Oscar 2008 - Predictions

Updated:
It's a pity that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly walked away with no awards. It was one of the finest movies of the 2007. Tilda Swanson came from nowhere to win that award. I was glad to see that Marion Cotillard's performance did not go unnoticed. Ellen Page will have to wait.
Other than that, most awards went as expected.

Reportcard: 8/12

* *
This is now a yearly ritual (thanks to the insistence of JRR and others). Let's see what tomorrow will bring. Most of the categories have been quite easy to call in contrast to last year. This is not to say that the nominees lack quality, but rather that the relative differences are apparent.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Daniel Day-Lewis has created a niche in playing deranged, driven maniacs and this is a role for him. It is more his voice than his acting that deserves the credit and There Will Be Blood is a movie that should be watched but also listened to. The others nominees can leave their speeches at home.
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood


Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Philip Seymour Hoffman has had a fantastic year. If Daniel Day-Lewis is sheer depth, then Hoffman is breadth. His role as the cocaine-sniffing exec in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead did not get much notice, but was one of his finest ever. It took me a while to realise that he was playing the CIA-agent Gust Avakatros in Charlie Wilson's War. If acting prizes were handed out in terms of batting averages, Hoffman would win many prizes. Unfortunately for him this time, Javier Bardem is standing with a cattle-gun with a killer performance that has been bested by only Day-Lewis.
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men


Performance by an actress in a leading role
Cate Blanchett is in her own Golden Age as an actress. Even her tiniest role as Bob Dylan earned a nomination. Do you need to say more about an actress who can embody - Hepburn, Dylan, Elizabeth and Galadriel? Another fan. I thought Marion Cotillard playing Edith Piaf poured her heart into role. But, there are a few things going against her - the movie was in French, about a French superstar, and the musician-biopic has become a tired genre for this award. Ellen Page (not Julie Christie) is the fresh face and her role as the flippant, pregnant teenager is the best one of the year.
Ellen Page in Juno

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Ruby Dee's performance was good, but not great. I cannot say anything about Amy Ryan since I have not seen the movie. I was most impressed by Saoirse Ronan in Atonement. When I read the book, I had a Briony in mind. Now, after having seen the movie, I cannot imagine anyone but Ronan. She exudes that nervous energy, prodigious talent, and fanciful imagination of a thirteen-year old.
Saoirse Ronan in Atonement


Best animated feature film of the year
My real work involves rats, I confess to certain amount of Francophilia, and to being a foodie. Even if any of these did not apply to you, Ratatouille should convince you to save money to be able to eat once at a cafe in Paris. I did not have the opportunity (in terms of money) to eat at a Michelin three-star restaurant, but if the 'common' cafe food was so good, I cannot imagine what a real restaurant offers. I have missed the bus on rap-music and also on the graphic-novel genre. Persepolis stands an outside chance (it's the only movie that is really made in France!)
Ratatouille


Achievement in cinematography
Both, the American Westerns would not have been that majestic if hadn't been for the camerawork. But, Kaminski's job as portraying the life of man who can only blink his left eyelid is one of the finest achievements in cinematography that I have ever seen. It would be nothing short of travesty if the award goes to anyone else.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Janusz Kaminski


Achievement in directing
Schnabel's work is nothing short of spectacular. This is the movie that is going to make it to the textbooks. Juno has on outside chance, but the Coen brothers' tight, riveting piece of work in No Country For Old Men will most probably win.
If I had to choose I would give Schnabel the award and let the Coens take home the Best Picture. It takes a great deal of skill to portray the life of locked-in patient without pitying him and showing his spirit.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel


Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
Incorporating the typewriter as part of the score is nothing but brilliant, and Marianelli's other selections, like the aria from La Boheme, will not go unnoticed.
Atonement - Dario Marianelli


Adapted screenplay
Ian McEwan's novel was written to be adapted. There are no challenges there. Large parts of the Diving Bell had to be written to show the second person perspective which was very nicely done. But, Cormac McCarthy's novel presented the greatest challenge and the end result speaks for itself. I cannot see Bardem or Lee-Jones being able to do what they do without this adaptation giving them the canvas.
No Country for Old Men - Joel Coen & Ethan Coen


Original screenplay
It takes effort to write a sentence with ten redundant 'likes', even if you are a teenager. The exchanges between Juno and her friends and Michael Cera are so uncannily real that you feel you have actually overheard them.
Juno - Diablo Cody

Best live action short film
It's a really pity that these gems are not as widely distributed. The Michigan Theater performs a great service by bringing these to Ann Arbor. There are novels and then there are short stories and these are truly the best of the best.

