Escritura
Because someone needs to make sense of it all.
Dynamic Duos
Aug 31st
The English Premier League got underway a few days ago and everyone’s got involved in fantasy football. In fact, after years of being out of touch with the Premier League, I decided to play fantasy football this season. As a result, I’ve got involved with it all over again and I end up watching a lot of matches over the weekend. Given that I haven’t watched regular football for a while now, I found myself finding various holes left in certain teams by players that have left that were never really filled by anyone. It got me thinking, which players would I like to see playing together today? I restricted myself to a time-frame of this decade, I didn’t want to start posting an article that said that Di Stefano and Raul would be good to see together.
As of now, I’m keeping this list restricted to national squads. It’ll take me a while to come up with an interesting enough list regarding club football that would fit the bill, but it was much easier for me to think about World Cup 2002 and World Cup 2010 and keep my thought limited as of now to only national squads. Bear in mind that you might have tons of such combinations, but these just sprang out at me as I watched football and I thought that it would be absolutely epic to see these combinations playing together. It would be good to keep in mind that I’m talking about these players during the peak of their career.
Hey, just a minute now! You were talking about the English Premier League, then you jumped to the World Cup and you’re going to list combinations of national squads?! What the hell? Yeah well it’s my blog. Without further ado, let’s get on with the list!
1. Aimar and Messi
No surprise here, the first combination in my list involves Lionel Messi who was perhaps the most entertaining player in the World Cup. And for those of you who do know me, I’m sure you’re not surprised that I’ve got Pablo Aimar in my list. For those of you who don’t remember Pablo Aimar, let me give you a short introduction to this phenomenal player. Think about a player who’s been gifted with a coalescence of vision, top of the line skill, flexibility and an eye for goal. Now multiply this by two. Add six. You’ve got Pablo Aimar. He spent a lot of time in the Spanish League playing with Valencia and served Argentina’s national squad well. I doubt I need to introduce Lionel Messi to anyone after the World Cup.
Pablo Aimar
Lionel Messi
So what is it about this combination that I think would be epic? Look at Argentina’s current squad, and then place Pablo Aimar in there. Argentina at the moment have an array of attacking options and they performed fairly well in the World Cup, but if you watched the team closely, you’ll notice that whenever Messi was involved, he was pretty much doing everything solo. Ran with the ball, got past players and then slid in a pass to someone or took a shot at goal. Maybe it’s just me, but the link up play with Messi was lacking. There weren’t enough players that were linking up well with him. Surely here and there there were instances when things seemed to gel well with him, but for me, there was a lot of solo Messi play and a lot of other players linking up to produce goals.
Throw in Pablo Aimar, and see the magic. If I’m not wrong, I think Aimar was involved in a few of the qualifying games for Argentina when they fell short of players but Maradona didn’t include him in the final squad for the World Cup. Aimar’s vision and skill would have had players running in circles around him and Messi being on the field would have left the defenders in a dilemma. Hell, come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if teams fielded five defenders and two defensive midfielders with Aimar and Messi both on the field. The link up play would have been brilliant because Aimar used to play so much like Messi with a slight reduction in speed, and he would have loved to have Messi picking up on all of his through balls and cheeky chips over the defence.
Why We Watch TV Shows
Aug 7th
Think of your favorite TV shows. I’m pretty sure you’ve got a list. Now think of why you watch these TV shows. For some of you, it’s going to be hard to find an answer. You probably shrugged your shoulders, or responded with something lame like, “Just like that” or “Because it’s fun or whatever”. Some of the biggest reasons why people watch TV shows are reasons that they will conceal with all their strength. They’ll give you reasons like they like the characters, or because the storyline is great, or (the most unbelievable explanation of all) that they get to learn a lot from the TV show. Think about it. Do you know who writes your favorite TV shows? Who directs them? Whose idea it all was in the first place?
Oh, before I forget, this post has a more button at the bottom of it, so in case you think it’s short and abruptly over, click the ‘More’ button to read further in.
