Viraj's Weblog

Some quotes from a good book I just read called Static:

"It's not about embedding. It's about television's refusal to show the truth of war. Many of the worst pictures taken in the invasion of Iraq in 2004 ... never saw the light of day. They couldn't be shown. They could - but they were not: 'Because of sensitivities.' 'Mustn't show this at breakfast time.' 'It's irresponsible to show the dead like this.' 'It's disrespectful.'

"If you saw what I saw when I go to wars when I'm on the front line - with or without soldiers or with civilians or the wounded in hospitals - you would never, ever dream of supporting a war again. Ever in your life. It's a remarkable thing that in the commercial cinema, feature films can now show the bloodiest, goriest themes which are quite similar to what we see in real life - Saving Private Ryan - the guts spilling out. And yet real war cannot be shown without censoring pictures which in many cases are exactly the same as what you see when you go to the cinema.

"If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat. It is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it. It is about the total failure of the human spirit. We don't show that because we don't want to. And in this sense, journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow you to have more wars. Because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn't allow any more wars," [Robert Fisk] said.

"I know I'm very soft-spoken. But I have endeavored to live my life by my terms. And that means that I am a renegade. An outlaw. A pagan."

Alice [Walker] continued, "There is no reason not to rebel. I learned that really early.... Rebellion, any way you can manage it, is very healthy. Because unless you want to be a clone of somebody that you don't even like, you have to really wake up. I mean, we all do. We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone."

...

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.

Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

But be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

I had posted in the past about The Yes Men, probably the most unique activism I've ever seen.

Well, I found the movie on Google Video. Check it out before it gets taken down.

For some highlights, skip to about 38:00 minutes into the film, where they demonstrate the 'Management Leisuresuit'. Some funny CGI .

And the grand finale at about 1:00:00 (1 hour) into the film, the McDonald's sewage system. "The #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 would no longer refer to combinations of food, but rather just the number of times the product has been recycled." Pure genius.

I think you get the picture .

I've always found the reverse() method of a list rather wierd because it reverses the list in place. I just found out about reversing via slicing:

>>> f=['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> f[::-1]
['baz', 'bar', 'foo']
>>> f='hello'
>>> f[::-1]
'olleh'

There is also a new builtin function in 2.4 called reversed(), which returns an iterator, and is more efficient for large lists:

>>> f=['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> for x in reversed(f):
...   print x
... 
baz
bar
foo

And yet another (ugly) method shown to me by a coworker:

>>> f=['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
>>> reduce(lambda x,y: [y] + ((type(x) == type([]))
...        and x or [x]), f)
['baz', 'bar', 'foo']

Hmm, Python seems to be moving towards TMTOWTDI.