Asterix in Corsica

Asterix & Obelix rescue a dour Corsican Exile captured by the Romans and go with him to his village in Corsica to help retrieve the tax that the greedy Roman Praetor Perfidius has extorted from the Corsicans. In Corsica, they get mixed up with inter-clan vendetta, a bunch of idiot pirates, an overenthusiastic Roman legionary named Courtingdisastus, not to mention the Praetor himself.

Two of my favorite pieces in this book:

(1) A Corsican explaining to Asterix the roots of a very bloody vendetta between 2 Corsican clans:

Asterix: What’s the vendetta about?

Corsican: The old folk say Boneywasawarriorix’s Great-Uncle married a girl from the Vionecellix clan and a cousin by marriage of OllabellaMargaritix was in love with her. But others say it was because of a donkey which OlabellaMargaritix’s great grandfather refused to pay for when he got him from the brother-in law of a close friend of the Boneywasawarriorix clan claiming that he was lame (the donkey, not the Boneywasawarriorix’s brother-in-law). Anyway it’s very serious.

(2) Conversation between Obelix & a Corsican chief:

Obelix has mistaken the sound of a pig for the ‘secret’ cry of a chief of a Corsican clan.

Chief: Can’t you tell the difference between a pig and a chief of a Corsican clan?

Obelix: I don’t know, I never tasted the chief of a Corsican clan.

Asterix in Corsica is not in the same league as “Obelix & Co” and “Asterix the Legionary”, but is pretty darn good and a definite must for any Asterix fan. And I despair of those that have never read an Asterix comic. Come on!

Coming to a Social Network Near You: Pretentiously Cute Names

What’s with the new trend of cloying and pretentiously cute names for social networking sites? The VCs must have released a memo to all startups threatening to deny funding to projects that have even half-intelligent names.

Here’s a sample of names of actual new sites/ social networks/ widgets/ thingummybobs that are trying to capture the public’s imagination and pageviews. While they may be perfectly good sites that will shortly change the way mankind thinks, works and plays, they suffer from exceedingly annoying (and forgettable) names.

Check out a sample:

Naymz (puhhlease…..)

Graspr (sorry…did you get something stuck in your throat?)

Phreesia (!!)

And then, there’s a bunch of startups/ sites that have these rhyming names: I kid you not, these are real names of real companies.

Hulu

Lulu

Kanuu

Yuuguu

In the same vein, and in a spirit of co-operation and helpfulness, may I suggest some more names for up-and-coming sites?

Foolu

Droolu

Moo-Moo (social network for cows)

Zzzzzzzuuuuuuuu………

Which trends are you a part of?

In the book “Microtrends: “The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes”, Mark Penn outlines more than 70 ‘microtrends’ that are emerging in the US today (though there are also some international trends). He believes that it takes about 1% of any given population to adopt something for it to become influential. He also maintains that America is no longer a melting pot of immigrants from different countries and ethnicities joining the American mainstream, but instead, is a country increasingly made up of microtrends, with small populations increasingly doing their own thing, adding up to dozens, if not hundreds of microtrends.

Some of the current trends include:

Cougars, Office Romances, Young Knitters, High School Moguls Wordy Women, Ardent Amazons, Stained Glass Ceiling Breakers, Pro-semites, SouthPaws Unbound, Black Teen Idols, Surgery Lovers, Powerful Petites, Social Geeks, Video Game Grown Ups, Neo Classicals, Smart Child Left Behind, Mammonis, Eurostars

I personally am part of at least 2 trends (I think!) and have observed many other trends that Penn outlines. One very interesting trend is Italian males who stay at home- a whopping 80% or more of Italian men between the ages of 18-30 stay at home with their parents! The main factor contributing to this is higher unemployment due to jobs moving to low cost locations such as China.

It does seem though, that some of these trends have been around for a very long time and are not really new microtrends. After all, office romances have been around since the beginning of time (or shortly thereafter) and Wordy Women is a long standing stereotype. Some trends are extremely self evident and don’t really warrant a mention in the book - you’d have to be living in a cave to not have noticed the rapid growth in Surgery Lovers.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Considering that I’m a history buff, Istanbul is obviously one of the places I very much want to visit, it being smothered in history, as it were. However, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City is very different from the city I dream of visiting, and his description of Istanbul is, I'd reckon, much more authentic than the romantic and fabled city of my imagination.

