Kamil Choudhury

#define ZERO -1 // oh no it's technology all the way down

Memcache For My Brain

I am going to keep updating this list because it is annoying to have to repeatedly spend hours googling things that are tantalizingly familiar but still forgotten by my increasingly decrepit brain.

That Movie where...

... a bunch of sailors on shore leave defraud a casino with their ship's computer

The Honeymoon Machine

... poor Chinese migrants get caught up in the noir-esque travails of a Vietnamese bar singer.

So Close To Paradise

That song...

... you listened to 800 times at 2AM while you were working graveyard shift for the 82nd time in 2009, but lost when your iPod went tits up:

Goo Goo Dolls - Black Balloon

Dashboad Confessional - Stolen

... that plays in Dogtown And The Z-Boys when the narrator is talking about Venice falling apart:

Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground (Fila Brazilia Remix)

... that plays at the end of Dogtown and the Z Boys when they're showing what happened to all the Z Boys and is supposedly a remix of "Exchange" by Massive Attack:

Massive Attack - Exchange (Dogtown and Z Boys Version)

Yes, I wrote to Stacy Peralta to find out what it was and where I could get a copy.

That quote...

... by Kim Stanley Robinson in Sixty Days And Counting on what to tell oil companies when they resist changing their ways.

"None of the alternatives are competitive [to oil]."

Charlie’s pencil tip snapped. “Competitive for what?” he demanded. He had not spoken until that point, and now the edge in his voice stopped the discussion.

Everyone was staring at him. He stared back at the World Bank guys.

"Damage from carbon dioxide emission costs about $35 a ton, but in your model no one pays it. The carbon that British Petroleum burns per year, by sale and operation, runs up a damage bill of fifty billion dollars. BP reported a profit of twenty billion,so actually it’s thirty billion in the red, every year. Shell reported a profit of twenty-three billion, but if you added the damage cost it would be eight billion in the red. These companies should be bankrupt. You support their exteriorizing of costs, so your accounting is bullshit. You’re helping to bring on the biggest catastrophe in human history. If the oil companies burn the five hundred gigatons of carbon that you are describing as inevitable because of your financial shell games, then two-thirds of the species on the planet will be endangered, including humans. But you keep talking about fiscal discipline and competitive edges in profit differentials. It's the stupidest head-in-the-sand response possible."

... and why everyone has a problem with the Baby Boomers now:

Lots of [people] are locked into an Oedipal hatred of the baby-boomer generation. They hate the boomers for what we were given when we were young, the world gone for just the briefest moment out of its mind into a realm of sex, drugs and rock and roll, of revolution and war and history right there in our hands, a time of excess and joy, a feeling that things could still change -- a freedom that was so extreme no one who was there can even remember it properly, and no one who wasn't there can imagine it, because it was before AIDS and crack and meth and terrorism had returned everything to something like the weird and violent Victorian repression/transgression state of fear that we've all been living in these past years. So I see a fair bit of resentment. You old Vietnam vet, I see their eeys saying, you old hippie, you got lucky and were born in the right little window and got to grab all the surplus happiness that history ever produced, and you blew it, and you stood around and did nothing while the right Reaganed back into power and shut down all possibility of change for an entire generation. You blew it in a ten year party and staggered off stoned and complicit. You neither learned to do machine politics nor dismantled the machine. Not one of you imagined what had to be done. And so the backlash came down, the reactionary power structure stronger than ever, and now we're the ones who have to pay the price for that.

It was probably a follow on from his thoughts on change and those who make it possible in Years Of Rice And Salt:

In every group a Ka and a Ba, Ka always complaining with the kaw of a the crow, the cough of the cat, the cry of coyote, kaw, kaw, that fundamental protest; and then Ba always Ba, the banal baa of the water buffalo, the sound of the plow bound to the earth, the bleat of hope and fear, the bone inside. The one who missed the missing Ka. The world was changed by the Kungs, but the Baos had to try to hold it together.

Heady stuff.