking Up with John Waters if this collection sells well.

For those of you hungry for a bigger piece of him than this meager blog post has to offer, here is Waters on Fresh Air, All Songs Considered, YouTube (reading from the record's liner notes), and a song from the album, Josie Cotton's "Johnny Are You Queer". Which, incidentally, would be a rather sensible question to ask one's valentine before things could get inordinately painful and somewhat messy beyond control.

Look, Ma, no Menus

Or, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The new version of Microsoft Office has done away with menus in an effort to upgrade and overhaul the now ubiquitous interface that involves clicking, pointing, dragging, and dropping. David Pogue, who double clicks through technology for The New York Times, discusses the changes with Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition.

SI: Where are they heading with this?
DP: There have been some interesting efforts. One clue is the rise of these instant search commands in both the Macintosh, and now in Windows Vista, where you type a few letters of what you are looking for, and up pops the thing, whatever folder it's buried in. And, if you think about it, that means that we needed a cry for help here because the folder thing was getting too unwieldy.

SI: Before mouses and icons and that sort of thing, people just typed a command into a computer. Might we eventually head back toward that system now?
DP: Well, that's what's cracking me up. That's what everyone pooh-poohs as the old stone age way of using a computer by memorizing and typing commands. But this is one of the most touted and beloved features of both the latest Mac OS and the latest Windows Vista, is you can start to do things by typing out little commands again. And the old timers are saying, 'Dude, didn't we do this twenty years ago?'

And what cracks me up is how The Next Big Thing is, more often than not, the same old wine in, if one is lucky, a slightly different looking bottle; little more than a forgotten and discarded leftover from the past, albeit reheated and touched up. Hooray for the shortness of public memory!

The Greatest Century

1. This is just part deux of my original Blogger's 100 posting. When I started the first one, I was initially apprehensive that I would never complete it; but I did, and the moment I did, I could already think of a couple more entries that didn't go in it. Thus the sequel.

2. At some deep dark basic level, I am quite convinced that I am totally incapable of being truly loved.

3. At the movies, I always want to stay till the final completion of the end credits. However, I almost never can, since most of my friends don't seem to share in that desire.

4. I find lonely people dining alone in restaurants almost heartbreakingly sad.

5. I am often vaguely intimidated by servers in upscale eateries or salespeople in fancy stores.

6. I don't think I have one favorite color. It usually changes with my mood.

7. Rosemary's Baby is my favorite horror film.

8. I will often do this kind of stay-in-one-place-spot-jump routine when I am really happy.

9. I will sometimes put off doing an unpleasant task till absolutely the very last moment.

10. The following is my most favorite knock knock joke of all time. (My friend Nina told it to me, and it is her mother's favorite joke too.)

"Knock, Knock..."

"Who's there?"

"Interrupting cow."

"Interrupting c..."

"MOOOOOOOOOO!"

11. I don't really like Italian or Mexican food all that much.

12. I would love to visit South America and Australia some day.

13. Stanley Kubrick is the only English language director that I completely admire. (Of all his films, only Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut don't leave me gushing one way or another.)

14. One of my professors in college used to say that we could think of groups as Algebraic animals.

15. I have an undergraduate and a graduate degree in Statistics, and a post graduate degree in Quality, Reliability, and Operations Research. However, I don't use almost anything from any of these fields in the kind of work I do right now.

16. I had to move four times during my first six months in California. During this whole time, I stayed in the same zip code, and just moved around a couple blocks each time.

17. I left my parents' home for the first time after I graduated high school, and have never really gone back to live there for more than at most a couple months since.

18. I don't consider Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese to be great directors; I believe they are very competent craftsmen and storytellers, but not great artists.

19. I believe that well designed movie posters and book jackets can be great art.

20. I cannot, for the life of me, parallel park my car. (In my defense, I live in suburban parking heaven, so I have never needed to learn how.)

21. When discussing movies, I want to use terms like mise en scene and auteur or even didactic, but I am never quite sure exactly how to say them.

22. I used to go to high school riding on my bicycle. I had almost exclusively used only public transport till I learned to drive after moving to California.

23. I pooped my pants one time in elementary school; I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, and wasn't found out till my mother came to pick me up after school.

