Selfies at funerals?

 

 

Selfies, as most Instagram users have helped popularize, are increasingly – and notoriously, often – taking place in nearly all facets of our lives. We have seen people self-posing themselves with oftentimes farcical, and mostly ridiculous, expressions, all the more bizarre with unrecognizable body-language patterns. We have also seen an increasing number of people taking selfies on historical sites (someone even curates all those pictures into his Tumblr blog). But then, who can imagine if people are self-imposing themselves on cellphone cameras while listening to eulogies?

Some of them may probably create an argument under the rationale that ‘they are taking such pictures out of final respect they want to show for their deceased beloved ones’, but still, either you take pictures on Anne Frank Museum or a nuclear-contaminated ghost town, or that you pose your smiling face together with your beloved’s coffin, when moments supposed to be solemn for contemplation lose their credence for such phenomenon, what does ‘being solemn’ mean, anyway?

Read the full articles on Internet Meme Database and Business Insider.

And get prepared for full outrage on Selfies at Funeral.

How to write like Italo Calvino

 

 

I’m a regular guy, I like well-defined outlines, I’m old-fashioned, bourgeois. My stories are full of facts, they have a beginning and an end. For that reason they will never be able to find success with the critics, nor occupy a place in contemporary literature. I write poetry when I have a thought that I absolutely have to bring out, I write to give vent to my feelings and I write using rhyme because I like it, tum-tetum tumtetum tum te-tum, because I’ve got no ear, and poetry without rhyme or meter seems like soup without salt, and I write (mock me, you crowds! Make me a figure of public scorn!) I write … sonnets … and writing sonnets is boring, you have to find rhymes, you have to write hendecasyllables so after a while I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems. – Italo Calvino

 

Read the full article on Brain Pickings to gain more insight on how one of the history’s most enigmatic writers thinks about writing.

Bonus: more worthwhile quotes included.

 

Indonesia’s worsening gang wars

 

 

Question: how much have we been oblivious on our predecessors’ Sumpah Pemuda after reading this article?

Read this exclusively ‘humiliating’ report on Al Jazeera.

 

Excerpt:

 

“I never used acid when I was fighting. But people are using it because of the police sweeps,” Jambrong, a 19-year-old alumnus of Muhammidiyah High School (SMA), central Jakarta, said.

“With a samurai sword or a machete – you need a big bag and the police will find it. But you can get acid easily. You can buy it in building supply stores or technical stores. No one will ask you what it’s for. You can even get it from the school lab.

“It’s hard to look for acid. You can just keep it in a plastic bottle – it’s small and it looks anonymous.”

But Jambrong said the most popular weapon in student brawls is a motor gear tied to the end of a karate belt. “You get someone in the head with that and it’ll rip it up pretty bad. There are no rules to tawuran, there’s no code. You just have to have the guts. If you dare to kill, then kill, if not you will be scarred. I got hurt a couple of times.”

Still more nostalgia from Phil Collins: True Colors

 

 

Aside from ‘You’ll Be in My Heart’ or ‘Against All Odds’, this song, despite not being Collins’ original work, is also one of my most favored.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Shreddies.

 

 

A brand-new underwear that filters all flatulence odors.

Thank you, Improbable Research.

Official website for this product: My Shreddies 

 

See how Shreddies, originally made in UK, is being advertised all over the country’s media:

 

The notoriety of ‘topeng monyet’

 

 

Once again, Indonesia grabs another international spotlight for this notorious street circus.

View the full slide show in Foreign Policy.

And here’s what the website says:

Now, Indonesian authorities are cracking down on masked monkey performances like these, denoucing them as a form of animal cruelty and an international embarrassment. “Have pity on the monkeys,” Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo said recently, “they are being exploited by their owners.” 

Widodo plans to unveil an anti-topeng monyet campaign next year, while authorities are working with animal rights groups to treat and relocate confiscated monkeys to a special enclosure at the local zoo. In the future, topeng monyet handlers could face up to seven years in prison for violating the animal abuse law.

Well, matter-of-factly speaking, there is ‘only’ one Joko Widodo who stands up to this issue.

Nostalgia with Phil Collins, another day in paradise.

 

 

The reason you can’t forget this gentleman, and all the success he had had with Genesis.

 

 

Indonesia’s petite dynasties

 

With the subsequent arrest of Banten’s long-ruling and ill-conceived governor, Ratu Atut Chosiyah, the democracy in Indonesia is brought to another spotlight: it has, under the pretext of seeding ‘majority-elected’ leaders, also indirectly spurred a new, massive growth in political dynasties, owning potentate-like power either in first-level administrative divisions (provinces, or as in Indonesian, provinsi), or the second-level counterparts (regencies, or as in Indonesian, kabupaten), or even municipalities (politically termed as kotamadya). To make things more complicating, it has now fueled a new string of addle-pated problems the central government finds it increasingly hard to solve, given the massive connection they obtain within political parties, mostly in coalition with current regime, that they have strongly built from grassroots to national levels.

Tempo and The Jakarta Post report the latest situation.

And here are some of the websites, as found on Google, which provide some of the lists (only in Bahasa Indonesia):

Indonesian Company News

Harian Merdeka

Harian Merdeka (2)

Academia.edu (for English-language articles)

 

In search of happiness

 

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. – Albert Camus

Ingenious homes in unexpected places

 

Torre David, one of Venezuelan capital Caracas’ tallest skyscrapers, is now mostly known for being the world’s most well-known epitome of a typical vertical slum. Originally intended for use as an office tower, the unexpected death of the edifice’s developer has since left an unprecedented, and painful, mark on the fate of this huge building: it subsequently ran out of funds, and many of the city’s poorest inhabitants now hinge on this building as homes, factories, shops, and even places to gather with other fellow inhabitants.

 

What are the similarities of:

1. A skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, that is unexpectedly used as ‘safe haven’ for a city’s poorest rank-and-file

2. An abandoned ‘dream city’ in Chandigarh, India (a Utopian project by Le Corbusier), that for the city’s most impoverished, is a ‘brand-new huge office space’ to find new dreams upon?

3. A slum city (Makoko) on the suburbs of Lagos, Nigeria, that is entirely built above water and houses up to 150,000 people, and even supports a lively and vibrant economy despite decrepit infrastructure?

4. A densely-stacked town (Zabbaleen) on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, that wholly depends on mounts of waste and garbage, and that for its inhabitants, are the primary sources of income?

5. And lastly, houses built underground that are scattered throughout China, for the reason that ‘governments are overlooking their housing needs’, when in fact more and more ghost cities are built in perpetuity across the whole country?

For Iwan Baan, a globe-trotting photographer, the answer is plain simple: ingenious.

 

And this is the similarly ingenious, and truly original, TED talk by which he presents the illustrations of real human ingenuity.