Mental Detox Week

Well I just spent a week observing adbuster's mental detox. Formerly TV-turnoff week, it has been updated to include video Ipod, DVD and laptops. As I approached the week clearly I had to make some decisions on what was allowed, as I couldn't quit computers altogether unless I were to take a vacation.

I decided to include Ipod music in the banned list, as I feel I spend all too much time in ipod 'isolation' - avoiding interaction with the world around me as I listen to music. While it helps when coding, too many times in a week I find myself having to remove my earphones to hear what someone is saying to me.

I also decided to include news websites and rss feeds: too much time reading digg and reddit only brings me down anyway with all the depressing news about recessions, oil prices, the primaries, conspiracies not to mention the twaddle that reverberates around main stream media and the blogosphere.

Youtube and video sites were banned. Facebook and twitter were banned. The blog was temporarily shut down.

I would allow email, SMS and informational websites I needed for work.

So, how do I feel now that it's over? Refreshed actually. So much so I don't feel the need to check reddit and the new york times twenty times a day like I might have. I read a lot more, went for walks, and generally felt more in touch with the world. I got a lot more work done, taking breaks by getting up and looking out the window rather going off on some website tangent.

I don't feel that mental detox week led to anything life changing, but it did feel good to know I can just step away when need be.

Aboudoudermane Yakoubi on Kiva

I previously wrote about Kiva.org - a website that combines the best of the social web with microloans, and how I made a $25 loan to Abraham Abagado in Togo for a barber shop.

Well Mr. Abagado has repaid his loan in full and so it's time to re-loan the money: this time to Aboudoudermane, winner of best first name ever award, also in Togo, looking to borrow money to buy milk for his general store (really).

Tremendous Podcast on Chinese View of Olympic Protests

NPR's On Point host Tom Ashbrook is in Beijing this week and has been doing great interviews about the coming Olympics. The attitudes in the podcast (link below) are exactly like the ones I experienced talking to students while working as an intern in Beijing.

If anyone knows how to embed NPR's podcasts in Blogger please let me know. For now here's the link: Young China NPR Podcast

Amazingly, the youngest Chinese are the ones who toe the party line the most and are the fiercest nationalists.

Two moments stand out, at about minute 32, Ashbrook asks about the genocide issues in Darfur which prompts the infamous Asian sucking sound in response from the student.

Also, at 38:00, Ashbrook responds to another student's claim that CNN doctored its images with Nepalese police with this query: "Are you sure? How do you know? Do you have a free press in this country to assure you can know?"

Priceless work, Tom.

The Incredibly Shallow Quest for the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Malcolm Gladwell tells a great story in his TED talk about the man who didn't invent the perfect spaghetti sauce - he invented the perfect spaghetti sauces. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - which makes contests and press on 'who is the most beautiful person' silly. Everyone chooses movie stars, whether from Bollywood (Rai) or Hollywood (Jolie). Models seem to me to be like Frankensteins, freaks of nature - tall cruel and so unhealthily thin that no red meat eating heterosexual man would cast their vote for such a body being the spaghetti sauce of his choice.

Take for instance, Gisele Bundchen whose high cheek bones suggest a wanton ruthlessness:



Can you imagine an evening with Gisele? What a reminder of everything you don't have that would be!

Cat's Cradle

Is a brilliant novel. Really. I've read some Vonnegut before - Time Quake, Slaughterhouse Five, and this one I think is the best of his I've come across.

Bokonism, the religion invented on San Lorenzo in the novel, is a charming cocktail of freethinkery.

"Science is magic that works."

Brilliant!

Perhaps best of all - I got the novel for free in electronic format at wowio.com. I've been reading it on my Sony Reader after I converted the pdf to lrf format. There are some layout issues but the file is readable enough.