24. I have felt deeply humiliated too many times in my life to even keep count.

25. I would much rather volunteer my time than pay money to a charity.

26. While telling a joke, I occasionally tend to completely murder the punchline.

27. I abhor almost all kinds of jewelery and make-up. However, I find some piercings and tattoos to be secretly compelling and attractive.

28. While I don't much care for the music, there is something that draws me to punk.

29. Your Catfish Friend by Richard Brautigan is one of my favorite poems. So is He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats.

30. I can sometimes be obsessively compulsive.

31. Sometimes, when I have too much to do, I will feel somewhat overwhelmed and will do absolutely nothing.

32. I have been told, "Why the fuck don't you belt up?" at least once in my life.

33. When I was traveling in New Zealand our car was broken into and every single scrap of identification I had ever possessed was stolen. (We later learned that most of the other cars in that parking lot were broken into that evening as well.) The police eventually recovered my backpack and the only thing missing was $400 in cash.

34. Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! and This American Life are two of my favorite radio shows.

35. I have often submitted unsuccessful entries to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

36. The Betrayal (#164) is one of my most favorite Seinfeld episodes. All scenes in this episode were played in reverse order with a caption indicating the time frame of the scene in relation to the previous scene.

37. I am a pug lover; I find pugs to be absolutely and completely adorable.

38. Once, in Tokyo, I tried to speak in Japanese with a post office clerk. However, I literally turned around and fled once the conversation turned into something far more involved than what I was equipped to handle with my very limited collection of tourist book phrases.

39. I have recently discovered that I really enjoy going to waterparks.

40. I recently took the SAT and scored 800 on the Math, 750 on the Critical Reading, and 740 on the Writing sections. However, my essay score was only 9 (out of a possible maximum of 12).

41. My friend Claudio used to say that the one characteristic he would look for in a lover was enthusiasm; a deep and varied range of interests and the urge to pursue them eagerly and joyfully, and an openness to always try out new things. I don't think I could agree more.

42. I think falindromes are wicked cool. (For all those of you who cannot be bothered to click on the link, falindromes are fake palindromes: although they cannot be read the same forwards and backwards, their peculiar structure make it appear as if they can.)

43. I have watched a complete full-length feature film on youtube.

44. My coworkers and I sometimes play with a 40-foot long rubber band in our office parking lot.

45. I can think of a few words in my native language that don't have proper English synonyms. (Linguist Christopher J. Moore has published a collection of such words and phrases from around the world in his book In Other Words.)

46. I used to be able to recognize Orion's belt in the night sky.

47. I am not a purist when it comes to cooking; I will happily use substitutes and time and effort saving shortcuts whenever I need to.

48. The fact that I've lost much of the full head of luxuriant hair I used to have upsets me occasionally, but not to the point where I obsess or agonize over it.

49. I think I can be really patient when I have to.

50. I have trekked in the Himalayan ranges while I was still in high school.

51. When my coworker Ryan drew superhero versions of everyone in the office, I was Flash.

52. My favorite vegetable is probably green beans. While I will happily eat almost any vegetable now, there were a couple like pumpkin or bottle gourd that I wasn't too fond of growing up.

53. I often go to the most ridiculous extreme to recycle even the smallest scrap of paper or plastic even though I realize that it is probably not worth the energy and effort.

54. When I was younger I could turn on the charm at will fairly easily and make myself desirable to people if I really tried, getting them to like me and making them want to be my friend, but I strongly doubt if I can do it any more.

55. Pornography doesn't really do much for me. I am usually bored out of my wits after the first couple minutes, and would truly read Playboy for the interviews.

56. Of all movie directors who are actively working right now, Wong Kar-wai is probably my favorite. I also greatly admire Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou of China, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu of Mexico, and Pedro Almodovar of Spain. I consider all of them to be great auteurs, with consistent bodies of work and distinctive styles that deeply resonate within me.

57. KQED is the local public radio station that I subscribe to, but I will also occasionally listen to KALW.

58. I find it very difficult to say no to people. I also often try to please everybody and, as a direct result of that, get into the most convulsively complicated situations ever.

