I kept staring at her, straight in the eyes, not wanting to shift my gaze even for a moment because if I did, I would lose this battle long before it had begun. ‘How have you been?’ She asked, but she already knew, so she threw her head back as the disgustingly beautiful laughter escaped [ ... ]

Feels like a good year, so far. My friend had a baby today, his first. I dropped off my camera in the morning and saw a picture when the thing popped in the evening. Have yet to meet this character in person, what with the rules of the hospital. I feel like the world is broken, but we have time to fix it before this generation remembers anything. A bit of a magic trick. Perhaps we'll learn how to control the weather. I was playing with another batch after work and it gives me hope that everything will [ ... ]

she turned up at the ‘chatroom’ audition with a half-forgotten shakespearean monologue. and i thought - ‘oh god. not another. why me? why the devil can’t people turn up at auditions with something prepared!’ groan groan mutter mutter try to be calm - but sometimes, you can recognise a kindred spirit just by looking at them. a director needs [ ... ]

These are a few photos from a family trip up North to Kalpitiya. There are a few beaches close to Colombo. Hikkaduwa is the most saturated and Unawatuna is getting there. Kalpitiya, however, is just as beautiful and almost entirely untapped. Every third house down Beach Access Road in Una is a guesthouse, but there are precious few in Kalpitiya. It's also really difficult to find food. We ended up buying fresh fish and frying it ourselves. However, it does have the cached of being unsaturated. Hikka, in season, is pretty much like walking into White Horse [ ... ]

My uncle needed an boat (long story) so we got in a car and headed to the coast. Got too rough to drive so we got in the back of a pickup truck. Walked through fields of tobacco and radishes and onions. It's not a verdant land, naturally, but they've irrigated it and things grow. Ended up on the beach in the white hot sun, but it's a dry heat, not as sweaty as Colombo. The animals are all hiding in the shade, in boxes, under rice bags, inside the thatched hut. Find a dog in a box, [ ... ]

i thought i'd share this with you: I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. Albert Einstein, in "What Life Means to Einstein : An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" in The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929) [ ... ]

It was about half past nine in the night when my uncle called us from work to tell us that it was snowing last night. I couldn’t believe my ears because for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to see snow falling on Christmas Day. For some reason it made all the sense [ ... ]

This is some visual from the wedding of Timothy Senaviratne and Melanie Barco. It was a beautiful wedding on the rocks at Unawatuna. Everyone wore white, an outfit you can purchase for Rs. 1000 on the Beach Access Road. Hania Mariam Luthufi sang and Tracy Holsinger officiated. They were serving Jehan's Arrack Malum out of a bucket into half coconuts. It was great, and exactly what I think a wedding should be. I know Timothy well and he's a hardcore guy with a heart of gold. Wish him and Mili the best, and thank them for getting us [ ... ]

I'm doing this backwards cause it's, uh, LIFO. These are the trippy photos, from the end of the trip. My friends Timmy and Mili got married. It was a beautiful wedding and entirely befitting the couple. The dress code was white and you could buy an outfit for Rs 1,000 on the Beach Access Road. They got married on the rocks overlooking the beach and then everyone danced all night to house music. Again, these are the trippier photos. Not that I was tripping, but it was trippy. There are more photos which might be construed to represent [ ... ]

I'm not sure if they get it, but the headlines are often absurd. Yesterday's Sunday Observer was 'Beware of invisible forces' and 'Parliament supreme in taxation'. Now, I'm assuming this comes straight from the government (being a state-owned paper) but it's still a bit absurd. Our official bodycounts actually give the LTTE negative troop strength, have they assembled an unholy army of the undead? Are they under my bed right now? I suppose the onus is on Mahinda for actually saying something as vague as 'be aware and cautious of the invisible and unseen forces which [ ... ]

Dinner table conversation in my family has always been interesting. A slight hint of an old story and we usually all go rushing down memory lane. Last night was no different. A thick fog had settled in outside, the cold wind was brushing against the windows and inside the warmth of my Aunt & Uncle’s [ ... ]

It has been a while. Two devastatingly complex 3000 word papers later, I’m barely standing. Every thought seems to spiral into the possibility of sleep and a couple more episodes of Gossip Girl (new favourite waste of time). The Christmas spirit which took so long to seep in, has finally settled with the short days, [ ... ]

