Like Deshan says, if books are going out, they might as well go out like dinosaurs. There’s a lovely bookshop in Mount Lavinia that sells pop-up kids books for less than Rs. 2000. These exemplify the art. The place is called Serendib Books. It’s not on FourSquare so I geotagged it on Twitter. Where are some other places to get books in Colombo.
I remember when the Hambantota Port opened. It was all over the TV. They had dancers symbolizing water coming into the port. I thought it was kinda weird. Turns out the whole thing was symbolic anyways. “Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port needs extra loans of 147.9 million dollars to cover equipment including cranes, cost escalations in building the port, and digging the basin and entrance channel, the island’s state-run ports agency said.” (LBO)
Jack Point has an interesting post on the cost of corruption, namely as related to this apartment building toppling over in China. Sri Lanka has had its own issues with dodgy cement and a lot of our new infrastructure is being built by the Chinese. The Hambantota Port, for example, is not actually usable yet and requires around $150 million USD to fix (LBO). The thing about a giant rock is apparently not true though. It’s a lot of littler rocks. Anyways.
The veddahs are the original (aboriginal) inhabitants of Sri Lanka. When they visit the President they still wear their loincloth and carry an ax on their shoulder. Many still live much as they did. Like most aboriginal communities, however, they have struggled to even maintain. A year back we drove into an aboriginal area and ended up driving straight out. It was actually a bit scary.
Kottu has been completely recoded by Janith Leanage. What’s different? Well, it got too big and now Kottu has tools to make the experience a bit more relevant again. You can filter by language on top (English, Sinhala, Tamil). The popular posts thing is now back, except smarter. Before a few people would sit and click all day and mess up the rankings. Now clicks are only one factor in an algorithm, other factors are buzz on Twitter, FB, Twitter and Google Plus.
Sam Harris has suggested that the rich pay more taxes, and he’s getting hammered for it. His readers are deep in the throes of the fundamental attribution error, thinking that individuals are responsible for everything that happens to them. Which isn’t true. Wealthy or poor, luck plays a lion’s role.
Wrote something for the Indian site MyLaw.net on grease devils. Everybody spins the story their own way. Being a panic, it’s of course prone to multiple interpretations. My point here is that people don’t trust the police or even army that much, so this shows the underlying fragility of law and order, and the cost in terms of survival of the state.
One of the landlord’s many cats had kittens. Two shivered, wobbled and died. One survived. The kid took her in for the night and they were sleeping together, which was cute. He started tossing and turning and the cat had to be moved. Then I noticed that the animal was pacing around unusually. Oh God, it was pooping.
Anna Hazare is calling off his anti-corruption fast after the Indian Parliament agreed to some of his demands. I shan’t get into his demands or the response too deeply, the NYTimes link before or this Hindu link should help with that. The broader question is, what is democracy? Is it representative or deliberative? Are laws the domain of a Parliament or of the people?
The last Twitter meetup was held in a coffeeshop with about 100 people (I think). This one was at least 400 and it was held in a big hall (Dialog Future Center). Next year they may have to find someplace bigger still. Internet use in Sri Lanka has rapidly gone young and gone wide – it’s truly not expat types by myself, it’s ordinary extra-ordinary people.