Tanghi Argentini had a great twist at the end and Il Supplente was a Robert Benigni-style riot. Every frame in The Tonto Woman could be in the National Geographic and I would watch out for Daniel Barber in the future. Going with the Francophile theme, the pickpocket movie was clearly the best. A very human story, told with a lot of wit, wonderful dialogue and a nice end.
Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)


Best motion picture of the year
Michael Clayton should not be here. I don't know what it is supposed to represent. Atonement was very tastefully done and, in this case, one can admit that the movie is as good as the book, and in some ways better. Using Vanessa Redgrave as the old Briony Tallis was a nice touch. There Will Be Blood fails to offer anything beyond the ambition and mania of two men - Paul Sunday(Dano) and Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). No Country For Old Men offers a lot of different things and speaks at different levels. The story is both old and young. Javier Bardem is the Grim Reaper and Tommy Lee Jones is the honest sheriff, a composite from all Westerns. Josh Brolin is the Vietnam Vet who is more a cowboy than anything. The themes are huge - Good and Evil, Chance and Fate, Contemplation and Spontaneity. In contrast to this Goliath of a movie stands the charming Juno. It's going to be interesting to see if soaring universal themes are cut to size by a pint-sized pregnant teenager with an attitude. For now, like God, I am sticking on side of the big armies.
No Country for Old Men

Press One, then Press Five For...

Sick of talking to machines?
Pressing one, then five, then six, yada...yada... yada?


Get me a human please!

In Defense of Food

Grocery lines at the local Meijer can be quite long and what can you do while waiting in line? One, read the pulp magazines on the rack, or two, talk on the phone. My preferred way to pass the time is to look into other people's carts - it tells you a lot. How much soda-pop? microwave-ready food? fruits? fresh veggies or boxed? You can make a pretty decent guess about their health, wealth, and lifestyle. You can even tell if they are single or married without looking for the ring finger. Try it!

One day while eating Michael Pollan felt like asking, "What is it that I am eating? Where does it come from? He traced the story of four different kinds of meals - fast-food, organic, foraged, and hunted. Those simple questions lead him to discover some shocking and rather unpleasant facts and write the Omnivore's Dilemma. Most people think that they know what they eat, and where their food comes from, but they don't. For example, try looking at the package your bread comes in. How many of those ingredients do you recognize? Are you surprised to find some stuff you weren't expecting was in the bread you eat? If you are perplexed then grab hold of the book, or listen to this - NPR interview.

That book was the description, his latest book - In Defense of Food - is the prescription and it's bafflingly simple:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

There isn't anything more to it. How many books have you read whose first line IS the punchline?

Eat food
What food? you ask. Any food that is really food, says Michael Pollan. Much of what we eat is not food, but a 'product' of food science. Simple rules of thumb:

1)Anything with more than five ingredients is probably not food
2)Especially something that needs to advertise itself - low-fat, multi-grain, vitamin-fortified.
3)Something your grandmother(great-grandmother, if you are American!) wouldn't recognize

What you are left with after applying those three rules is very likely going to be food, whole food. I tried it this week and what you realize you are not left with much. As Pollan says, "The yam, sitting there silently in the produce section doesn't scream it health benefits" and I found, much to my shock, that my low-fat healthy yogurt contains high-fructose corn syrup. There is actually very little real food in the supermarket.

Mostly plants
I am what you call a 'flexitarian' - one who will eat meat if nothing else is available. People give different reasons for giving up meat or animal products - religious, ethical and health. I've discovered another, in my opinion, more compelling one - ecological. The entire livestock of the world emits more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation industry. I also ought to let you know that herbivores are being fed meat (mostly ground beef) for juicier steaks and cows drugged up with hormones. So, that bumper sticker you say is right - "Drink beer, not milk!"

Not too much
We all know this right? But, it's hard to follow it when the food is piled sky-high on your plate and you feel compelled to finish it. Okinawans who are known for their longevity as a community believe in hara hachi bu: Eat till you are 80 percent full. Again, hard to do since most meals are not consumed at dinner table, but are eaten in the car, in front of the TV and are eaten far too quickly or absent-mindedly that we cannot or don't respond to satiety cues. The French paradox is well-known. How do the French eat the most 'unhealthy' food and still manage to be so lean? First, they emphasize quality over quantity, second they don't take second helpings, and eat slowly and enjoy their meals.

