Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Many, many media experiences over the past few days have…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Many, many media experiences over the past few days have I had.
On Tuesday I saw Noam Chomsky speak. I couldn't follow his speech, which was about about theories of linguistics or something.
On Wednesday I went to BAM!, er, BAM's exhibit of photographs depicting human migration. Certainly many images haunted me, especially pictures of dead bodies and of children. But the most striking photo showed me a woman working the land in the foreground and a river and a skyscraper in the background. The caption informed me that, in Indonesia, one often finds farmland and highrise buildings within sight of each other. This bit of data uniquely made globalization come alive for me.
Yesterday, Thursday, I saw Gosford Park again. A very good movie that stood up to repeated viewing and that Leonard enjoyed. (He's as picky as I am, so that's something.) Gosford Park -- what Wodehouse left out but could have written had he been more malicious.
Speaking of Wodehouse, I finished A Few Quick Ones and (as always) loved his short stories, especially the ones where plots turn on coincidences and scheming, rather than just scheming. Now I'm working on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum.
Also: Hey Seth: there's a database on agriculture [subsidies?] called Agricola. And the lobby of Sather Tower on the UC Berkeley campus holds an exhibit on the loyalty oath controversy.
And: To me, laugh-out loud funny.
