the klog

Look! It's Arthur C. Clarke wearing a t-shirt that says, "I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy t-shirt". Sweet.

It comes from this BBC News article on the debate in Sri Lanka about their time zone. They changed from India's UTC+5.5 to UTC+6 in 1996, but both Buddhist monks and Tamil Tigers weren't happy with the change. The latter just ignored it, while the former blame the country's ills on the change: "The Venerable Gnanawimala says the change moved the country to a spiritual plane 500 miles east of where it should be."

:D I actually disagree with Clarke here, though, who seems to just argue that UTC+5.5 is weird. It seems to me that syncing up with big neighbor India would be more important thab a little weirdness to the rest of the world.

(Found via boingboing.)

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In vaguely related news, I figured this was as good a time as any to plug my favorite (musical) artist of 2005, M.I.A.. Her music is kinda hard to describe... hip-hop-ish, electronic beats, a vaguely ethnic/world music feel, sometimes political. Okay, so Wikipedia says, "Her style contains elements of grime, hip hop, ragga, dancehall, electronica and baile funk," only a few of which I've heard of. :) Really pretty different from anything I'd heard before, which is part what I like about it.

She was born in London, but was raised in Sri Lanka. Her dad was a Tamil Tiger (thus the connection to the previous story), and so she moved in and out of India until she eventually ended up back in London as a refugee. She got her start traveling with Elastica during their last US tour. She provided the cover art for their last album and documented the tour, and she was Elastica lead singer Justine Frishmann's roommate. I thought this was neat because I actually went to Elastica's last US show in Boston, and so M.I.A. was probably actually there. :)

Here is the video for her debut single Galang, which features her own artwork. And Justine Frishmann produced that song(!). She eventually got together with a white DJ from Philadelphia called Diplo, who had fallen in love with Brazilian "baile funk", and they made her album, Arular.

Even though the album is kinda overhyped among music circles, I think most people still haven't heard of it. I found it kinda jarring at first, but I soon got used to it and then found myself leaving it on repeat a lot.