Month: March 2015

General · reading · Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Sonia Lal14 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser (this is one sentence):

Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.

– The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

General

Teaser Tuesday: The Color Purple

Sonia Lal10 Comments

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
Open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser:

Maybe he figure he start thinking bout things he shouldn’t. But what bout me? First time I got the full sight of Shug Avery long black body with it black plum nipples, look like her mouth, I thought I had turned into a man.

– The Color Purple by Alice Walker

General

The Smart Watch

Sonia LalLeave a comment

 

All this talk about the Apple Watch has me wondering: what, exactly, would I use a smart watch for?

The smart watch – almost all smart watches, from Pebble to the Apple Watch – is advertised as a second screen for the phone, and to keep better track of your health. You can use it to check notifications, to check and respond to messages, to keep track of health related items. Instead of pulling out your phone, you just glance at your wrist.

But why, I wonder, does a smartphone need a second screen? Using it to keep track of your heartbeat and footsteps and all is a rather admirable, very useful purpose of the smartphone. I imaging apps that hug your bare skin will work better than ones that follow along behind me, inside my purse.

But for the rest – why not just take your phone out? If it’s so annoying, turn off your notifications or check them later. OK, so, using your watch to check your messages is less obvious than using your phone to do so. Even so.

Manners + Health = Not A Convincing Reason.

I don’t get it. If it’s cheap and a long battery life (like a week!), maybe it would be worth it. The Pebble’s color e-ink screen is supposed to last a long time and is relatively cheap. And you’re not going to watching videos or look at pictures on such a little screen, so an e-ink screen is fine.

Even so. I cannot quite picture myself using it. I surely cannot picture myself using one of the Pebble’s more expensive cousins. (Even if it looks a lot like a watch, like the Moto 360.)

A part of me is thinking that the smart watch could be the main phone – the thing you buy from the carrier, the thing you put the sim card in. And the smartphone/phablet/tablet could be tethered to it, so you get data on the go. So the watch would be more like one of the feature phones from the last decade.

But I don’t know if that would work, or even if the carriers would get behind the idea.

So I cannot think why I would get a smart watch. I am sure there must be some really compelling thing I can do it. I just don’t know what that could be.

(Using it like David Michael Hasselhoff used his watch in Knight Rider to give his car orders would be pretty cool.) But beyond that, what?

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

General · reading

Readings in Old and Middle English

Sonia Lal3 Comments

While randomly browsing YouTube the other  day, I happened across this video:

It’s a reading from an associate professor at MIT, reading some lines from Beowulf in Old English. It’s quite incomprehensible to my American-English trained ears. It’s hard to believe this is what English sounded like once upon a time.

The associate professor also reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English and this I can understand somewhat. A little bit, if I listen closely.

It’s really amazing what English used to sound like.