Pollan says that - low-fat, low-carb, Omega-3, multi-grain, organic, etc. - are fads and not nutrition, but nutritionism in action. We have been eating food for centuries, and there is much evidence to suggest that most cultural practices are often healthier than the seemingly more healthy array of products of today. Food, real food, needs defending because it is rapidly disappearing from the marketplace.

So what's on your plate? - Make sure it's food, mostly plants, and not too much.

Ira Glass: now on DVD (the radio is better though!)

As an self-confessed NPR junkie I make no bones about my favorite show on radio - This American Life. The show is like the movies, except the stories are real (see old post).

Last Saturday, the show's host Ira Glass was in town. Being Ann Arbor, one the few places where if you don't listen to NPR you will be looked down by people, the local bookstore Borders was trying to restrict the audience by handing out wristbands when the store opened in the morning. In the evening, Borders did not have the executive power to enforce this and were letting anybody in. As a result, yours truly was stuck behind a pillar. This kinda of put dampener on the whole point of going there - "I came to see Ira, not to hear him!".

Ironically, Ira is on a tour to promote the DVD of his six-episode TV version of the show. Something, he said, he was reluctant to do for a long, long time. I have seen the pilot (on their website), but the radio show is better( and everyone knows it). From the straw-poll conducted at the bookstore, by Ira himself, not many people know the show from TV, which is small victory of sorts. TV or radio, the show is about real-life stories of real people.

The show is also well known for its beautifully put together music and one wonders if Ira who was born in 1959 was inspired by the music revolution in the 60s and 70s. He said that he was a nerdy Jewish-American kid growing up in Baltimore. He never heard any of the popular music while growing up. He said, "I remember a kid in my neighborhood asking me if I thought 'The Monkees' were better than 'The Beatles'. Imagine that there was a time when there was even a debate about this!. I grew up listening to Broadway musicals. The music of my people!". Musicals from the 40s and 50s, he said, have shaped his aesthetic and he tries to achieve a lot of that effect on the show.

I waited in line for about an hour to get the DVD signed. A bookshop is perhaps one of the few places in the world where I can wait in line forever. I picked up a book and 'almost read it'. Finally, it was great to meet and talk to Ira. He seemed to be in no hurry to conclude the conversation. The reason the line moved slowly was that Ira likes to talk to people, but which also made the wait worthwhile (not that I was complaining). I suggested that he should make a show on the show. There is a certain demographic to which the show appeals and, 'who really are these people?', and 'why do they listen to the show?'

Earlier, he said that for those in the creative profession most of the work is not in doing the work, but in simply finding the subject. As a young reporter, Ira tried really hard to sound like what he thought a reporter should sound like and he was terrible. He said that your best work is done when you are not trying to be what people think of you, but when you are doing it simply to amuse yourself. What does Ira do when he has all these wonderful stories from people to choose from. It isn't that hard -

Everyone has a story, but everyone does not have a story that needs to be told to two million people.
- Ira Glass

Orienting my Cartesian Coordinates

Go outside, the graphics are amazing
- Unknown quote

Upon reading this quote at the end of someone's email, my first impulse was to look through my window. Yes! the graphics were truly amazing. So, my excuse for not blogging in a while is that I have been out, in the real world, doing things that real people do. Mostly important stuff like doing the laundry, making enough to pay the rent, scraping ice off the windshield, etc., you get the drift.

The digital world does get a little too comfy after a while. Instead of blogs being about the world outside or about real people, they are mostly about themselves. Blogs on blogs. Opinions on other opinions. Links to links. I looked back at my last few posts and I was a little shocked to realise that I was describing myself.

Do I do anything that is unconnected with the digital universe and has something to do with the real world outside? Actually, I do. I am always up to something. Over the past four years, my yearly blog output has been remarkably consistent, with the exception of last year. Last year, I was extremely busy working or traveling or administering giving me little time to blog.
Which gives rise to the

Certainty Principle of Blogging: You can't be doing and blogging at the same time.

Thus, I have conveniently rationalized myself out of my responsibility to blog regularly and regale my readers with my posts.

