Antimemorable

Yesterday we watched this offbeat movie by the Coen Brothers - "O Brother, where art thou?". It starred George Clooney along with 2 other blokes and their adventures with a whole bunch of weird characters darting in and out of the screen and the screenplay. The actors were not unearthly - they were just strange humans with unpredictable behaviour.

Clooney's character who is perpetually obsessed with his hair and hair-creams, has this interesting ability to sustain a conversation but only after replacing all the simple words with the most complex synonyms that one may find in a Thesaurus.

After watching about 80% of the movie I began to realise that I might have seen bit and parts of this movie maybe a year ago. And when the movie was about to end, I realised that I have already seen the whole movie , but I still could not remember the next scene. That alone makes this movie unique - The memories of good movies are etched in our minds, while we love to forget the deplorable ones. But this movie was not too bad , yet it was impossible to remember the scenes and storyine because it feels like you saw this movie in some past life.

This post is primarily to remind myself that I have watched the film and even commented on it - just in case I were to write another review after watching the same movie another time in the not too distant future !

Ominous, dark, threatening and laden with Hope.

Do you ever look for the dark clouds in the silver lining ?

I used to in my school days. Even now when I see dark clouds forming in the horizon or when its overcast, I feel a powerful surge of hope, because of the many years of anticipation . But why ?

Dark clouds - just meant one thing - possibility of sudden showers, possibly long enough to fill the storm-water drains, possibly flooding the low-lying roads and areas , possibly making transportation to school very difficult, and a holiday declared by school authorities in the last moment.

But these days, in this part of the world, the rains come like uninvited guests and nobody seems to bother. They call it 'bad weather' and just take out their umbrellas. They get along with their lives and certainly don't declare holidays for office-goers.. The storm water drains work perfectly and transportation works like clockwork..

No silver lining there !

Lost in Translation

Isn't it incredible that we still dont have the technology to automatically translate and understand any human language in spoken form in real-time, but have the money and infrastructure for projects like Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence(SETI)?

Given the colossal misunderstanding between people, cultures, religions and linguistic groups we rather focus on understanding human talk than alien talk !

Ni hao ma?