This is hopeless, it seems like I am saying this every once in a while. Like I am forever trapped inside this cycle of despair and recovery. It's constant flapping to stay above the surface.
I will let myself go this time. I will start my journey of detachment. I will take the route of pain, to cold-turkey myself. To gain emancipation from this crisis.
My favourite female rock act is back, holla!! The quintessence storyteller, the soul country rock act whom may I just add here, accessible to the masses. No one could put so much complexities in emotion packed up in an pop albume like Sheryl Crow.
100 Miles To Memphis is her 7th studio album, Sheryl Crow co-produced together with Doyle Bramhall II and Justin Stanley. Doyle Bramhall II is a solo artist himself who had worked with Eric Clapton. Justin Stanley had worked with The Vines and Beck. This album packs some popular artists like Keith Richards and Justin Timberlake. The most surprising act for me is of course Justin Timberlake, most likely to prop up her star wattage which had been rather low due to the low sales of her last album, Detours. Justin Timberlake presence is not that prominent here as he only provides backup vocal alongside some lady voice. You would not have known him there if his name is not mentioned in the feature title. By the way, he appears in the cover version of Terrence Trent D'arby's 80's hit Sign Your Name.
One thing is clear with this album is that she has lost quite a bit of her raspy voice just like her most recent albums. I think starting from C'mon C'mon, her voice had sound thinner. Still many critics complain about her thinning voice which does not lend credit to her take into the Memphis sound. Starkly the first single, Summer Day is just not her typical single in the chart. No wonder it did not chart in the Hot 100 of billboard.
One stand-out track is perhaps the cover of this indie act from Washington DC, which The Washington Post back in 2002, proclaim him to be the most soulful export since Marvin Gaye, Sideways. Sideways came out in 2006, appear in several tv series soundtrack like Scrubs. Sheryl Crow had an opportunity to express her strong emotion outpouring which is starkly absent in this album.
When I first heard the album I accidentally heard first Jackson 5's I Want You Back. I thought I was mistakenly listening to the wrong album because uncannily the intro sounds almost exactly like the original Jackson 5's sound. I am unsure to why she chose to record this track but it gives a rather whimsical flair to her intention with this album.
Well I am not sure to what extend I should draw my conclusion to this album for I am never the person who could jump right in about an album with just one listen of even one-day listening. I need to really feel this album at the right time and right state, in order to really appreciate it. But overall, judging by just listening in background hush, I love it.
I just finished watching Inception, by Batman Forever's Christopher Nolan, starring Leonardo Di Caprio, Marion Cotillard, and Ellen Page. A movie that is 2 and a half hour long, but does not feel like one, the type of movie that I truly enjoy.
It tells about a group of secret agents who work in sort of mind espionage; getting into the mind of the victim to extract secrets which they could not get directly from any black-and-whites, like passwords or one's darkest secret. In this movie, the characters decided to take the tool a notch up, planting idea into the mind of the victims, to change them to make decisions or commit something which they will never commit due to their inherent original believes. Very cool premise indeed.
Written also by Christopher Nolan, this movie brings the audience to the possibility of playing with the mind by existing knowledge of human psychology; that dreams are human way of processing information, whatever that we dream of are our interpretation or ways of making sense to the reality of your day-to-day lives.
The hallmark of a great director, apart from able to inject humour into the story; like when the character of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arthur asked Ellen Page's Ariadne to kiss him after they realise the dreamscape they are in will about to break apart, thinking that the kiss would do something. After the kiss Ariadne realise that it did not work, Arthur said "well it was worth it", it also able to engage the audience throughout the whole show. I did not feel the story is 2 and a half hour long instead I was hoping for more for I was expecting more questions to be answered.
It's really quite impossible to come out with a mistake-proof, loopholeless fantasy movies, for you will always question every single details and people will always able to find fault in you and scriptwriter's job will not deserve to bother to even entertain those questions. (they should just say, "watch it again, if you still can;t find it, watch is yet again") I realise a good movies are able to hide well the holes camouflaged in superb plots and explosions, or make it so clever that it would be self-deprecating for people to even bring it up to their friends; it is so smart that everyone pretends to understand. I have in turn learn to accept the fact that good movies with strong premise like this are meant to be enjoyed, as long as they stimulate my intellectual hunger. Rather than questioning the details of the movie, I would want to just get inspired by the human potentials.
I find all audience around enjoy it. I know I do.
Kathy Griffin is a stand-up comedienne, and occasional actress in tv series and movies. Hilarious and audacious she is now my new role model. As a funny person, she is second to Jon Stewart as my favourite comedienne. Jon Stewart gives me the intellectual squeeze from his funny lines, while Kathy Griffin exemplify to me the audacious posture.