Everyone likes to call themselves a fan of Christopher Nolan because they thought The Dark Knight was cool and well, since everyone intelligent seems to be saying Inception was a good movie, hell, even they’ll say it was! Even though they couldn’t make out head or tail of the movie. Ask them why they liked the movie, and their response will be, “The movie makes you think. That top in the end, did it stop spinning or not?” Poke a little deeper, and you’ll find that you’d have a better chance of getting a response out of a cow than from this so called Nolan fan.
Matthew Perry after he saw Inception
Chandler Bing everyone. Probably one of the most liked characters to ever appear on television. Everyone liked Chandler for his sarcasm, his witty remarks, his expressions and just the way he’d blink at Joey at times. Did anyone ever think about what the writer was thinking about his character when he decided that Chandler, the have fun all the time, not serious about life guy falls in love? Falls in love so much that he is willing to change so much about him and get married? A complete character flip. Did anyone ever label Chandler as courageous? That’s probably the last word that comes to mind when you think of him. Of course, he ran off before the wedding and gave everyone a scare, but once he came back and cracked a joke at a baby t-shirt, everyone hears the joke, laughs, good ol’ Chandler is back and let’s get on with it.
Chandler Bing, is an example in the TV show Friends about how a person, because of love, can change so drastically, turn his life inside out. If you’re one of those people sitting there thinking, yes, I thought about all this, then that’s great. You’re one of the few people who actually looks into shows. Chandler is hardly a fitting example for a deep character inspection though.
So why do we watch TV shows? What is the reason that most people watch TV shows these days? More >
Unexplored Earth
Aug 3rd
Let’s start this post with something drastic to grab your attention. The total surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers, out of which 149 million square kilometers is land and 361 million square kilometers is water. Now you’d figure that since Discovery and National Geographic show us some pretty rad looking machines that seem to come out of a Transformers movie to explore the earth with, they’ve pretty much got the entire thing covered. As most of you have probably figured out by the tone of the above sentence (unless you’re five years old), that’s not true. Parts of the Earth still remain unexplored. Unexplored in the sense that there is no information present about the contents and features of a particular land. It doesn’t mean there aren’t people on it.
Enter the North Sentinel Island. It’s probably one of the only places on Earth that’s truly ‘unexplored’. I’m pretty sure most of you are thinking of some kind of island in the Pacific Ocean or the Bermuda Triangle at this point, but I’d like to shoot you right back to reality and tell you that this place is in the Andaman Islands. Yes, that’s right, the ones off the Indian coast. Very little is known about these islands since it’s inhabited by arrow-happy guys shooting at anything that comes anywhere near the island. So what do we know about these people? Apart from the fact that they’re pretty angry at the world and don’t want any outside contact, not very much. It’s been predicted that their way of lifestyle is paleolithic (yes that means they’re still on Windows 3.1 with Internet Explorer 3) and that they’re descendants of an African tribe.
No, that’s not a photograph of the Sentinelese shooting arrows, it’s one of an Amazonian tribe shooting arrows at a plane. A group of people once managed to get onto the island and even inland, where they found an abandoned village until they decided to get the hell away from there because it creeped them out no end. No word of their language has ever been recorded (so fat chance we’ll get through to them even if we somehow do manage to make them listen to us). After the Tsunami in 2004, some people tried contacting them, went in helicopters to see whether they had survived the Tsunami or not and guess what? Yes, they had arrows shot at them. It was like they were screaming, “We’re still here bitches!”
Apparently now the Indian Government has decided to leave them the hell alone and it’s illegal to go anywhere near their island. No fishing in their water either, otherwise the Coast Guard will own your ass. Frankly, we’re no one to decide whether or not we can invade their land or not. If they want to be left alone, so be it. It’s not like they’re building some kind of a black hole down there that’s going to swallow the earth.
So let’s think about this. A tribe that has never come into contact with the modern world. Let’s take a look at what they’ve not done so far.
- They’ve never watched an episode of 24, Prison Break of Lost (which I think they’d relate to).
- They don’t know who Lady Gaga is.
