The Flan is Gone

The omnisentient (made that word up for no reason) boring date idea of a ‘dinner and a movie’ has somewhat evolved since the dark ages. There was a time when one used to rush after dinner to make sure you get tickets (if you suck at planning). Then came the internet and you could book tickets online so you don’t have to rush anymore.

 ‘Yes, we will look at the dessert menu, please’

For those progressing to advanced stages of relationship, you had the choice of renting a movie and watching it at home. For the culinary unchallenged or monetarily challenged you could make dinner at home and snuggle up to your rented movie.

Then came Netflix. So you can order in dinner and stream the movie of your choice (uh, not quite) in the comfort of your pajamas home.

Nicholas Cage Week

Which brings me to my point. Guinness Book of Digressing Awards.

I checked my email yesterday and notice there was 1 unread email. My heart fluttered mildly. Maybe someone does like me and they cared to write. Ah, it’s from Netflix. Maybe they like me? No, not so fast. My unlimited DVD and streaming plan had been sliced like a surgeon operating on a Siamese twin. Now I have to pay for them separately. What cost me $11.99 earlier, will now cost me $17.98. Once I successfully mastered the math behind this skullduggery, I realized that it was almost a 50% increase.

Felix Salmon writes about it here and here. The point I like the best is where he mentions that when there is a struggle between quality and convenience, convenience will win.  But what might happen is also that some of them will opt out of streaming (like me) but the larger population will stick with the model.

Slick Corporate Move Warning: Netflix automatically enrolls you in this plan. If you are too lazy to care, you end up paying more

I don’t have a larger issue with what Netflix is doing. With the Cloud and everything, this is the way the world is heading, right? Just that the timing is really awful. At this point I feel that the cost doesn’t justify the value derived from the model.

Till then I am getting my movies delivered by USPS. Gives me a reason to check the mailbox in my apartment more often.

It’s pretty easy, as Douglas Adams says. You have to throw yourself at the ground – and miss.

 When you break things down in that fashion it just seems to make so much sense. And so much simpler. Wondering out loud why life is so complicated, messy, painful and tiring. At least some of the days. You just think you should be able to enjoy the things better.

 There is a lot to be thankful for. Limbs. Taste buds. Fresh Air. Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

 So I have been reading Altucher a lot. The man writes well. I recommend this anytime you are feeling down and out. When you are down and out you don’t want to pick up George Orwell. A lot of life is like work. And vice versa. There are good days and there are crappy days. You just live through them and hope that the good days outnumber the crappy ones. On the crappy days, I feel like I lose my sense of humor.

 Set theory alert.

 Days when I am sad ∩ Days when I have a sense of humor = NULL

 A good old friend of mine from the good old times used to remark ‘This too shall pass’. I always try to remember that when I was having a rough time. The truth is that applies to the good times as well. But I never thought about it that way. You are at your contemplative best when misery is knocking on your door on a Friday night, and stopping you from having a great weekend. Maybe living is easy, once you get over the inhibitions of falling face first on the ground. Either being impervious to pain or being callused so that it doesn’t hurt as much anymore would help too.

 Once that happens it will be easy to fly and even whilst falling you can still hum and sing Pink Floyd..

  ‘Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earthbound misfit, I’

Just started this yesterday. The book starts off by exploring the origins of political system. Fukuyama cites kin selection and altruism as two primary reasons behind social hierarchy and structure.

 I especially found kin selection interesting.

 Kin selection mandates that the more genes that you have in common with another being, the more likely you are to be nicer to them. Explains why we care about family a lot. You are more likely to care about your bother than your cousin. Logical, yes?

 I tend to agree for the most part. In my personal experience, and no offense to my extended blood lineage, I have been closer to my friends than I have been to my larger family. I also know people who are in a similar boat. The boat that strays away from the port in search of uncharted waters.

 HERE THERE BE DRAGONS. Makes a lot of sense, unless you are looking for dragons.

 The rationale I provide to counter kin selection is simple. The concept would have worked really well a long time ago. Then, if you were born in a certain society you were more likely to have the same values, taste and personality. The world has changed much since then. My brother and I don’t share a lot of traits. As commonality diminishes, the ability to relate and associate withers.

 While I completely agree with the theory that kin selection might explain how social structures evolved, I also think the efficacy of the same has vastly diminished in the world we live in now.

