There’s nothing wrong with pornography, but there’s a lot wrong with porn. Nothing wrong with watching people have sex, but too often that sex is brutal, senseless and coerced. I mean how many couples are coming on each others faces every day? Hence, philosopher king Alain de Botton – after...
Sri Lanka is going to start offer dual citizenship again, for people of Sri Lanka descent (ie, those who migrated or their kids). Which is good. Still not an actual immigration policy, but getting, well getting back to the status quo. I got dual citizenship years ago. Sri Lanka wants...
Avengers is blowing up worldwide. Even in Sri Lanka, the 3D cinema (Majestic) is booked for days in advance. I caught the film this Wednesday and here’s what I thought. Basically, it’s entertaining fare. I was never an Avengers fan. None of them really. More of a Spiderman or Batman,...
Arunoda Susiripala is a great geek. Here is on the MTV Sports morning show, which I happened to host. I am not great at TV but I think this is still an interesting interview. If you’re a developer or user or in the online scene, you must know Arunoda. He’s...
Sri Lankan wedding cake. Once I was dusting off my wedding suit and found some cake from a year before. It looked the same. I recently wrote about gay marriage, which is not even on the radar in Sri Lanka. But we have another type of marriage discrimination here as...
When Obama announced his (legally unbinding) support for gay marriage, he cited gay people he knows – members of his staff, friends, families, neighbors, soldiers. When Joe Biden pre-announced his personal opinion, he cited Will And Grace. I’d say Modern Family. Both TV shows, humanizing gay families and bringing them...
Sarath Fonseka posters in Jaffna, 2010. I started off not really liking General Sarath Fonseka, him being part of the aggressive war effort. I didn’t support the war (largely cause I thought it would fail), and I thought Gotabhaya Rajapaksa and Fonseka were gleefully stomping everything. Fonseka even came out...
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested on a bunch of trumped up charges, but mainly for daring to threaten Mahinda in a Presidential election. Despite his poor health, Fonseka was arrested in February 2010 and sentence to three years. Word on the street now, however, is that he’ll be released soon....
The cover of the first Playboy, from 1953. I’ve been testing a lot of apps. A very interesting one is iPlayboy, from Playboy magazine. It’s bad porn but a good magazine, especially since you can read issues from its cultural heyday – the Mad Men era of the 60s. You...
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...
It’s 5 am. I’ve been up all night. We’re supposed to be. The doors and windows are open. Seeya’s body is in the living room. The candles are burning down. I was bone tired today. And yesterday. My thoughts are largely incoherent. It’s all been broken down to human relation....
Seeya’s portrait, as we remember him. My grandfather was born November 19th, 1924, in Panadura. That side of the family had gradually proceeded up the coast, from Matara generations ago. Achchi and Seeya eventually settled in Mount Lavinia. When I was young we lived there. Many people lived there, when...
Mr Pawan Goenka of Mahindra and Mahindra, launching the hydrogen-powered three-wheeler ‘HyAlfa’ in New Delhi. Cool. Soon there will be 15 hydrogen-powered ‘green’ trishaws plying the Galle Fort (where trishaws are currently banned, apparently, though I’ve seen them there). This is funded by UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Dev) and I’m...
Guy Gunaratne is a Sri Lankan Briton who I met while he was down here filming The Truth That Wasn’t There. I haven’t watched it cause it’s largely unavailable/expensive on the web, but I think I’m in it. I’ve had random drunken NGO types accost me but I don’t remember...
Almost capacity. Until yesterday this was a multiple choice question. In my experience you can definitely fit six (plus driver). So theoretically eight plus. Today, of course, the answer is simple. Three. You can only put three passengers in a trishaw. Or they’ll cop you, for reals. While there are...
Flowers at a Hindu hall The Hindu’s R.K. Radhakrishnan has a rather workaday article in Frontline until the end: “[The Indian Tamil MPs] carried back a fact that is not palatable in Tamil Nadu: that Tamil in Sri Lanka is a language; nothing more, nothing less. Tamils are not a...
Mahinda’s Tamil avatar. In his post marking the 36th birth anniversary of the LTTE, DBS Jeyaraj said something striking – “Today the battered and shattered Sri Lankan Tamils reduced in numbers to being the fourth largest ethnicity in the Island are slowly struggling to pick up the pieces and get...
This ad was pulled for raising racist hackles, but I don’t get it. It’s not a great Indian imitation or anything, but I don’t see anything that offensive. I’m Sri Lankan, but still. The character is a Bollywood producer who likes Kim Kardashian and Snooki, which I wouldn’t call entirely...
The Sri Lankan flag is not an aesthetic triumph, but neither am I. I like it anyways. In this (random) graded review of flags Sri Lanka got 41/100 with demerits for weapons, bad colors, graven images and being too busy. Which I think is fair, but again, I like it...
I was watching this video on fan art and I saw these cool images of Internet meme faces, drawn quasi-realistically. These faces are used all over the world for all manner of jokes, including Sri Lanka – for everything from bus rage to dansal hijinks. It’s interesting seeing the usual...
Buddhist Flag and the Vesak full moon. I hope you’re enjoying the Vesak weekend, celebrating the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. I went to a calm and beautiful temple, took one of the new city buses downtown and walked around the Beira Lake. It hasn’t been a huge Vesak thus...
April and May aren’t months full of holidays, they’re holiday months. In case you haven’t noticed, my blogging frequency has dropped dramatically. Every day just feels like a holiday, with occasional surfing for paperwork. Which is kinda the way it is. Avurudu breakishness has just worn off and now it’s...
I went to get some milk today for my cereal. It was Rs. 155 for a liter of Ambewela (which I bought) and Rs. 165 for 250g of Rathi powdered milk. I mention this only because milk is the latest flash point in Sri Lanka’s ongoing consumer trauma. Just a...
They typographic style in Pondicherry – half and half. I was recently in South India, briefly. One thing I noticed (after it was pointed out) was the dominance of a particular font, or typographic style moreso. On almost every wall or poster (often above trash or urine) they’d be using...
May Day bikers on Horton Place. Yesterday I wrote about the opposition JVP May Day rallies. These are some photos from marches on the other side of town, near Town Hall, led by the government and presumably paid for by you and me. They seem to bus people in (in...
