Mahinda has got a two thirds majority in Parliament and is using it to extend his term. This is not because he was necessarily so powerful, it was more because the opposition was so weak. Mahinda told Ranil that he was going for an Executive Prime Ministership, invited Ranil to Temple Trees, gave him a new car, visited Ranil’s mother in hospital. Then he turned around and stole two Tamil MPs (got them to cross). Ranil was like ‘harumph’ and went back to meet Mahinda again. Then Mahinda patted him on the back and stole eight Muslim MPs, enough for the two thirds. Now he’s tabled a revocation of term limits for President and a President who also goes to Parliament. One could say this is all Ranil’s fault, but it’s also the fault of people like Sajith for not having the courage to wrench the opposition leadership away.

Today the SLMC will probably cross to the government side, giving Mahinda more than a two thirds majority. This is the final crumbling of Ranil’s coalition which began in 2001, hastened in 2004 when he didn’t fight President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and now almost completed since he has not fought President Mahinda Rajapaksa. With the last two Presidents he’s tried to negotiate and they’ve simply picked his pockets of his MPs. Now the UNP’s fall is almost complete, but Ranil will probably stay there until there’s no party left. Today the greatest impediment to democracy is not Mahinda but Ranil. The MPs he’s lost over the years now comprise the better part of Mahinda’s government – G.L. Peiris, Bandula Gunawardena, Keheliya Rambukwella, S.B. Dissanayake, etc. Most party leaders would step down to prevent such an implosion, but Ranil hasn’t. So now it looks like Mahinda will get enough to change the Constitution entirely.

Ah, the mosquito. Bane of my existence. Like Twilight, they both drink blood and annoy. Only female mosquitos bite, and they are basically molesting us, using our blood to trigger their ovaries. Grossly, they need something called a blood meal in order to produce eggs. Males, by contrast, sip flowers and stuff and then buzz around in big orgy parties for the females to fly into and mate. The female mosquito can take in three times her weight in blood, as you may have noticed from slapping them and getting a handful of your own blood. The horrid creatures sense body heat, breathing and sweat, making it difficult to get away. More dangerously, mosquitoes also spread dengue, malaria and killer blood diseases which hit places like Sri Lanka basically every time it rains. I hate the mosquito, but it was still interesting to read this Slate article on their story. Unlike some others that recommend mosquito genocide, this one recommends a modified co-existence. I think I still prefer killing them all.

Sri Lanka is having its first Twitter Meetup today (the 26th) at Coco Veranda on Ward Place at 5 o’clock. Sri Lanka is full of firsts which are insipid (SPEED’s first bottled water ‘for kids’, for example) but this one is somewhat worthwhile. Twitter is a online short messaging service which I now use as my primary news source. I follow a few people that I consider interesting and they post interesting news links and ideas. This gives me a diversity and specificity of fodder, and I also share some. Twitter also has other uses, one of which is starting, promoting and executing a meetup.

I am part of a dwindling and slightly pathetic race called the English Speaking Elite, or the Esé. Despite filling out Sinhala Buddhist on every police report (they ask), I cannot really speak Sinhala. If I’m under arrest it somehow comes back to me, but for casual inquiries I can’t. The Esé were once the dominant group in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon) or, more properly, the head niggers in charge. We were the government, we were the cops, we were the businessmen, we were the Ministers and we were the Minister’s sons. Now we’re not. Despite being an Esé myself, I think this is most certainly a good thing.

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.