- They’ve never heard of MTV or seen a Black Eyed Peas video.
- They’ve never shopped on eBay, visited Walmart or a mall.
- They’ve never experienced traffic.
- They don’t know what the hell an LOLCAT is.
- They haven’t stood in front of an elevator door cursing their head off.
- They’ve never got notifications about which apple or which past life character their friends are.
- They’ve not seen Twilight.
- They haven’t seen a Drew Barrymore film.
… if you ask me, that sounds pretty freaking good.
Alright, now let’s consider this. Why do you think it is that these people don’t want contact with the outside world? I mean, surely there must be some reason behind this. I’m sure earlier tribes have approached them and there have been people who’ve looked just like them who came over for a cup of coffee or a game or cards? I wonder why they’re so intent on having nothing to do with the outside world…
- Old Rivalry: It’s possible that there’s some neighboring tribe that they’ve had a dispute with some shitload of time ago and they’re pretty good at holding a grudge (like most teenagers), and so anyone who approaches their island they feel is from that damn tribe and they decide to raise hell. That sounds credible. I mean think about it, you can probably think of one person who you want to start abusing the second you see their face. I said one person.
- Twilight: I’m sorry, but I think this has to be a reason. One of them probably read one of the Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer and committed suicide over the stupidity of it all. The tribe then decided that it’s text-warfare being used by the outside world and they’re going to ban everything that the outside world has to offer. Yes! We can now blame Edward Cullen and Bella Swan for the the Earth not being explored too!
- Jay Leno: They probably saw a Jay Leno show. Better yet, they probably saw Conan O’Brien leaving because of Jay Leno. They decided that a world that can possibly think of doing that must. not. be. ever. contacted. again. Do you think it’s possible if Conan approaches them shouting out jokes they might agree to let him in?
- Reality Shows: I think Survivor had them thinking that everyone’s psychotic on this planet, except them. They decided that anyone who decides to watch a TV show where people basically go to an island with a person with a camera recording their moments as they go about and have some VERY ORIGINAL fights and disputes, deserves to be not spoken to at all. Maybe we’re their Lord Voldemort. That which they do not speak of.
- Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber: Need I say anything?
- Bill Gates: Someone told them that he was the richest guy on the planet and his contribution to the world was to have everyone sit at one place and do lots of work, then randomly lose all that work, then do all that work again, only to lose it all over again and the cycle continues. Some people might think of that as genius, but the Sentinelese knew that this guy was full of shit.
- Rap Music: If that’s music, then the Sentinelese probably thought that there’s no scope for their way of partying on this planet.
- American Idol: … ’nuff said.
The Toba Event
Jul 29th
Something that grips everyone and sparks a little interest in them if not a lot, is a calamity. There’s a reason why a newspaper headline that says, ’500,000 dead’ is more popular than ‘Bunny rescued from clutches of Madman’. Although the latter makes you feel all fuzzy and warm inside, the former is what you feel is something you might have to deal with someday, or something that’s a real issue that could potentially affect you in one way or another. Of course, that would be true if everyone got past the ‘it-can’t-happen-to-me’ syndrome.
There have been events in the past that have obliterated life on earth. The first thing that comes to everyone’s mind is that asteroid that smacked into earth and made a Michael Bay explosion look like bubble-wrap popping. For those of you who don’t know who Michael Bay is, I’ll throw a few movies he’s directed at you. Transformers. Armageddon. Bad Boys. The Island. Whenever someone talks about extinction, people think dinosaurs. Some might think about the dodo too, awesome bird wasn’t it? Throw it at someone’s face in the middle of the night and they won’t sleep for the better half of a decade.
Onto business now. Roughly 75,000 years ago something pretty insane happened. I’ll sum it up for you quickly. Fwish. Boom. Fizz. Shhhzt. Everyone’s dead. Except for about 6,000 people. No one’s sure how many people survived, because back then they were too busy trying not to get caught in the volcanic ash and die. You’d figure someone walking around with a register calling out names to mark them present or absent wouldn’t have survived too long. The Toba Event, as it has been called, proposes that a supervolcano erupted in Indonesia and everyone was screwed. The earth plunged into volcanic winter for a shitload of time, and the global temperature dropped by about ten degrees, which should make you shit yourself because climatologists tend to become suicidal over one or two degree changes.