Having said that, I have another thought - assuming that blogs are not recursive and do talk about something really interesting, like the graphics outside, then I do believe that the ancient Cartesian dictum of 'Blogito, ergo sum' holds. As any responsible blogger can attest, a lot of blogito requires a lot of cogito (There some who seem to manage fine without the latter). Logically speaking, if A ⇒ B, then ¬ A does not ⇒ ¬ B. However, I am not one to take chances.

Creating a blog is easy, the hard part is keeping it going. The Buddha told us that birth ⇒ there will be death. Many blogs are started with great enthusiasm, but after a few months most are simply trying to avoid blog-death. Writing blogs can get to be hard work, especially if you are attempting to say something meaningful or capture something memorable, not for others, even simply for yourself. For my part, I could be as well as yelling into a well. Ira Glass said something last night (see next post) that is really relevant to this idea. In any case, writing does makes you think harder. So, there could be a lot of doing, but not much thinking. Or, vice a versa.

Lab Notebooks

What good is a lab note-book,
if it doesn't have a coffee stain somewhere?

Right or Left?

This article by Steven Pinker is fantastic!

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

A lot of issues are going to be debated in this election year and it has been an interesting exercise to frame the arguments using the spheres that Pinker describes.

One ring to bind them

One of the most profound concepts that I came across late this year was of the 'organic circuit'. In The Metaphysical Club Menand writes on John Dewey:

... it assumes that the parts are prior to the whole, when in fact it is the whole that makes the parts what they are...

Meaning that divisions are artificial, there are no real discrete units, there is simply an organic whole. According to Dewey, we do not know, so that we can do, but doing leads to knowing. Knowledge in not the result of experience, any more than a response is the result of a stimulus; knowledge is experience itself in one of its manifestations.

As is usually the case, the same concept once discovered pops up more often and much sooner than expected in other places. At a different level was Jeff Hawkins's On Intelligence which presents a new framework for intelligence - ideas on how to build a human brain. Even after all these years AI did not produce a device that can perform the basic task that a three-year old can perform with ease. Bigger, faster is not going to get us there when the neocortex, the size and dimension of a dinner napkin still beats anything out there in telling a cat apart from a dog.

The key is to first understand how the brain actually does it. Neuroscience suffers from the the other problem - too much detail, no overarching theory. Echoing Dewey, we need to study the organic whole and not just the parts in isolation. Society is not a sum of individuals, but an aggregate of interacting individuals. The brain too works as an organic whole and there is no seeing that leads to perception that results in action, but all these acting together. No wonder that 80% of the connections in the brain are feedback connections.

There are always analyses, the breaking down in various ways. What about the synthesis? the putting together. Is that a tacit assumption that we know how to put together what we have pulled apart? If the market is any judge are there jobs for synthesists?

Eric Clapton on Eric Clapton

It's a goddammed impossible life
- Robbie Robertson

So described Robbie to Clapton the life on the road as a musician. It also neatly describes Clapton's own life. The facts of EC's life are well-known and there are no facts out of the ordinary and known in his autobiography - Clapton, the Autobiography . Yet, the book is a marvelous, fascinating read of an impossible life told by the incredible artist himself. It's not just what happened, but how it happened that interests me. The book is organized chronologically along the big events in his life. Clapton arrived and left quickly, often at the peak of a band's popularity. These quick, short events are convenient for breaking up the story in neat chapters. But, that is on the surface. Like his own songs, in which there is a main riff and then dizzying solos, the book is largely a rambling account, with years, events, and names flashing forward and backward. It feels like listening to an extempore narration of Clapton recounting his life based on bullet points printed on a 4x3 inch index card. There are no footnotes to help you along, as EC talks about people using their first names - e.g. Mick, Keith, Roger John - without introducing them appropriately. Sometimes there are lots of details that would have been excised by a more careful editor. It is quite unlikely that the book was ghost-written, and the somewhat poor editing gives the autobiography a rough authentic feel.

His musical wandering has been relentless - Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominoes. Life has been a constant journey and search. Is Clapton a seeker or just a wanderer? It depends on your point of view. He was an illegitimate child, told that his grandparents were his parents and his mother his sister. When the truth was told he was unable to handle it. He constantly wanted to hide, constantly felt he was being judged. That made him a perfectionist and made the desire to pursue music and play it the best he can his prime obsession (with the drugs and alcohol getting in the way, of course).