59. Once, when I was stranded on a particularly rainy night in Tokyo, a homeless man gave me his umbrella.

60. I have figured out the infamous "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." sentence, which is a grammatically correct example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs, attributed to linguist William J. Rapaport. (The Tokyo dogs analogy does help.)

61. For the longest time I was absolutely convinced that 3D stereograms were an elaborate hoax, till the first one popped out at me rather unexpectedly a couple years ago. Since then, I have made it one of my life's mission to convert other non-believers.

62. Salil Chowdhury is my absolute all-time favorite Indian popular and film music composer, and Rahul Dev Burman is a close second.

63. Every time I write the word receive, I am afraid that I have mis-spelled it.

64. The first time I went to a KFC or a McDonald's or a Wendy's was in Tokyo.

65. I don't do well in large groups at all, preferring smaller and more intimate gatherings with close friends instead. At big parties I am usually found sulking in a corner, and this almost certainly comes off as being unsocial and conceited.

66. I find self flushing toilets very unpredictable and somewhat intimidating.

67. I had great fun pissing my friend Sid off by exclaiming "Whoopsie Daisy", an expression I picked up from the owner of a small breakfast place somewhere on the way to Wellington from Auckland, rather dramatically at any and every opportunity while we were traveling in New Zealand. (I tried to do the same with "Sweet, mate!", but that didn't quite stick.)

68. The first music CD I bought in the US was a Joan Baez compilation.

69. I have vertigo. That may be one reason why I have never been good at climbing trees.

71. I believe that the public library system in the US is one of the greatest triumphs of the free world.

72. I have always wanted to write a spoof version of the Beatles song "Hey Jude" that would begin "Hey dude".

73. According to me, "All mimsy were the borogoves" (from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky) is one of the finest and most perfectly amazing sentence fragments ever written in the English language.

74. If I had to restrict my fiction reading to just one genre, it would have to be science fiction. (Two intriguing authors I would encourage you to explore would be Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany. The former brings to the field her unique feminist perspective and voice, and the latter his "outsider" status as a gay African-American man.)

75. I had an almost life-size poster of Madonna (Louise Ciccone, not the virgin) on my college dorm room wall.

76. The literal meaning of my name is 'son of the earth'.

78. Growing up in India we measured temperature in Centigrade, so now I am constantly confused about how hot or cold it really is.

79. I have never had the confidence to approach people I really like, so all my life I have only gone on dates when I have been asked out. A couple times I have actually found out later that someone I had a secret crush on was also very interested in me, but we never connected because neither of us took the first step.

80. I was once told that I have the skin of a twenty year old. (I was way older than 20 at the time this happened.)

81. Life is undoubtedly often extremely unfair; however, I strongly believe that we can choose to be - in fact, almost have an obligation to be - happy nevertheless.

82. I avoid eating fast food as much as humanly and realistically possible. However, I do get the occasional craving for an In-N-Out burger, or a Lee's sandwich, or Popeye's fried catfish.

83. I used to think that Brie was a type of deli meat (probably because it reminded of the word brisket), and I was once quite upset and confused when the Brie sandwich I ordered came only with veggies and cheese.

84. I think I have discovered the perfect no-fuss snack: a generous hunk of Brie on a Nacho Cheese flavored Doritos chip. The contrast of the textures and flavors is quite amazing, even though my friend Sid says that just the culture clash alone would be enough to give him indigestion.

85. The thought that I may become too stiff to cut my own toenails when I am very old really frightens me a lot.

86. I don't know the names of any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents; in fact, to be very honest, I have even forgotten my mother's father's name.

87. Once someone asked me for the phone number to my college's admissions office, and I gave them my aunt's number by mistake. My poor aunt still occasionally gets phone calls asking the odd admissions related question.

88. I can never accept praise or compliments graciously; I start feeling extremely uncomfortable, and never know how to respond in an appropriate manner.

89. In January 1990, during the 13th International Film Festival of India in Calcutta, I watched five full-length feature films back to back in one day. I started with the first show in the morning, and attended various screenings at different theaters all day, finishing off with the last one at night.

90. While I am not even remotely religious, I generally have no problem accepting and respecting other peoples' personal faith; however, very overt expressions of religious beliefs, either individual or communal, do put me off quite a bit.

