Telling 'em like it is.

For everyone who's immensely concerned with feminism and women empowerment, Emily's your girl. Whoever you are Emily, you have my admiration and respect. You go girl!

un nuit à paris

I am in the middle of creating a photo CD for my father. The content, all pictures that he took, is about 480+ MB and I do not have a super fast computer. So to kill time, I decided to delve through my father's flashdrive - in which he keeps most of his photoshopped pictures - and I found some of our Paris picture which he had been working on in his spare time. ZOMG. When we took them (yes, he lets me play around with his EOS 50D, and by that deduction he is greater than your father) in June, they were quite good as they were, in their raw format. Of course with a $3000 camera and some powerful lenses you wouldn't expect otherwise, but the edited works look even better!

I'll include one of them. This one's a typical Parisian building on Champ Elysees. It's the long stretch of road that converges in front of the Arc di Triomphe - not the side that leads straight down to Place de la Concorde, but the direct opposite one; the Avenue de la Grande Armée side.

This makes me miss Paris. I am not particularly fond of the French pomposity and obnoxiousness over their language and culture, but Paris is a fucking beautiful especially, especially when you see it from le troisième étage de la tour Eiffel.

golden tree

Source

Sometimes a picture is enough to compose an entire blog post. This picture reflects, at this point in time, my mood, my feelings, the state of my mind. In other words, I'm clinging onto the fading wisps of Autumn, and not wanting to confront the biting cold of winter. Not that I get much of it here anyway; I suppose it's part of the psychological make up of a child who has been brought up previously in a country with regular four seasons throughout the year.

Reviving Those Strangers at a Train Station - Nytimes's review of Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, adapted and directed by Emma Rice invokes a strong desire in me to be audience to this performance. Of course that'd require a $1000+ plane ticket to travel halfway across the world to witness this aesthetically pleasing beauty.

My first interaction with Brief Encounter, which is originally a film made in 1945, came after watching The History Boys where Scripps and Posner acted out a scene from it, earning a semi-impressed, semi-bored, "God knows why you learned Brief Encounter" reaction from Irwin. Everything other exposure to this play comes from Wikipedia and the internet at large. Now this review adds to the appeal of the play, carefully (and selectively) constructed in my head.

A need to share this picture - there's something striking about it, something that captures the mind and opens doorways to the world of imagination. Stories told from behind the lens, capturing every range of emotion put on display, each telling its own tale; of joy, sorrow, heartbreak, misery, comedy, hubris, catharsis and the likes...

One day I'd really like to own a camera of my own, focus on the center point of my lief and tell my own story from behind the lens.

One day...

This is the dilemma I encounter frequently.

Oh and this boy using the computer on my left at the computer stations in the library is wearing too much cologne. My nose itches.

Now back to more Hypothesis testing and Solow Model of Growth until 4p.m.

I should probably make a daily rant about how much I loathe the long breaks I have in between classes - of course studious people would welcome such gaps and fully utilize them to study, revise, write out notes. Yours truly missed the cut off percentage point, to access the studious strata, by several decimal places.

This must be mentioned too - since it is Real Madrid, and I did predict teardrops at the Bernabeu. Is it masochistic of me to say I thoroughly enjoyed the large volume of boos and jeers the players got from the crowd? Yes I enjoyed it. They were awful. Perhaps not entirely true; they started off well, but without flair, without creativity and from then on it descended into an air of resignation hanging over the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu. If I'm honest it is upsetting - because we were playing a Third division team (without taking away any credit from Alcorcon, who were fantastic in every aspect on both legs of the tie) and we had a packed Bernabeu. The Real Madrid boys broke more than 76,000 hearts; they left a permanent stain on Real Madrid's history, which, leads me back to an assertion I have been making since June: THIS IS NOT FIFA2010 ON YOUR PSP; GALACTICOS 2.0 IS NOT GOING TO WORK IN THE LONG RUN.

I hope we keep Pellegrini though; that man can do wonders, if he has the right players. By right, I do not mean skillwise, because we have already paid 200 million euros to cover that. We need the right combination of motivated, hardworking footballers who go out to prove to the world at large that they are indeed worth every penny paid for by the club. Like LASSANA DIARRA and GONZALO HIGUAIN. Period.

a picture speaks a thousand words, six pictures speaks six thousand words

Pictorial vignettes from before and today. Click to enlarge them


(Behold the steady state of capital per worker in a Solow Model of Growth)


(The Investment Tax Credit which helps to provide the incentive to Invest)


(Hello nation building and nationalism. I see you.)


(My iPod Classic 80GB whom I like to call Raúl González Blanco)


(Neil Gaiman and the moderator who made me cringe with his poor pronounced, singlish infested, humourless questions. I wasn't sitting close enough; and this was taken with my phone camera which isn't exactly the best out there - my phone is specifically designed to play music, not take photos)


(The Supreme Court.)

Pictures that somehow brightened my day

(Juanes doesn't need any introduction)


(Neither does hotshot coach of Valencia Unai Emery with his 439823128754320984324289 feet tall Serbian striker Nikola Zigic)