I’m going to get back to blogging. I buy a shitload of stuff on my iPad. Not that I like spending money, and the exchange rate terrifies me, but it’s just so easy, and so good. For example, I’ve been reading comics again. Spiderman, and Carnage. Except this time Spiderman is friends with Iron Man, and Carnage has boobs. Amazing. I’ve realized, however, that Marvel never ends stories. They are all cliff-hangers. Sequels are the business model. They’re such assholes money machines.

I got this on the Badulla bus, I think it was about 50 Rupees. It’s pretty awesome. A Chinese knock-off of, I think, this product, this static book creates what looks like a movie image when you drag the attached film across the page. It’s pretty cool.

Star Wars is a deep part of modern culture, despite George Lucas repeatedly disinterring it an molesting the body in public. See (for an example of culture, not necrofilmia) this children’s book about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. It’s a series of touching vignettes about how life coulda been, if Anakin Skywalker had stuck around to raise his kid. Here’s a money quote: “It is pointless to resist my son. It’s bedtime.”

I recently got a physical book in the mail. It cost me twice as much as the Kindle version and took three weeks longer to arrive (I live in Sri Lanka), but I bought it anyways. Why?

I finally walked into the Colombo Public Library. It’s about as bad as I imagined it. The periodicals room is OK, it has all the newspapers and you can stand around reading them. Not too much else that’s new. It’s mainly the selection of books that’s depressing. I did a random walk around and the newest book I could find was from 2006. There was some non-fiction about the Chinese economy in the 80s. The fiction was even worse.

My friend Shehan Karunatilake has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Damn well deserved. Chinaman a thoughtful and entertaining book about Sri Lanka, unlike the self-pitying war and araliya tripe many authors produce. Give it a like on Facebook, or better yet buy the thing. It’s fun, sad and strange – truly repping the country.

This is only one column, cause I think I got fired from the Leader. They weren’t happy about a critical piece (critical of The Sunday Leader) I blogged a year ago. They also weren’t happy that I was also writing for The Nation, which I have been doing for months now. The latter I guess I understand, but I think I’d rather be free to write what and where I want.

One of my favorite blogs is Rice & Curry, a food blog that mostly covers Sri Lanka. It’s interesting stuff, and all quite cookable. Thus I was pleased to see that the author, S.H. Fernando, has published a cookbook – Rice & Curry: Sri Lankan Home Cooking – which seems to be out now. It’s gotten some good reviews:

Sociologist Robert Bellah says that religion may be like play. The rules don’t make sense in the abstract, but they can create meaning and better people if you just play along. I’ve been in enough religious debates to conclude that God is not in the details. It’s like having an extended argument about how logical an LBW is and claiming that this refutes the game of cricket. But it doesn’t. These somewhat abstract rule based systems can lead to higher level awesomeness, but viewed in isolation, the rules may not make much sense. Like Java.

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.