But, satisfaction and comfort came late. Subway graffiti proclaiming - 'Clapton is God' only made Clapton feel that he had some street cred, but did not give him the feeling of guitar divinity. He always felt uncomfortable with the 'guitar-hero' tag. His problem was always been about being comfortable in his own shoes. He writes that it was confidence that he lacked, not the chops to be a bandleader and a singer. He took him more than 50 years to really find his footing and come to grips with his talent, his origin, and his addictions. At the same time, he writes, "Once, I got what I wanted, I realized I did not want it any more." It's the same story with guitars, women, and success. And he had a lot of all three while riding on one form of addiction or another.

Throughout the book there is not one harsh word about anyone; Clapton reserves it mostly for himself. It wasn't about them, it was about that inner demon that lead him to both glory and despair. He writes, "There is a madman inside me that gets out under the influence." EC did a whole lot of wild things, but the tone of the whole book and every episode is even and matter-of-fact. He does not gloat over his crazy episodes or failures in relationships. They, sort of just happened. It hurt, and it hurt like hell, but he moved on, for the most part.

The Epilogue is one of the finest chapters in the book after rather anti-climactic last three chapters of domestic bliss with Melia (his current wife). If they ever make a movie about his life (which they will) it would start here.

As I write this, I am sixty-two years old, twenty years sober, and busier than I have ever been.... I am virtually deaf, but refuse to wear a hearing aid because I like the the way things sound naturally, even if I can hardly hear them.

After having been sober and clean for 20 year, he blames his addictions for not being able to forge close relationships with people during those years, especially Muddy Waters. Some the most famous concerts, he writes, he was too stoned to remember.

I was curious to know what he had to say about his relationship with Jimi Hendrix. Clapton says, he was devastated when he first heard Hendrix play. "I remember thinking here was a force to be reckoned with. It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star, and just as we were finding our own speed, here was the real thing." Jimi and Clapton used to crash random bars, walk up onto to the stage and wipe everyone out. What would I not give to see this happen? Clapton was deeply shocked and saddened by Jimi's early death. He was going to present him a guitar the next day.

He has nothing but good things to say about musicians, and even managers, in the entire book. He hated the 'music machine' when he first started and he still hates it now. We like to glorify the 60s and 70s and think of that time as some sort of golden period of rock music, but he puts it into perspective.

The music scene as I look at it today is little different from when I was growing up. The percentages are roughly the same - 95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure However, the systems of marketing and distribution are in the middle of a huge shift, and by then end of this decade I think it's unlikely that any of the existing record companies will still be in business. With the greatest respect to all involved, that would be no great loss. Music will always find its way to us, with or without business, politics, or any other bullshit attached. Music survives everything, and like God is always present. It needs no help, and suffers no hindrance. It has always found me, and with God's blessing and permission, it always will.

e-klavya

This seems rather late in the day decade, but I just found out that MIT has made about 1800 courses available online:
OCW. They started in 2001 (I found out only a few days ago). Sometimes I wonder, if all I should have done is invested in a super-fast internet connection years ago. It would have saved a lot of time and cash.

I am really interested in the access data. There is a long report on it which should make interesting reading on the knowledge needs(with some caveats) of the rest of the world.

The statistics are quite revealing. Not surprisingly, most of the access to the OCW is out of the US (>60%). North America(39%), China and Southeast Asia (21%), South Asia(7%), Europe(19%), South America(4%), and sub-Saharan Africa(1%). Are the South Americans and Africans not interested, or do they simply lack internet connections? Students from India have made their presence, and their gratitude felt.

The most visited course is Linear Algebra (link), a subject that needs to be emphasized more. The most visited courses are mainly mathematical or engineering courses, the traditional domains of nerds. Only psychology and macroeconomics manage to squeeze in as humane elements.

There are many courses that I will 'attend' in the next few months as snow drifts pile up at my door. I always find video-taped courses provide the much needed benefit of using fast-forward and being able to listen to them in your bed. This is a dream.

PS: I am trying to find a course that Chomsky taught.

Used or New? Forget it!

As any college student can attest, there is a HUGE secondary market in textbooks. The average price of a textbook is between $100-$120, and many students sell their books at the end of the semester, or buy used ones at the start of one. So, what do you do? Buy used or new?

There are cost, quality and time trade-offs. Many students order books online and have to wait, often up to 2 weeks, to get their textbooks.(Some online sellers are based in India and China and mail economy editions.) To save money, you lose time and might have to hunt the book down in the library, or check it out for a 4-hour reserve for the first couple weeks. For this reason, a student wrote in the campus rag asking professors to make the list of textbooks available before courses actually started.

