...or maybe not?!
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Leaving Las Vegas
This film is more about loneliness than anything else. How human beings feel, behave and react when they are lonely, and how miserable they become in that state. It is very sad story of loneliness in the shadow of all that extravagant Vegas life; a grave and yet attractive contrast.
Why are we build that way? Why can't we just bear loneliness? Why does it drive us crazy? And above all, why are we all so god damn lonely at the end of the day?
Why are we build that way? Why can't we just bear loneliness? Why does it drive us crazy? And above all, why are we all so god damn lonely at the end of the day?
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Roy is gone, King is in
After a turbulent and mostly disappointing couple of months, the man I once labeled "the best manager money can buy" left and King Kenny was brought in to induce some adrenaline in our wrecked ship. While he is yet to win a game after 3 matches, I personally believe that we should have stayed with Roy a bit longer and given him some time to make his impact. Kenny, however very popular among hardcore fans, has been away from the scene for too long and doesn't seem to have his mojo these days, unless he performs some magic right off his sleeve.
A good analysis of short reign of Hodgson can be found here at Phil McNulty's blog.
Depressing times nonetheless, we just have to hang in there and not lose our faith; not the easiest job.
A good analysis of short reign of Hodgson can be found here at Phil McNulty's blog.
Depressing times nonetheless, we just have to hang in there and not lose our faith; not the easiest job.
It's not you...
Scene from the episode "The Lip Reader" of season 5 of TV series Seinfeld.
[Setting: Monk's coffee shop]
Gwen: I'm sorry George.
George: I don't understand, things were going so great. What happened? Something must have happened.
Gwen: It's not you, it's me.
George: You're giving me the "it's not you, it's me" routine? I invented "it's not you, it's me". Nobody tells me it's them not me, if it's anybody it's me.
Gwen: All right George, it's you.
George: You're DAMN right it's me!
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Into thin air
1. Go to control panel, select add or remove programs, a window with a list of programs installed on your computer shows up. When selecting each program, it also states how often that program is used. So is the same with every man's character or soul or whatever. Everyone has many sides, facets, programs into his being, some are used very often and on daily basis, some are used occasionally or rarely. Nevertheless these sides are still there until being uninstalled completely.
2. Mountains and climbing them is one of the sides of me which I seldom use nowadays. Being born and raised at the foot of Alborz range, I have always had a deep passion and a high respect for the mountains. I used to watch the mountains, which laid to the north of the city, and dream of being on top of them. This spiritual experience materialized even more every time I laid eyes on Mount Damavand (5610m) whenever clear air allowed the naked eye to see the ceiling of the world (gonbad-e giti) from a 60 km distance.
3. My late grandparents used to escape the heat of the summer in the city and go to their village which was in the higher altitude (compared to THR) somewhere inside the Alborz range. When I visited them during summer vacations, my grandfather use to take me to the nearby mountains and their peaks which surrounded the village. These hikes, or climbs as I used to call them back then, were at times demanding for me and more importantly, very long. We could have spent a whole day in the mountains just wandering around or chase a mountain deer in vain. When we sat down at our camps or top of the peaks, we started some fire to make the smoked tea and we drank it with grilled local cheese and bread. At the end of the day, I was completely spent (I was visiting them from early age until I was a young teenage or something) and normally passed out after dinner. My grandfather was avid hiker. He always took these long hikes in the mountains, even in the city he walked everywhere. Very seldom did he take bus or cab to get to his destination. He walked. I guess I took his passion for nature and mountains during these hikes. My father also took me for hikes in the nearby mountains almost regularly during weekends. When I grew a bit older (and so did he!), I continued this activity with friends for the fun of it for many years.
4. The pinnacle of my mountaineering was a ascend of Mount Tochal (3964 m) which I did with 2 close friends. We started in the evening from very bottom and slept at 2 story building which served as a sleeping camp for climbers. We attacked the peak at 6am in the morning after and we were on the summit by 9am. It was beginning of the fall and the first snow had landed on the slopes. We left the main route intentionally to save time and climbed a glacier instead. We were poorly equipped for any kind of ice work i.e. no ropes or ice axes or any rescue gear, just the not-so-watertight military boot and crampons and some extra clothes and food in the backpack. It was indeed the most difficult and the most satisfying climb that I have ever done in my life. After spending a half hour or so on the top, we decided to descend to another side, and not having a compass or map, we got lost several times and we ended up hiking for 6 hours or so until we reached our destination. Stepping through a knee deep snow with nobody around, we slowly sank into a state of mental trance; we stopped complaining to one another and we moved on silently for hours. It was an unforgettable and sacred experience.
5. In 1996, Jon Krakauer was sent by Outside magazine along a commercial expedition to climb Mount Everest and write about it. A series of unpredicted events led to the fact that the worse tragedy in the history of climbing this mountains unfolds and Krakauer tells his take on that in this book. In the beginning, he tells a little bit of the history of climbing Everest which at first sight, seems kind of boring but it is very interesting and worth reading at the end. The book is filled with a number of interesting parallel stories as well as thoughtful quotes at the start of each chapter in the same manner as Into The Wild. It is obvious that he has done a good job in conducting a systematic research on the subject especially when some of his errors came to light after his piece was sent to press in Outside (he wrote an article for outside first right after coming back from Nepal but then he realized that he has failed to pay his dues to the tragedy so he wrote a book with more details and concrete research).
