Month: June 2008

Bengaluru … dark o’clock

Just landed at the new Bangalore airport which is vast improvement over the old one, but a lot further away from the city center. Midnight arrivals are a fact of life when flying into India, but the car ride into the city was an excellent white-knuckler. India doesn’t have superhighways — but there is a really nice six lane one that runs for about ten kilometers out of the airport, before reverting to the old way of doing things.


That means some cosmic speed bumps laid down at random with a skull and cross-bones sign next to them, lots of trucks and construction equipment navigating at snail speed with no lights, weird roadside shrines, dogs tempting the fates, those buzzing little three wheeler black and yellow death cabs for cutie ….

I got to the hotel and they stamped my forehead with a red dot, hustled me to my room, and now I get to blog against the clock having signed up for a grand total of 30 minutes.

Home on Saturday.

Tom Doctoroff: My Olympic Torch Run: Planning, Propaganda and Passion – Politics on The Huffington Post

Tom Doctoroff: My Olympic Torch Run: Planning, Propaganda and Passion – Politics on The Huffington Post
Good piece by JWT’s Tom Doctoroff on carrying the Olympic torch in China:

“A few days ago, I ran 100 meters in Minghan, an outlying industrial district of Shanghai and home to one of Jiaotong University’s five campuses. It was difficult not to be moved by the participants’ emotional release and spectators’ unity of ambition. Despite China’s awkward progress on many issues of concern to Westerners, its resolve to confront operatic challenges – from natural disaster to economic crisis – is inspiring. That’s what the Torch Run was ultimately about.”

Word of the Day: Ouroborosphere

Twitter – John Battelle’s Searchblog

“I am very, very tired of the ouroborosphere’s take on Twitter. It’s time for the service to either fish or get off the pot, so to speak. And with $15mm in the door, it’s obvious which way it has to go.”

Echo chamber, reflecting pool — whatever you want to call the closed-terrarium of social media pundits that tweet and post and opine all day long about tweeting, posting, and opining — Battelle nails it best with “Ouroborosphere.”

And trolling for Yanks tickets on Twitter? That’s like looking for supermodels at a sardine cannery.

Random thinking on a nice Sunday in June

  1. I am off to Bangalore tomorrow night. Lufthansa business class through Frankfurt. The whole ordeal always remind me on 2001: A Space Odyssey and the hibernation pods – I am seriously into ear plugs, noise cancelling headphones, eye patches and massive overdoses of Restoril washed down with post-takeoff scotch. Stewards have had to slap me awake on approach to the landing I get so numbed out. Back next Saturday.
  2. I wonder about people who use twitter on weekends. I think I need to unfollow about six people who seriously get under my skin and just annoy the snot out of me.
  3. I need to find Manny Ramirez’s 500th homerun from last night’s game against the Orioles and watch it.
  4. I received seasons one and two of The Wire for birthday presents and wonder why I didn’t get into it the first time around. Seal of approval for me is the involvement of my favorite crime writer, George Pellecanos.
  5. Reading list:
    1. The Night Gardener, Pellecanos
    2. The Pequots in Southern New England, Hauptman and Wherry
    3. Around the World Singlehanded, Pidgeon
    4. Flyfishing for Bonefish, Brown
    5. Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, Rippetoe & Kilgore
  6. CrossFit remains a daily feature of my athletic life. I am slowing getting into fierce shape with my eyes on a single goal come next February. I won’t talk about that, as I am in Nike-mode and “just doing it.”
  7. I am not fishing enough this spring. Today perhaps.
  8. I can’t garden enough because May was a cold washout.
  9. I need to go paint my boat.
  10. I think I am in China for the last few days of July and most of August
  11. I need to write a big post updating Lenovo’s sponsorship of the Summer Games.
    1. http://summergames.lenovo.com
    2. Joe Nocera has a good piece on the value of Olympic sponsorships in the sports supplement (magazine thing) in today’s NYT
    3. Yes, I saw the front page piece on the Chinese Olympic Rowing team. Pretty impressive. I would love to get an invite to watch a practice at their center in South China. The Chinese have been surprising people the past two seasons as they are not a traditional force in elite rowing.
  12. I need an awesome camera for the Olympics and need to start building my portable reporting kit for blogging my coverage of the Games. I’m thinking a Lenovo Y510 IdeaPad (I’d go Thinkpad X300 but they lack SD slots which are crucial for digital camera work), a nice SLR Nikon with an 18:200 lens, FlipCam, and perhaps a digital audio recorder and mic if I want to do any podcasting. I really want to nail the package I tote around – from batteries to knapsack.
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