TamilNet sort of lost it when the war ended. TamilNet, if you’re unaware, was the LTTE mouthpiece then an anti-KP mouthpiece and now a chewed off rump LTTE mouthpiece. Occasionally (coincidentally moreso) they do mete out some news, but lately I read them more for entertainment value. I especially enjoy their ‘Features’ which are meandering exhortations to separatism and denunciations of the usual suspects. My favorite feature of the features is that major opinions are cited to ‘Tamil circles’ or sometimes just Tamils. For example – “Do they think it is easier to drive the people into corporate slavery by retaining the present conditions, Tamils wonder.” Most Tamils I know are not possessed of such a Borg mind but what do I know.

I was at Acropolis getting some fried something when I saw a catchy magazine on the counter. I looked again and my photo was on the cover of the magazine (Colombo Monthly). I thought this was odd but then they’d credited me on the bottom with a link to my Flick page, in perfect accordance with the Creative Commons license I attached to all my photos. Which made me quite happy. I’ve seen my photos in almost every paper and even a government textbook, uncredited, but it is nice that a new generation of publishers is starting to get the Creative Commons system.

I’ve been using this surfthechannel.com which is, essentially, crack on speed. It lets one stream almost anything imaginable instantly (on Dialog Mobile Broadband at least). To that end I have finally watched Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie which Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is based on, often scene for scene. I didn’t like The Departed much at first (Irish gangsters? What?) but I like it much more after watching Infernal Affairs. IA is a bit cooler because it’s about the Triad, but the lead gangster is nowhere near as fleshed out as Jack Nicklaus’s character. Both, however, are interesting character studies and Scorsese does keep the main scenes from the Hong Kong affair. Both movies are about two moles, furiously burrowing for each other and both are interesting, I think, together. Of course, surfthechannel is full of such opportunities, so where to begin.

I went to the Lessons Learnt And Reconciliation Commission a few times. War Commission if you will. These are my impressions. It’s, at best, half empty. They speak English. Most of the witnesses are ex-diplomats who offer, essentially, a kindly uncle’s view on the war. One (Nihal Rodrigo) even cited something he’d heard from his domestics. The panel itself is old. There are two Tamils who ask questions about peoples welfare sometimes, there is the Halikarra fellow who does not seem especially intelligent, there is the Chairman C.R. de Silva who has an awesome voice, there is this American professor Hangawatte who I thought was a zealot but has winks of nuance, and then there is the forgettable fellow on the end. The panel is, to a tee, pretty set in its view, and so are the witnesses. The point of the commission is to evaluate the CFA, and there are basically indicting the LTTE and, to a lesser extent, the UNP and Norway. They are doing it wrong, IMHO, but they are not entirely wrong.

I was reading an article on the brain and modern distractions, on my phone, but half way through I was thinking I should tweet it. I was in the midst of watching Infernal Affairs on surfthechannel.com and had not yet had breakfast. I only now finished the article, and that after numerous interruptions. I’m not sure I’ve retained much. On bit is that “Behavioral studies have shown that performance suffers when people multitask.” Multitasking all the time, I have to concur. In many spheres I find that we’re being driven towards a world of quantity rather than quality. For me many simply means media, in news and film and conversation I’m having more but not necessarily better. Indeed, it gets harder to push for better when it seems like the demand – in music, film and arts – is for the fast, cheap and easily reproduced.