“Chan pa he chan ho!”

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Leona

I was just musing over how incredibly annoying ads are these days… and then Heineken’s ‘The Date’ concept burst onto the scene. (Well, OK… ‘my awareness’. It’s been on ‘the scene’ for a good while already).

It’s AWESOME.

It takes some kind of bollywood-meets-bond, meets circus, meets date-movie memeplex and manages to create something immersive and engaging from it all. The joins between the borrowed ideas are seamless, and the cross-cultural slant is just a breath of fresh air. The two characters at the center of the action move the world’s tiniest story forward, from one moment to the next, and the miniature plot unfolds within the tight temporal constraints yet nothing feels squeezed at all (in fact, the shorter edits of the ad work even better). So we accept this gorgeous epic, compactified as it is in every possible dimension and yet remaining as engaging as any well-made marathon flick… Continue reading →

Exhibit – history of television

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Leona

So, when trundling along between the movator lanes at the airport (San Francisco), what do you expect to see? OK, what do you totally not expect to see? A totally awesome exhibit on the history of television, that’s what… right smack dab in the middle of the thoroughfare between the security-heads and the gate you’re supposed to wait patiently at.

What are the frigging odds? That someone has sought to entertain – scratch that - educate the pieces of captive meat traipsing back and forth… this was an ode to the beleaguered traveller, I tell you. An oasis of mental stimulation… Continue reading →

Quantifying Occupy

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Leona

In the ‘Supporting Occupy Toronto‘ segment tonight, Steve Paikin grilled – as nicely as pie – the young, well-meaning pinstriped lawyer dude who spoke in support of the Occupy Toronto movement. Other than the latter’s point about demonstrating solidarity with other Occupy movements (that I get), I quickly tired of uttered generics like “the larger issues“, “dialogue“, “change“, blah blah blah. No amount of prodding would bring about any further elucidation.

And y’know, it’s this inability to consistently and categorically state its mission that is one of the perplexing things about the Occupy movement. For you see, it had a mission, but the mass media was sufficiently underwhelmed by it that it spun an entirely new mythology for the whole thing. One that even the protesters themselves might have bought into. After all, the media (and the rest of us left-leaning 99%-ers) had a vision where the Occupiers themselves did not – and a vision is how you instantiate a reality, folks… Continue reading →

Umbilicus

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Leona

Those with a capitalist cheerleading bent might want to put down the pom-poms and statistics and fancy charts for just a moment – lay people are speaking.

There’s an organisation (whose name I’ve forgotten) doing the rounds with research-backed TED talks and whatever else… (can’t find ‘em, my google-fu is weak today) about how societal ills correlate spectacularly well with the gap between the haves and the have-nots in any society.

Specifically, they conclude that it doesn’t matter how rich or poor people are, (and by implication, where they are on the social pecking order)… it only really matters how BIG THE GAP is between the two extremes of rich and poor. When the gap is huge, as has rather become the case in most nations/cities/societies planet-wide, you can expect increases in crime, corruption, medical problems, mental illness, teenage pregnancies, you name it…

Half of the planet – let us call them group A – hears this and says,
“well, DUH? How is this news?”.

The other half – let us call them group B – says,
“That’s a load of crap. The real problem is the poverty end of the spectrum, not the spectrum or the gap per se”.

Both groups can agree on one thing: that if you have any sort of spectrum of wellbeing at all you necessarily have a gap, and by dint of that, “THE POOR”. Whether those “poor” people are millionaires surrounded by insufferable trillionaires, or whether they are garbage-surfing grovellers surrounded by those who have found the day’s meal, their condition shall be perfectly irrelevant to the fact of the gap’s actual existence. Continue reading →

An unavoidable use of time

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Leona

[updated 2011-10-03] Here’s a crazy armchair hypothesis: parents (“good” ones, or equivalents thereof) are worth about 20 years of realtime effort. They’re there to save you anywhere up to a generation’s worth of heavy lifting. A socio-economic birthright. In other words, every child is supposed to start life with a cosy +20yr launching pad; an effect which in an ideal world filled with ideal parenting / equivalent parental guidances and equal birthrights, could be normalised away… putting everybody on the starting block at “0″, in real terms. (Of course, there’s always the finicky problem of nature vs nurture, but just play along, will ya. I’m talking mostly about nurture, here anyway). Continue reading →

"Slutwalk"… (sigh)

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Leona

Google “Slutwalk Toronto” and then come back – I can’t be arsed to bring you up to speed. But what I wanted to say was this:

The wound-licking of a self-proclaimed “slut” (her/their words, not mine) has been hitched onto the “attire has no causal link to rape and even if it did, it should not be allowed to stand in court” wagon.

And it really is too bad, because now the wagon in question, already struggling under the weight of all that common sense and just barely inching into the puritanical collective’s grudging acceptance, has now been saddled further by a FUD-ish memeplex it did not want or need. As the wheels churn in place and the crapulence flies into the faces of average Janes everywhere, lets calmly smear away the crap and take stock of things, shall we? Continue reading →

2010, and a belated viewing of '2001: Space Odyssey'

Posted on December 16, 2010 by Leona

I promised myself that passing snippets every few years on telly would not suffice, and that I needed to see for myself the whole thing, from beginning to end, properly… and to find out what all the fuss was about. So I did it. Finally.

I just saw Kubrik’s 2001 Space Odyssey:

It was bloody gorgeous, is what it was. By which I mean the kaleidoscopic technicolour ride through the Jupitan wormsponge multiverse, culminating in a sort of starbirth into the organic roiling folds of some ever-forming manifold of the most awesome effing SPACE that could ever fragging exist… WAS BLOODY GORGEOUS. But there’s other random things I came away thinking about… Continue reading →

More on egypt: virtual museum tour

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Leona

Here are some more pics I took at the citadel museum in Egypt. You might want to mouseover and pause the slideshow if you want to read some of the inscriptions / placards. Enjoy…

"We need women in IT"… really?

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Leona

This topic has kept cropping up at me over the last few weeks, so… well, that’s a sign isn’t it? Plus, I can’t think of a better way to end my blogging drought. In what follows, I am going to reduce the entire, multi-faceted IT industry to a specific phase in the systems development life-cycle: the development phase. Because I think software development / coding is the activity which really pushes this issue…

And I shall restrict this activity further to coding in a traditional software house, where bespoke/original software development takes place in contribution to a core technology or platform. Continue reading →