I think after everyone gets over the asteroid collisions, 2012, tsunamis and zombie epidemics, there might be a movie about a supervolcano eruption. I wonder how mankind will be able to survive that. Bruce Willis goes into the depth of the volcano using a sophisticated vehicle and just freezes everything down there? Vin Diesel stuffs a giant cork in the volcano’s top? Would make for a pretty assuming movie. In case there’s an idiot out there reading this post and thinking about Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano, you should know that the film was about a volcano that erupts in downtown Los Angeles and threatens only the city. I’m talking about the entire planet here. Interesting how not very many people seem to know about this event but half the world knows about the asteroid collision. Interest in dinosaurs? Just plain Hollywood education?
Well, there we go, wasn’t that simpler than Wikipedia?
Another Battle in Facebook War
Jul 28th
Facebook currently has over 500 million active users and its net value is estimated to be around $15 billion. To most people, Facebook is synchronous with the internet. They log on, check their Facebook, log off. That’s pretty much their entire dealing with the internet on the whole. That’s what Facebook has done to most people. Earlier, people would log on and check their e-mail, sign into an IM application and chat with friends. Facebook now provides that entire package on a single portal with the ability to do so much more. So can you blame these people for becoming like this? Not really. For most people, the internet is more about communicating with one another rather than an information resource.
It would, however, be a little heartening to see these people a little more interested in how Facebook works, who the people behind the service are, and what’s happening with it. Out of Facebook’s 500 million users, how many do you think have heard the name Mark Zuckerberg? For those of you still not in the know, he’s Facebook’s CEO and the young mind behind the entire concept of Facebook. And oh, he’s 25 years old and is the youngest billionaire in the world.
Fantastic then. Isn’t it? The youngest billionaire in the world, the owner of one of the most popular websites on the planet, what more could a person want? Well for starters, I’m sure he wants to be free of controversy. Does controversy follow every success story? Most of us would believe so, for that’s what the media tends to be really good at covering. Ben Mezrich’s ‘The Accidental Billionaires’ is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg’s life in Harvard, Facebook’s first financier Eduardo Saverin and a duo who claim that Facebook was originally their idea, the Winklevoss brothers. The book is definitely worth a read, and I posted a review on Facebook saying just that a few weeks ago.
So what’s new? Why this post now? Weren’t the Winklevoss brothers given $65 million as a settlement? Hasn’t Eduaro Saverin’s name been included in the list of people who’ve founded Facebook? True. But now, I give you, Paul Ceglia. Hailing from New York, Paul Ceglia is a wood-pellet vendor who claims to have legal documents stating that he has 84% ownership of Facebook. If you’d like, you can take a look at the legal document here. So how legit is this claim? Is this just another person who did some business with Mark Zuckerberg back in the day and has forged documents to try and swindle some cash out of Facebook?
Facebook says so. Apparently they strongly suspect forgery and that this claim by Ceglia that could potentially allow him to take over the firm is absurd.
Ceglia’s lawyer, Paul Argentieri stated that he found these accusations absolutely hilarious and that his client has more documents to back his claim. So then why wait so long before coming out in the open with these documents? Was Ceglia waiting till Facebook was worth enough so that he could get his share and sell a portion to get a large sum of money? Or is this just another scam that he’s trying to pull? It’s worth noting that these claims are extremely dangerous and in the event that these documents are proved to be forged, Ceglia could face imprisonment for a pretty long time.
No matter what the outcome of the case, I doubt that 84% ownership of Facebook is ever going to be in Ceglia’s name. In the event that the situation does get a little tricky for Facebook, they’ll probably look for a quick settlement. Do you guys think David Fincher’s upcoming film, ‘The Social Network’ will have time to make a quick edit in the end if this lawsuit has a dramatic ending?
