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.

This country is ruled by Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers. Many ministers serve in his court. Two ministers – Wimal Weerawansa and Mervyn Silva are given special ambit. They are the symbolic gladiators of the media colosseum. When Mahinda cannot give us bread, he gives us circuses. Today the government is struggling with post-war issues of poverty, education, environment and education that have caused nearly daily protests. To communicate symbolically to these masses, Mahinda lets out his media mavens, unofficially, to soak up some newspaper ink, fill some airtime, give him a little cover. Weerawansa took a symbolic tilt at the UN, fasting unto drip. Mervyn tied a local government official to a tree to symbolically assume the sins of the bloody dengue scourge. Perhaps I’ve got the metaphor wrong. These are not gladiators, or jesters, or anything else. These are devil dancers, chasing out demons with demons.

What is going on with the UNP? Ranil Wickremesinghe has lost every recent election for the party and wasn’t even confident enough to run in the last Presidential, making it the first election in history that the UNP hasn’t contested. Still, he clings to power and is even negotiating with the government on one side while more MPs flee the party on the other. While he got Mangala Samaraweera to abandon his party of one and join the UNP, he simultaneously lost two Tamil MPs. Indeed, many of the heavy hitters in the current government from GL Peiris to Keheliya Rambukwella are former UNPers (tho they crossed at different times). One wonders how Ranil has the gall to negotiate with the government when he can’t even control his own party.

The historic St. John’s fish market is set to be moved to a brand new facility out of Colombo soon, so we went to check it out before it goes. The market is called historic, but it’s really just a concrete space covered in fish blood and teeming with fishmongers hacking up carcasses and buyers treading gingerly in rolled up pants and rubber slippers. I smelled like fish for a day afterwards and my car still smells like fish. Smells like dried fish now, actually, the scent matures. I am all for history, but moving the facility to a more modern location might be good.

There’s an article in Nature saying that were mosquitoes to disappear, they would not be missed. Ecologically that is. There are, or course, significant caveats, but some scientists seem to think that the mosquitoes positive ecological niche would be quickly filled. Mosquitoes are rather horrid creatures that carry horrid diseases like malaria, dengue and chikunguniya. Less people would die were they genocided and African nations in particular would even significantly improve their GDP (due to reduced health costs and great productivity). The danger is that eliminating mosquitoes would mess up the circle of life, but at least a few scientists seem to say the disruption wouldn’t be so bad.

There was this dead gecko frozen by a small nuclear holocaust or something. He’s stuck still screaming, in dinosaur mode, except dead. I don’t know how this happened but it did and this was his last photo shoot before he disintegrated. I have long wondered whether geckos were edible and, based on a cursory Google search, I think they might be. They don’t look very taste and some species expel feces in self defense. That is all I know or, more precisely, don’t know about geckos. They inhabit every nook and cranny of every kitchen. Some people think they’re gross, but I really don’t mind. I think this is now enough text to fill my layout requirements.

First there was Sugar Burger, and it was good. Then, or thereabouts, there was Burgers King. This evolved to a roadside cart to a sign the size of the cart to an enterprise that would made Jughead drool. Then Sugar Burger went commercial and set up shop with Odel while an old employee set up shot as Daddy Burger, working the lonely corner outside Lush (or Omnipotence, or Irrelevance, or whatever they’ve renamed Bistro Latino), just away from the horrid cart outside R&B which once made me throw up violently and an already old friend lost ten years off his life. Which is to say, there are quite a few places to get a Burger now, [insert requisite Burgher joke here].