Sunday morning was a good morning. Any morning without an EarlyMorningDuckAttack is a good morning. But this one came with extras. I had the pleasure of witnessing a colonial type doing a renal extraction on the Vijitha Yapa crowd. I would not normally be ecstatic over another's misfortune (fingers triple crossed) but shoot me if i cant derive a wee bit 'o pleasure when those insects, who had the effrontery to turn me out of the shop at 9:50 a.m. saying that they open at 10:00 a.m., get lampooned. And then i discovered this.
Why, for example, did the dead man leave so many bafflingly inane clues when a Post-it note would have done? Why does our code breaking hero know so much useless stuff and why is he usually wrong about it anyway? Behold
The Asti Spumante Code -
a thriller of such power that it will render all other books pointless. Behold also the titles authored by our hero, prof. James Crack:
Below the surface:The hidden meaning of superficial stuff and
The significance of words and some of their meanings. I wager it's gonna be better than the nearly abysmal Da Vinci Code, though i confess i didn't have the smarts to decipher all but the last of the puzzles. Bah! They were so beneath my standard, to be sure.
That brings me to another thought crawling around the fetid depths of what masquerades as my mind. The Rowling woman will take another 2 years to come up with the next potty book. And it will, ofcourse, be the pits - of Mariana-ish proportions . So why cannot some random literally minded person beat her to it. Not only will it be financially rewarding, the readers would probably get a much better deal. How difficult could it be? The HP universe
after all is a mere petri dish of shiny amoeba after all.
I have the urge to write about pants, my thoughts on the past couple of months, and a pink spoon named Julia, but this post is far too fractured as it is.
sot:There's this one girl who goes around naked shooting people.
moi:completely naked? throughout the movie?
sot:well, she wears a holster and boots. But yes, from beginning to end.
moi:oh. <covertly pockets DVD> (well, in reality there was not much covertness involved. I just wanted to use the word. It reminds me of covet: What does he do, agent Starling? what is its nature?)
sot:I've never really figured out why she has to be naked though. I mean, Tokyo is not exactly the warmest place now, is it? The sahara or Sri Lanka, now that would have been ok.
moi:And she shoots people you say?
sot:em, yes. that too...
I wish I could believe in a naked gun totting goyle. It would be a start.
There was this time that i used to
believe in stuff. At least, I have this one memory of being quite upset over the Sri Lankan team loosing a match. This was way back before the worldcup days. I must have
believed in something, the team, miracles maybe, for me to be dissapointed in the loss. I have no memories of believing in Santa though.
Somewhere down lifes twisted little footpaths, I think i stumbled over some misbegotten pebble of knowledge which questioned why people should care about cricket matches, deaths of pretty little monarchs or britanny spears virginity. And thus i was enlightened. Stop caring. Stop believing. An event, an action, a job was just that, an event, action or job. Disconnected. Incapabable of affecting.
But it's gone too far. There is a level beyond cynicism. Where you're cynical about being cynical. When nothing matters. When you consider it beneath you to expend effort for the state of cynicism.
The trouble is, that you stop believing. It might start with the silly little things. But if you don't believe the silly stuff, how can you ever hope to believe the serious. Maybe being human/jolly is about believing in things no matter what the reality.
On a different note, I came across this article on rational edge where this guys nominates Knuth as a Master. Terrible article. But you can't argue about the way he feels about Knuth. He mentions the Art of Computer Programming and how it is still the holiest of holies in the algorithm world. This was not chance. It wasn't even mere hard work; the compilation of scattered knowledge, a compendium of computer science. What Knuth achieved in TAOCP was a rigourous clinical treatment of the very core of computer science. The presenting of concepts in their entirety, for what they actually are, rather than sugar coating it for understandability. It is this quality that has made TAOCP timeless, and Knuth himself immortal. There is nothing i wouldn't give to be locked away (with rough paper, pencils and a whiteboard) to pour over his volumes.Thats one thing i beleive in at least...
Unfortunately, there are bridges that you burn in life. You tell yourself that every decision is reversible. That you can backtrack. That you can simply switch lanes. But they aren't; you can't; at least not without making omlettes. Choosing certain paths effectively close a whole lot of doors; doors that you never knew existed. Or we tell ourselves that we wouldn't want to open some doors, even if we come across em - that's just bovine excreta; We always want to open new doors. And always, in hindsight you see your mistakes.
All you can do is to be thankful for what you have here and now. Go with the flow. Make the most of it. Most... That just sucks. How can you see all the possibility and keep it to yourself. Insulate yourself enough and you become a monopole. I wonder if monopoles are happy? But then they don't exist. Magnetic ones don't, at least...