6. I have very seldom encountered any book like Into Thin Air. I can only think of Papillon by Henry Charrièr in this category for the time being. However, I must emphasize that my fascination to this book is in a whole new level. I was staying with a friend for a couple of days and he had a very bad cold. He could barely do anything, lying in bed all day with doors and windows shut tight at the end of the summer making his small studio flat a sauna. All he did during that time was to read this book. This rose my curiosity so I started reading that book a while after and I finished it in 2 weeks. I don't remember that I have read any book so fast. By now, I have read this book 3 times, each time I got it more than the previous one. I suppose not only I am attracted to the style of writing and the way the story is being told but it somehow touches some sides (read programs) of me that I rarely use these days and brings that old but not-died-out passion to the surface.
7. I know I can go on and on and write about this book and my fascination with the subject matter and yet feel that I haven't done justice to it. Hence, I decide to leave it as it is - unfinished - and just wrap this up with an extract from the book:
"...Mountaineering tends to draw men and women not easily deflected from their goals. By this late stage in the expedition we had all been subjected to levels of misery and peril that would have sent more balanced individuals packing for home long ago. To get this far one had to have uncommonly obdurate personality.
Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses..."
2. Mountains and climbing them is one of the sides of me which I seldom use nowadays. Being born and raised at the foot of Alborz range, I have always had a deep passion and a high respect for the mountains. I used to watch the mountains, which laid to the north of the city, and dream of being on top of them. This spiritual experience materialized even more every time I laid eyes on Mount Damavand (5610m) whenever clear air allowed the naked eye to see the ceiling of the world (gonbad-e giti) from a 60 km distance.
3. My late grandparents used to escape the heat of the summer in the city and go to their village which was in the higher altitude (compared to THR) somewhere inside the Alborz range. When I visited them during summer vacations, my grandfather use to take me to the nearby mountains and their peaks which surrounded the village. These hikes, or climbs as I used to call them back then, were at times demanding for me and more importantly, very long. We could have spent a whole day in the mountains just wandering around or chase a mountain deer in vain. When we sat down at our camps or top of the peaks, we started some fire to make the smoked tea and we drank it with grilled local cheese and bread. At the end of the day, I was completely spent (I was visiting them from early age until I was a young teenage or something) and normally passed out after dinner. My grandfather was avid hiker. He always took these long hikes in the mountains, even in the city he walked everywhere. Very seldom did he take bus or cab to get to his destination. He walked. I guess I took his passion for nature and mountains during these hikes. My father also took me for hikes in the nearby mountains almost regularly during weekends. When I grew a bit older (and so did he!), I continued this activity with friends for the fun of it for many years.
4. The pinnacle of my mountaineering was a ascend of Mount Tochal (3964 m) which I did with 2 close friends. We started in the evening from very bottom and slept at 2 story building which served as a sleeping camp for climbers. We attacked the peak at 6am in the morning after and we were on the summit by 9am. It was beginning of the fall and the first snow had landed on the slopes. We left the main route intentionally to save time and climbed a glacier instead. We were poorly equipped for any kind of ice work i.e. no ropes or ice axes or any rescue gear, just the not-so-watertight military boot and crampons and some extra clothes and food in the backpack. It was indeed the most difficult and the most satisfying climb that I have ever done in my life. After spending a half hour or so on the top, we decided to descend to another side, and not having a compass or map, we got lost several times and we ended up hiking for 6 hours or so until we reached our destination. Stepping through a knee deep snow with nobody around, we slowly sank into a state of mental trance; we stopped complaining to one another and we moved on silently for hours. It was an unforgettable and sacred experience.
5. In 1996, Jon Krakauer was sent by Outside magazine along a commercial expedition to climb Mount Everest and write about it. A series of unpredicted events led to the fact that the worse tragedy in the history of climbing this mountains unfolds and Krakauer tells his take on that in this book. In the beginning, he tells a little bit of the history of climbing Everest which at first sight, seems kind of boring but it is very interesting and worth reading at the end. The book is filled with a number of interesting parallel stories as well as thoughtful quotes at the start of each chapter in the same manner as Into The Wild. It is obvious that he has done a good job in conducting a systematic research on the subject especially when some of his errors came to light after his piece was sent to press in Outside (he wrote an article for outside first right after coming back from Nepal but then he realized that he has failed to pay his dues to the tragedy so he wrote a book with more details and concrete research).
6. I have very seldom encountered any book like Into Thin Air. I can only think of Papillon by Henry Charrièr in this category for the time being. However, I must emphasize that my fascination to this book is in a whole new level. I was staying with a friend for a couple of days and he had a very bad cold. He could barely do anything, lying in bed all day with doors and windows shut tight at the end of the summer making his small studio flat a sauna. All he did during that time was to read this book. This rose my curiosity so I started reading that book a while after and I finished it in 2 weeks. I don't remember that I have read any book so fast. By now, I have read this book 3 times, each time I got it more than the previous one. I suppose not only I am attracted to the style of writing and the way the story is being told but it somehow touches some sides (read programs) of me that I rarely use these days and brings that old but not-died-out passion to the surface.
7. I know I can go on and on and write about this book and my fascination with the subject matter and yet feel that I haven't done justice to it. Hence, I decide to leave it as it is - unfinished - and just wrap this up with an extract from the book:
"...Mountaineering tends to draw men and women not easily deflected from their goals. By this late stage in the expedition we had all been subjected to levels of misery and peril that would have sent more balanced individuals packing for home long ago. To get this far one had to have uncommonly obdurate personality.
Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses..."
Monday, January 3, 2011
Laugh, clown!
"Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor!"
Words by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
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