Experimenting with Monti Fest

To celebrate the the Nativity of Mary, Catholic folks of The Great Mangaloid Race (TM) celebrate the Monti Fest around this time of the year. Given the dearth of available scholarly studies of this phenomenon, I can only recount from observation.

The Monti Fest is technically celebrated in honor of said Nativity, but given that Onam, the Keralite Hindu harvest festival, is also technically a celebration of the legendary hero Mahabali, I'm inclined to think of it likewise as a harvest festival with a cultural tint.

Having not actually attended one of these in years due to my studies and travels abroad, this is my first Monti Fest in recent memory. Food served is to be all vegetarian (it is, after all, a harvest festival), and apparently the number of dishes has to be odd (1,3,5,7, etc). This year, instead of the parental generation preparing tradition dishes, we young 'uns cooked up some relatively exotic fare (with one preparation of dal, or thick lentil stew). Specifically, garlic-butter baby carrots, vegetable lasagna, cashew gravy and potato stuffed into bell peppers, vegetable kofta manchurian, mixed vegetable stir-fry, and a salad. I helped ... a little. At any rate, this unconventional spread for a traditional feast got fairly glowing reviews from the elders of all three families, much to our satisfaction.

EDIT: Apparently there is some more information about the origins of this feast: http://www.daijiworld.com/chan/exclusive_arch.asp?ex_id=129

Star Wars according to a 3-year-old

I dunno if this is live or not, but she is so darn cute, who cares?

In a world without rumble-voiced trailer narration ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/features/don-lafontaine-the-king-of-the-trailers-917949.html

Chances are that unless you have been meditating on Mount Kunlun your whole life, you have come across Don LaFontaine's voice. His signature baritone has transported watchers of his movie trailers to distant worlds of magic and sorcery, of myth and legend, of chaos and lawlessness, of ... well, you get the idea. His opening catchphrase, "In a world ..." (along with its little brother "In a time of ..." and distant cousin "One man ..."), has become one of the most recognizable cliches of movie trailers. Given how many awful attempts at imitation I have heard, I doubt anyone will ever truly measure up. Fare thee well, "Voice of God".

He rarely gets credited by name and he practically never gets to be seen on TV, so I present one of of his few actual appearances in the mainstream, displaying both his amazing intonation and his imposing presence:

 

Reptilian Marketing

"My theory is very simple: The reptilian always wins."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/rapaille.html

A most fascinating interview about cultural imprint and its role in marketing. Clotaire Rapaille, whose resume includes some illustrious names in the corporate world, talks about how marketers have to give products a certain je ne sais quoi and not just price or quality advantages in order to get loyalty. He has this concept of a "code" in which each culture is based, and with which people from that culture have been subconsciously imprinted. Cracking the code is challenging, but doing so gives marketers access to the sub-cortical "reptilian" brain, which handles raw emotion, childhood comfort, and primal drives, and to which they can directly appeal.

Bell Labs Closes Fundamental Physics Research Wing

After six Nobel Prizes, the invention of the transistor, laser and countless contributions to computer science and technology, it is the end of the road for Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab.

Alcatel-Lucent, the parent company of Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic science, material physics and semiconductor research and will instead be focusing on more immediately marketable areas such as networking, high-speed electronics, wireless, nanotechnology and software.

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Without internally funded basic research, fundamental research has instead come to rely on academic and government-funded laboratories to do kind of long-term projects without immediate and obvious payback that Bell Labs used to historically do, says Lubell.

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Increasingly, long-term research is being carried out in universities and national laboratories with federal grants, says Lubell.

For Bell Labs, yet another chapter in its storied history of comes to a close taking the once iconic institution closer to being just another research arm of a major corporation.

...

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html

Sad that a great scientific institution with such a glorious history has to get flushed. But I suppose you can't rest on laurels in a competitive world. Trouble is, much truly fundamental reearch is done in organizations that have some kind of monopolistic backing and are not under pressure to produce economically viable results for parading before stockholders. That means either the government, a private foundation or some market-dominating corporate entity. And this kind of research gives birth and impetus to technologies that are in fact economically viable and are later expoited by commercial interests that would not dare fund the insitutions that produced them in the first place.

Reading Her Lips

China's propaganda ministry moved in Tuesday, deleting many online discussion entries and blocking access to video links showing Miaoke's lip-syncing.

The Beijing organizers weren't the first to use lip-syncing for an Olympic performance. The late Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, in great pain from pancreatic cancer, did so at the Turin Winter Games in 2006, although the voice that was heard was his own.

But China has suffered a string of recent scandals involving fake news stories, bogus photos of a rare South China tiger and a sham TV report that vendors filled dumplings with cardboard. Social experts bemoan the lack of morality or trust among government agencies, companies and individuals.

Kang Xiaoguang, a social science researcher with the Chinese Academy of Science, welcomed the online debate over the government's big show, saying it was a sign the society is maturing. But he added that the singing and fireworks misrepresentations are disconcerting.
...

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-fg-lipsync13-2008aug13,0,3009926.story?page=2

 

It is quite unpleasant, I am sure, to be put in the background because of one's looks or physique. I think part of the furore is also a cultural disconnect between East and West. American actors, for example, are expected to sing their own lines in musicals, whereas in India, for example, plain-looking playback singers belting out songs for younger and more flexible actors on screen and on stage has been the way it's been for practically the entire history of Indian cinema.

She is already being called a little Milli Vanilli. That may be unfair as well. Perhaps they will now call lip-sync events "miaoke", as it is the opposite of, but kind of rhymes with "karaoke".

India's First Gold

India's absurdly high official-to-athlete ratio in Olympic delegations and pathetically low medals-per-capita (or even delegates-per-capita) count in the Olympic rankings have been the butt of ridicule for ages now. Last Olympics, even the tiny UAE managed a gold thanks to a marksman from Dubai, but India, a country of over a billion, has not captured a gold in any individual Olympic sport in the history of the Olympics, and in any sport for several decades. This is a truly historic event for India in the Olympics.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/sports/olympics/12indiagold.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin

NEW DELHI — India’s Olympic curse has finally been lifted, by the chief executive of a computer game company with a history of back problems.

Abhinav Bindra, 25, became the first-ever Indian to take home an individual Olympic gold medal, beating top Chinese and Finnish competitors Monday in a nail-biting finish during the 10-meter air rifle shooting competition. Bindra, a bespectacled M.B.A. from the north Indian city of Chandigarh, had shown promise as a teenage shooter but failed to win a medal in Athens, and hopes were not high before he competed in Beijing.

Until Bindra’s win, India’s population of more than one billion seemed to be collectively shrugging at all the Olympic carryings-on generated by China, its neighboring emerging global-market superpower.

 

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Incidentally, he beat Zhu Qinan, last Olympics' gold winner in the same game.