91. 'Teh' instead of 'the' is the most common typo that I almost certainly make multiple times daily. In my defence, I never really formally learned to type, and as a result, I have to constantly look at the keyboard instead of the terminal and mostly just use one or at most two fingers while I am typing.

92. I very strongly feel that monogamy, just by itself, should not be considered a virtue.

93. My friend Ryan says that fornication and food are my only two vices, but I don't agree with him. I don't think that either should be considered a vice.

94. I have been called both totally cool and totally bizarre. By the same person at the same time.

95. For a little while, my nickname in college was machine gun, but it didn't stick.

96. No one taught me how to masturbate. I figured it out myself, way before I reached puberty.

97. I have seven different e-mail addresses, five of which I regularly use.

98. Even though I know this to be untrue, I still believe that how hard or how many times you press the push button at an intersection determines how soon the walk signal turns on.

99. When speaking to myself, I never actually use my name, but often opt for the second person pronoun.

100. It only took me 73 days to come up with this list. That's 53 days less than what it took me the first time around. I must be getting better!

Novel Ideas

In November 2006, in honor of National Novel Writing Month, NPR asked fiction writers to explain the essence of creating a novel, from how they write to their approach to writer's block. For me though, the most entertaining part of each interview was when the author was asked to contribute a favorite sentence. Here are some of the delightful responses.

They were in one of the 'I' states when Zeke told Isaac he had to ride in the trunk for a little while. (Laura Lippman)

Ice is the past tense of water. (Rita Mae Brown)

All parents keep secrets from their children. (Scott Turow)

The sun broke golden on the surface of the pool, a thousand floating coins. (Lewis Buzbee)

Lyle is aware that he isn't right, and sometimes he feels his jaw, his face, making sure it isn’t becoming elongated in a cruel caricature of a sad man. (Kaui Hart Hemmings)

She stood, the water up to her ankles, and turned toward the sandy beach, toward the green sea grass and colorful umbrellas and blue smoke swirling from a beach fire and a boy selling cups of lemonade with ice chips, a woman in a purple bathing suit, and turned back to the blue water and pine trees on the far side of the lake, and behind that the green hills and white clouds against blue sky, the contrast a singular beauty; and now, somewhere behind her, a man was singing a song. (Nina Schuyler)

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. (M. T. Anderson)

Petra loved the stories filed neatly into the flow of train windows –- she had seen arguments in profile, mouths open with laughter or horror, noses squashed against glass. (Blue Balliett)

Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third. (Jodi Picoult)

By now she knew that this life, despite all its pain, could be lived, that one must travel through it slowly; passing from the sunset to the penetrating odor of the stalks; from the infinite calm of the plain to the singing of a bird lost in the sky; yes, going from the sky to that deep reflection of it that she felt within her own breast, as an alert and living presence. (Geraldine Brooks)

And wasn't sorrow a kind of slow death anyway? (Gail Tsukiyama)

It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches. (Jess Walters)

In the end, the survivor gets to tell the story. (Nancy Werlin)

To Jane's surprise, a grilled cheese sandwich with chocolate milk was exactly what she wanted right then. (Jeanne Birdsall)

In 1954, the summer before I entered third grade, my grandmother mistook Andrew Imhof for a girl. (Curtis Sittenfeld)

Leaves of Grass saved my ass. (Gayle Brandeis)

The boy had probably been praying to a distinctly conceived God not to lose courage; he must have been simultaneously aware of the rush of time transporting him to the explosive instant; the patrons were sprinting along the lines of their own thoughts and personal dramas, their love affairs, their work conflicts, their sporting enthusiasms; the youth probably found his field of vision tightly narrowing once he made it past the guard into the pizzeria; inside they must have known immediately why a youth dressed as an Orthodox Jew would be rushing past the guard; he shouted, "Allahu Akbar!" reported the wounded, failed, severely questioned guard; they didn't see him press the trigger; the boy pressed the trigger (in his pocket, beneath his black coat?); this was followed by an ultima of total clarity in which the bomber and his victims saw every detail of every aspect of their environment crystallized into that minute and second of that day in the month of August in the year 2002. (Ken Kalfus)

Fall in love whenever you can. (Alice Hoffman)