For all you Thames people:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,

As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,

From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

- Walter Scott

"Let me tell you one vairy funny story about putting. It was one day
I play at Nijni-Novgorod with the pro. against Lenin and Trotsky,
and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But, just as he addresses
the ball, someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a
rewolwer-you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate
Lenin with rewolwers-and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he
goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken,
you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole and match
and I clean up three hundred and ninety-sex thousand roubles, or fifteen
shillings in your money. Some gameovitch! And now let me tell you one
other vairy funny story----"
The Clicking of Cuthbert (A Short Story) , The Clicking of Cuthbert

tried to do some last minute shopping. this is my last weekend in ipswich ! but i couldn't think of anything to buy.. so ended up buying a rock 'n' roll riot cd. awesome tracklist, all songs by their original artists.. blue suede shoes (carl perkins), good golly miss molly, long tall sally (little richard), roll over beethoven , great balls of fire (jerry lee lewis) and some fats domino tracks i haven't heard before. 15 tracks in all, and the best part is, i got it at the 1 pound shop :)

speaking of CDs, due to some goof up by the postman, i ended up getting somebody else's package. as luck would have it, it contained 2 CDs, one david bowie and the other carly simon (who dat ?). they are not original CDs, looks like they've been ripped (the track list says it's printed on iTunes). after giving it a lot of thought, i've decided to mail them back to the original recipient. hopefully it doesn't come back to me again.

existentialism "A 20th-century movement in philosophy…All existentialists are concerned with ontology, the study of being. The point of departure is human consciousness and mental processes. In contrast to most previous philosophical systems, which maintain that an a priori essence precedes or transcends the individual existence of people or of objects, the existentialists conclude that existence precedes essence. The significance of this for human beings is that the concept that one has an essential self is shown to be an illusion. A man's self is nothing except what he has become; at any given moment, it is the sum of the life he has shaped until then. The 'nothing' he begins with is thus the source of man's freedom, for at each moment it is man's will that can choose how to act or not to act. However, each such decision affects the future doubly: a man is or should be responsible for the consequences of his actions; and each action necessarily excludes the other potential actions for that moment, and their consequences, and thus at least partially limits the potentialities for future actions. "By what standards, then, should a person make decisions? The mind cannot discern any meaning for this existence in the universe; when a person abandons his illusions, he finds himself horrified by the absurdity of the human condition…a person must create a human morality in the absence of any known predetermined absolute values"

Sin City:
if ever there was a comic movie, this is it. forget batman, spiderman and others of the same ilk. those movie versions of comic books are, well, just like regular movies. they don't have the same 'charm' as the comic books.
sin city is a new type of movie making in itself. a new movie genre, if i may call it that. for starters, most parts of the movie are narrated. the lines spoken by the narrator are brief phrases, just like you might see in a comic book.
the action is exactly like you might see in a comic book, where the hero might get punched a gazillion times and still manage to stay alive.
interesting way the movie is made. but i kind of have the feeling it will be the only movie made this way. not many people actually understood the movie making and went out of the theatre disappointed.
bruce willis is good, so is jessica alba ;-)
i absolutely loved the character 'marv', played by mickey rourke.
i could watch this movie a few more times.. sitting in gandhi class, i'm sure i missed out on many things.