 Here is something more on kin selection and altruism .

 Here is Arnold Kling on Fukuyama

 Good reading, but why do I get the feeling that he could have just said blood is thicker than water

A welcome break. Sunshine, and I am moving to Brooklyn. The first thing that people tell me when I tell that I am moving to Brooklyn is ‘ah, you are going to be a hippie’. Funny, that’s the first thing I tell people when they say they are from Brooklyn.

 Is Brooklyn still New York? I hope so and I hope not. A good friend of mine recently left NYC for good. He likes the change. The change of pace, the relaxed atmosphere and the lack of pressure to cling on to something that you shouldn’t be clinging on to in the first place. Good friends of mine seem to be moving all the time. Only the bad ones remain.

 I don’t even know what the term friend means anymore. It has been thrown around and abused by social networking as though Facebook was the internet equivalent of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I reminisce over the good old days of brick-and-mortar when you can call someone and expect them to answer. Why carry a cell phone, if you aren’t going to pick it up?

 Maybe it’s the lack of time. Or the lack of courtesy. Time makes for a great excuse. As a dimension, it’s the one on which we have the least amount of perceptive hold on.

 A football field is 120 yards. An elephant weighs 4.5 tons. The Eiffel Tower is really tall.

 But two hours flying coach on an airplane squeezed between two smelly, burly men seems like eternity. So do the last two minutes of every Arsenal game where they are only three points behind Manchester United.

 That being said, I am going to stare at this for a few hours . And enjoy time melt softly and slowly.

Hat tip to gaping void for the cartoon

‘Even the sounds of nightmare from the other shelters no longer reached him, for he was back to where came from, feeding the ponies with sugar over the garden wall’

 -William Golding, Lord of the flies

 I don’t like classics. I try as much as I can to stay away. It has always felt so trite. But sometime you just have to. Lord of the flies. A Clockwork Orange. Three Men on a Boat. Like how I squeezed the last one in there?

 But was reading this earlier and it drew a bit of me back to Lord of the Flies.

 Especially this part: “Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.”

 Read the whole thing now if you are a nerd. Or ever have been one, liked one, hated one and been around one.

 I have been a nerd when it wasn’t great to be a nerd. You know that age, where you are battling between popularity and the need to satiate your internal coolness. The author nails it when he says that all kids want to be cool. Even nerds. But nerds care more about being smart, than being cool. That’s why they are nerds, - and not cool.

 Life is about choices and priorities. And some priorities give way like butter under a hot knife to others. Others die a slow degradation like that tree trunk uprooted from the top soil it once caressed. And these priorities make us what we are.

 Life is like Napolean - not French, but short. No matter how many days where we spend watching the paint dry, the collective time spent on this planet seems somewhat short. And you can only fit in so many priorities in it.

 I chose Nerd over Religion. Finance over theatre. Pink Floyd over Monet. Apple pie over Risotto.

The sad part is that these choices manifest themselves more in our lives only as we grow older. Kids don’t have an option. They have to go to school.

Free-will is dead-on-arrival.

Every time I hear someone lambast child labor in some remote corner in Bangladesh, a wry smile leaves my face. Did you ever think about school? School is work, no matter how much lipstick you put on it. And you don’t even get paid for it!

Someone I knew once said ’What they teach you is limitation’.

Logical fallacies abound

I just don't get it. Blogging is like science fiction. There is a lot of crud out there.

There's stuff like Tyler Cowens' and then there's the rest of the stuff that's hardly worth any time. And my time isn't worth that much the last time I checked.

When you blog, it's quite easy for a grammatical error or fault in diction to slip by unnoticed. Even easier, is the lack of coherence in your narration. Like this one. 

This is the epitome of narration. And that's praise coming from martin Amis!

Reading Stein after Hitchens is like watching this after this.

'When anti-female bias in action reflects the hold of traditional masculinist values from which mothers themselves may not be immune, what is crucial if not just freedom of action but also freedom of thought'

Sunday morning read on free-will. The smaller question is, why am I up early almost every Sunday morning? I find it hard to start the day without a cup of coffee and I have to wait longer since Joe's opens at eight instead of seven on Sundays. Wouldn't life just be easier if I just slept in a bit more?