The publishers aren't twiddling their thumbs either. To add insult to the injury of high-priced textbooks, they bring out new editions every other year. Once a new edition is out, the price of the old one falls considerably, and there are no used books to go around for that semester at least. One commenter (see below) wrote, "Does calculus change so much that it needs a revised edition every other year?"

The Economist blog reports a new model of selling - FREE! For students, anything free is welcome. There are a number of additional benefits: It gives professors more options, and you can learn from a book that best suits you and not get stuck with the prescribed textbook that is too 'dry', or more plainly 'sucks'.

The question is, "Is this a viable business model? based on ads?" I don't think so. Since this is not YouTube, I would not visit the site again once I have downloaded my books for the semester. A better model would be to charge a fraction of the cost, say between $5-$10, to generate some revenue and give the author more money than he would make from royalties. The volume should compensate him enough since more people would be inclined to buy the book in the first place. Perhaps, this is what future textbook authors need - a low barrier to entry.

Blogs were laughed about when they first appeared as alternative media. Now they have been co-opted by every major company and publication. I cannot see why we don't have more of these textbooks download sites. Wouldn't you write one too? This is where market economics will best serve the purpose of giving more choices and options to both consumers and suppliers and sidestepping the middlemen - the publisher and the professor to some extent.

More aimless wandering on the internet

Remember the time they used to ask capitals of countries in quizzes? and then it all changed. The worst thing you can do as a quizmaster is to ask capitals. But, what do you do if you still know where Dushanbe is? Or, pinpoint Reunion on a map?

This Travel IQ will ensure that you gain a sense of power and superiority over your fellow men. It is totally addictive and an insane waste of time.

Even the WSJ has taken interest in it!

Album Art Grabber

This site does a pretty good job of grabbing Album Art. Apparently, Apple isn't too pleased about this and has blocked the high-res images.

Face Off

The biggest suggestion at a recent conference that I attended was not scientific at all, it was "You need to get on Facebook!".

For all my geek bravado, when it comes to social networking, I am still in the dark ages. When it first started on Friendster, and later on Orkut, it seemed rather pointless, juvenile, and silly. I figured - I am more than 20 years old, I have a blog, and a webpage, why would I ever need this? For people who could not set up their own webpages, or upload music MySpace, Facebook, etc. provide useful tools. To me, it looked like another digital time sink.

IMHO, there is little intrinsic value in these networking sites, but all value is due to the snowball effect. I have noticed friends and lab members check their Facebook accounts even before they check their email in the morning. Bizarrely, I was left out of a party invitation because the invitation was not sent on the email group, but on the Facebook group!! Not by choice, but by design - 'If you are not in, you are out'. Party snubs aside, it is time to take this thing a little more seriously.

For certain contexts, it has replaced email and even cell-phone messages. It's true that you cannot possibly email ALL your far-flung friends to know what's going on. Sometimes, you want to just say, "Hi". In a few minutes, you can get a pretty good idea of what your friends have been up to lately. There are tons of pictures on Facebook that are tagged, mostly Patel-shots of the me-at-the-EiffelTower variety. Then I heard about the graffiti wall, virtual gifts, and the virtual happy-hour (where you can invite your friends for a beer). This really got to me and I was a runaway again. I am content with my blog and my mostly static webpages.

But, I now understand that most people don't like to write, or even read what you have written (gentle reader, you are an exception!). Blogging freed tons of people who were simply aching to write and hungry for a space, some space. ( It also released a few that shouldn't have been let out of the asylum.) Alice was right (Who the ***k is Alice? from the Wonderland) - people like pictures. Some bloggers have strict 'no-pictures' policy, but then they are not so pretty. There is something rather inhuman about pages with only plain text than a book or webpage with pictures (some not a lot). Where does that leave a i-love-plain-text kinda person? Into digital exile.

Currently, I am still holding out. Things don't look so good, considering that even my Dad now has a Facebook account. Social networking is not the flavor of month, and now I feel like an ostrich.

A Word a Day: Some grain of truth

A link from my brother Darshan:

I am really intrigued by the interesting method employed to raise money for the UN World Food Program. Go to
www.freerice.com to work on your vocabulary and donate 20 grains of rice for every word you get correct.

This program is highly addictive, don't say I did not warn you! At least you won't feel as guilty.