My landlord often gazes wistfully out of his gate and tells me that this all used to be cadjan huts, selling for Rs. 500 a perch. Not anymore. The neighborhood outside our garden is all tight concrete houses, now piling on top of each other. This isn’t a shanty, but it’s how most people in Colombo live. Our neighbors, at any opportunity, live in the street.

I recently read two education stories. One was about a 13 year old student beaten in front of the whole class. The other was about a scholarship student who refused to bow to the Education Minister (literally). The last story is much more heartening.

I was only in Sri Lanka for a few years as a child, but I remember the vans. I was in Montesoori, but I still took a van. I remember gazing out the window and daydreaming. Chavie and Halik, however, have some more coherent memories – “The memories I had of the van are mostly of being stuck in traffic, getting home two and a half hours after the end of school, wonderful.”

A lot of the middle class commutes into Colombo from the suburbs. They don’t live in the municipality, so they can’t actually vote. While they certainly have strong opinions about the mayoral race, the strongest voting block is the poor, shanty dwellers that actually live here. Or there if you will. Colombo, like the heart of any country, pumps a lot of people in and pumps them out. The 2001 population was about 650,000, estimates today are around 800,000. Around 400,000 people commute into the city for work.

Basically, Top Chef is tense and bitter, and MasterChef is tense and sweet. People are quite nice on the latter and they still produce great competitive food. People are so mean on Top Chef, and they produce food that I don’t understand. Even in its Australian incarnation, I think MasterChef is the best. Mainly cause it doesn’t bring out the worst in people.

I’ve seen these huge billboards in Rajagiriya and Nugegoda advertising 19XXX.org. I think this is a reference to the candidate number of Madhura Vithana and the three checks a voter would make. The site itself is just an image asking to keep Colombo clean. Not great, but not disastrous. Type in 19XXX.com, however, as I did by accident and you are directed straight to porn.

Each year, the Galle Literary Festival assembles students from all over Sri Lanka to make their own films. I went to the first camp, which was good, but in this year’s camp the students have produced some objectively excellent work. The movie above, The Report, combines story-telling with symbolism, interesting cuts and good editing. My favorite is the opening scene with the wolves and sheep and the cuts where the students are looking at the boy from above. It’s a bit slow at times, but so’s Kubrick. One of the last shots against the blue Jaffna twilight is beautifully composed.

Ranil seems to be running for Prime Minister again. He recently wrote about a plan for Colombo, which is to follow his plan from 2004. It’s an interesting idea, a Colombo Megapolis which stretches from Negombo to Kalutara. The problem is that the current election is for the Colombo Municipal Council, whose jurisdiction ends in Dehiwela.

I read HeyDude’s blog now and then, he tells some quite good stories. This is a classic about moving to another country, not having much money and loving your kid. I know a bit how it feels: “This story is not funny at all. We hadn’t brought much cash with us when we arrived here. And everything was unexpectedly, artificially and humorously expensive. What we had we had to spend so carefully till we got our first month’s salaries. The little one who had a roomful of toys at home (both his and his sister’s) was fingering the toys in the shops here and but never asked for them. We gritted our teeth and prayed for the salary.”

Kottu now has tags. THANKS TO JANITH. Boy is a genius, seriously. I work in duct tape and he works in marble. There’s a thin line between categories and chaos, but I think Kottu is walking it now. Basically, bloggers can tag posts as they please. Kottu takes the first three tags, sese if they fit into our taxonomy and files them accordingly. What I think is especially cool is that language and popularity and category filters all work together. Thus, you can get a vegetarian kottu with extra chili but no onions, so to speak.