Her comedy content is usually sexual in nature, also dispensed with heavy dose of celebrity bloopers which she laced it with well-out-in-the-open sort of gossip. Her lines are so provocative, not to mention offended too many celebrities like Martha Stewart, Perez Hilton, Oprah Winfrey, and all prime-time late-night show hosts. Suffice to say she understands her market well; bitchy gays who have nothing else to do but having sex, going clubbing and denigrating celebrities during social hours.
It's a success story, she does sold-out shows to audience consists of in her own words "gays and women who wants to sleep with them". I like it that she belch out anything under the sun, the more provocative the better, and is not scare one bit of the consequences. There're of course many things she wouldn't say, like racism, gender discrimination and
Christpher Chabris and Daniel Simon conducted a study on a group of people. They showed them a video of a group of people in a place of what's look like a corridor passing around a two basketballs. The sample were asked to count the number of passes performed by one group while ignoring the other. In the middle of the video, for 9 seconds straight a man in a gorilla suit strolled in, beats his chest at the camera and then walked out.
After the video, the audience were asked whether they see a gorilla in the video, and most of them say no. They are so absorbed with their task at hand that they failed to notice something as conspicuous as a gorilla in the video.
Do you remember chatting with your friend while window shopping, and then you notice a hot guy coming from the opposite direction. You try not to notice him and told your friend that there's a sales in Parkson. The thing is he did not answer you. After a couple of seconds when the hot guy passed through us, you asked your friend why he did not answer you, you realize your friend was trying hard not to notice that hot guy that he was phased out when you asked him question.
You failed to use your senses as occupied with something else. It's quite simple actually to understand this. Your ear is always open right? Meaning you always taking in audio messages. Why is it that you will not hear if your boyfriend whisper something in your ear? This is the simplest way of phasing out of the call. But Chabris and Simon goes further than that. They said that illusions and beliefs could lead us to see things we want to see and not to see things we don't want.
In short they listed down 6 common intuitive errors one could commit:
The thing is we are all aware of this in someway or another, just not entirely, because if we think we are entirely aware of this, then we're committing an error. This book says that we'll never be perfect, no matter how much perfect we think we are.
A name may not ring a bell rather throws you to a swampy land with gothic castle in the land of Transylvania, Romania. Victor Niederhoffer is a very successful hedge fund manager, statistician, best-selling author and ex-squash champion. He's what people in America like to call quant, and a very successful one, so successful that George Soros owned his business. Avid art collector and tennis lover, he is the type of person who had it all.
Stood at 6'3'', a face which Hollywood would instantly love, (reminds me of the guy who acted in Sex and The City , Carrie's lover in season 2, The elected Mayor remember?) and a brain that can almost literally change the world, he is the type of person I will never be but loved to, and even at times would wish to become.
But life was not all bed of roses for him. In 1997 when the Thai government decided to devalue Baht, which he betted against, believing no sane government would bring down its own currency, lost billions of dollars and ended selling all his art collections. For me when I read it I felt like that must the most embarrassing thing ever to happen to a mega-person.
Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Taleb used him as the strong example of the financial manager supposed gamble with money. They argue that hedge fund, financial analyst and the goons are just lucky when the value of their money goes up, and it's just a matter of time they hit their Waterloo. All financial position in the market that earns a lot of money are plain luck, and just as easily they will lose it all away one day, it's just a matter of time.
I do not mind being Niederhoffer, seriously, as most geniuses have that sort of crisis in their life. I have my own crisis as well, most of the time make me older and smarter. My only gripe is that my failures and successes are not spectacular enough.
The secret to my intellectual powerhouse is that I given opportunity for Time-Out. Just give me ½ an hour of shut-eye and perhaps a moment of self-introspective silent, I'll give you the idea of world-changing proportion.
Now I just dun have that moment, nor am I can get it. Have to wait. For now I am just ambling.
Argentina has recently legalize gay marriage. This seems like a good thing but not necessarily. The normal human institution tries to get the whole world to conform to their needs. At the same time the gay community do not mind having a strong validation of their existence in addition to being able to enjoy the benefits all this while granted only to their heterosexual kin.
Homosexual marriage among the gays and lesbians are not unanimous especially voted by the undomesticated type who think the formal declaration is limiting nature's law and affecting significant economy damage to their population. Imagine spending money on marriage instead of boozing the night away and then when the love go sour will lead to bitter legal divorce and expensive prenuptial arrangement. For them Carpe Diem is sowing the seeds of lust than love.
However being married legally is human instinct to get validation of their love. Being married allows same inheritance and adoption right like their heterosexual counterpart.
I am on the fence about this. I might like to be married one day to someone I love, and spend the rest of my life with, only on the assurance that that marriage would last forever. But I hate the money involved in getting that whole ceremony done. I think it's a waste of money and everyone's time. At the same time, if being married produce a set of joint benefits like adoption and inheritance, I think it's definitely a good idea after all, if your love one leaves you behind, you want to make sure their stuffs are left to you, not to their parents whom renounced them for being who they are.