That’s what the Venicians call the High Tide, when the water rises above knee level making everything rather wet and messy in Venice. This is all I’ve been hearing on the news for the past few days whenever the weather report comes up. But can you imagine watching the rain in this beautiful place. It’s [ ... ]

…and when it’s all over and we are a mass of nothingness exploding into oblivion imploding within our own emptiness what will be left of this memory? what will i have left of right now? what will we have of this moment, frozen in time, unmoving in the hurried rush of what is the present? will we return, from where the grass is greener and life [ ... ]

Glen Terry is BAAAACK….jpg, originally uploaded by nazreen.sansoni.        [ ... ]

I met Karu Jayasuriya once. I was standing next to him at the musty UNP office as they 'launched' their website. However, the UNP is so fucking stupid that they didn't have Internet connection ready. They were trying to launch the website without Internet. Somebody called me with this problem in the morning and I didn't even believe them, I tried to go back to sleep. In the end I loaded the site on Firefox at home and brought my laptop. Karu asked me 'what button to push' to launch the site and I told him to click the [ ... ]

Ok first of all thanks for tagging me DD… anyway, i’m still not entirely sure what we’re supposed to do but I hear we’re supposed to write down some things that we did this year and how this Christmas is different to the others ya? Anyway, here goes. This year has been most interesting because I [ ... ]

Sharon and Zack, originally uploaded by nazreen.sansoni.        [ ... ]

There's this haunted house down Skelton Road. When we're bored we occassionally break in there and scare ourselves. These shots are taken therein with a 15-30 second shutter. It was 1:30 in the morning and we could barely see ahead of ourselves, but the photos look like daylight. Some very strange, still daylight, but this LX3 lets in a lot of light. In the photo above, for example, you can see the blades and color of the grass, which I couldn't see with my naked eye.You can't really take photos of people with a shutter that long (cause [ ... ]

...the scene eh? Wandered on to ach after a long time to see a lot of people coming out with what they did or what happened to them during the past year. It's been a while since the last post and I've got some time in hand so thought of jotting down a few things that I remember of the year that was 2008.

- Well, did the least amount of blogging since the time this started. Only 10 posts (not including this one) for the entire year. In fact, dropped off the whole blog scene all together. Hardly [ ... ]

Sanjana has put out a call for articles on ‘UDHR at 60 in Sri Lanka - Fact or Fiction?,’ to commemorate the 60th anniversary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that occurred on December 10th. He has asked for short essays, photos, audio clips or short videos on the state of human rights [ ... ]

I wouldn't poop in the Beira Lake for fear of getting my poop dirty. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who has this reaction, as everyone else just walks on by. Today I was looking at the lake from the World Trade Center (NO PHOTOGRAPHS ALLOWED) and it's damn beautiful, from above. Could be a fanta family lake, with paddle-boats and ducks and stuff. But it isn't, and nobody care. Early I wrote something on Broken Window Theory, how urban leads to social decay. How a polluted and dirty environment can actually lead to crime. [ ... ]

Winter Solstice falls on December 21 at 12:04 UT (17:04 local time). I am awed by Natural Phenomena. I'm sure you are too. I love to watch Lightening, the occasional Eclipses, Rainbows, Sunsets, Clouds, etc. Winter Solstice is one such event. I have made several posts about the Solstices and Equinoxes over the past years. Often when I greet friends with "happy summer solstice" or "happy winter solstice", they respond with a reference to pagan rituals. The recent events in the US by atheist groups have stirred the battle between Christians vs Science even more. Science is portrayed negatively and [ ... ]

The inimitable RD has gone and done it again – gone and done a ‘Christmas Tag’ number, wanting to know what his readers (and others too, perhaps) have done during the past year. Java was intrigued – especially by the snide remark RD made about getting his (Java’s) knickers in a tag-twist, and so he [ ... ]

So I'm fucking with this LX3 camera. Desh had a look and figured you could stick a professional flash on it, via the old hotshoe. I'm not sure I'll ever do it cause I don't like flash and it looks retarded. The Nikon or whatever flash weighs more than the camera and tilts my wrist something terrible. Plus it's black and the camera is silver and that don't do. But the flash is powerful and you can get some interesting effects, especially with colored spirits. I got some cool stuff with arrack and flash priorly. In [ ... ]