Pamuk talks about growing up in a city that is acutely conscious of its lost glory of the heady days of the Ottoman Empire, and is helpless to recover it. He traces parallels between his family’s genteel and unhappy life and his beloved city, enveloped by an all-pervasive “Huzun”, or “sorrow” in Turkish. The Istanbul of Pamuk’s childhood and youth, eager to shed its Ottoman past, finds nothing to replace its lost civilization, resulting in a feeling of emptiness all around. The book has vivid descriptions of the crumbling Ottoman mansions that nobody in modern Turkey wants; besides being impractical to live in, these are also a symbol of the civilization that modern Turkey has firmly turned its back on in its quest to embrace modernity.

Pamuk also talks about the many writers, both Turkish and foreign, who “wrote about the goings on in Istanbul, from the various species of drunks to the street vendors in the city’s poor neighborhoods, from grocers to jugglers, from the beauties of the towns along the Bosphorus to its rowdy taverns and meyhanes……..”. Religion is an interesting topic, with Pamuk’s family being ambivalent about it (his mother believes in God, just in case). This attitude is reflected amongst Istanbul’s westernized elite, who are always wary of the more religious lower classes and provincials who (they believe), if they acquired political power, would use religion to get rid of the Westernized way of life of the elite.

Now for my frank opinion of this book. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature for “Istanbul”. However, I must honestly confess that I did not enjoy this book all that much and found it depressing and somewhat boring. Not surprising, since its main theme is melancholy, Huzun, sadness. Besides, I'd prefer to keep my delusions intact and do not appreciate having my romantic notions of Istanbul shattered. This book is like spinach, you know it’s good, but you don’t really like it all that much. All in all, I feel that I ought to like this book, but do not, no fault of the writer’s.

It’s not you, Orhan, it’s me.

Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There

I’ve been re-reading Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There, Travels in Europe. He says all the rude things that I wish I could think of and manages to unfailingly offend every nationality in Europe with his acerbic wit.

Bryson travels 2000 km to somewhere near the North Pole in the Nordics in search of the Northern Lights and endures two weeks of excruciating boredom before witnessing the Lights, which apparently are magnificent and not like anything you’ve seen. He then goes on to tour the rest of the Continent, and the book details his adventures in various European capitals. He narrowly manages to avoid getting killed by Parisian cab drivers, gets repulsed by the breathtaking ugliness of the new Pompidou Centre in Paris, encounters ominous food (Kalbsbrann, anyone?) in Germany, compliments the Dutch for beautifully maintaining their historical streets and houses in Amsterdam and gets ripped off by the Swedes. My favorite chapter is the one on Rome, that describes the glorious chaos and indiscipline of the Italians. (“Romans park their cars the way I would if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap”). This book is pure joy.

If PG Wodehouse had Written Star Wars......

A hilarious account of an imaginary conversation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Wodehousian lingo that I came across while surfing…….

http://www.angiebrennan.com/The_Wodehouse_Strikes_Back.html

Obelix & Co

This is a brilliant book at many levels and can be enjoyed not only for its classic Asterix humor and puns, but also as a clever satire on modern economies and hype driven marketing.

Fed up with the sacking of the fortified Roman camp of Totorum by the Indomitable Gauls in honor of Obelix’s birthday, Julius Caeser dispatches Caius Preposterus, a hotshot young graduate of the Latin School of Economics, to corrupt the Gauls with gold. The profit motive, as Caius explains, will enfeeble them and keep them busy, and as proof, he points out the example of the fat, corrupt, senators of Rome. With the Roman treasury behind him, Caius befriends Obelix and starts buying menhirs for handsome (and artificially inflated) prices and starts to convert the Gauls’ barter economy to a money based one, enriching most of the Gaulish villagers, except Asterix and the Druid Getafix, who refuse to be taken in. The villagers, busy trading, stop fighting the Romans and leave them in peace. It looks like Julius Caesar is going to control all of Gaul, after all.

However, seeing the enormous prices obtainable for the next-to-worthless menhirs, other nationalities (the Egyptians, Phoenicians) jump into the menhir trade, creating an artificial bubble for a product that does not have any intrinsic value and is purely driven by hype. In the meanwhile, the native Roman traders, upset at being left out, lobby for protectionist economic policies and “keeping out the foreigners”, threatening to derail Julius Caesar’s Gaulish conquest plans.

As is inevitable, the market for menhirs eventually comes crashing down, depleting the Roman treasury and forcing a devaluation of the Roman Sestertius. Our hotshot grad of the Latin School of Economics seriously falls out of Caesar’s favor and everything ends happily with the Gauls going back to their old ways.

Incidentally, is there anyone that has not read an Asterix comic? Please accept my condolences on a very misspent life.