Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

THE NAME
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A Burgher in Sri Lanka, formerly called Ceylon, used to refer to someone descended from employees of The Dutch East India Company (`Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or The V.O.C.) the 17th and 18th century colonial rulers of the coastal regions of the island. There was, and still is, an organisation called `the Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon` where the genealogies of some 200 of these families are maintained. However, over the last century, the term `Burgher` came to include Ceylonese/Sri-Lankans of British ancestry.

With two new movies Broken Embraces, her fourth film with director Pedro Almodovar, and Rob Marshall`s big-name musical extravaganza, Nine Penelope Cruz is mining both the Spanish roots that made her an actress and the hard-won Hollywood breakthrough that made her an international star. The author taps into the fierce passions of the Oscar-winning enchantress, whether for her directors, her leading men (including current flame Javier Bardem), or the cinema itself.

Cruz is poised to become a new member of the tiny firmament of actresses who began their careers in a language other than English and went on to become truly international stars: the Marlene Dietrichs, Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Sophia Lorens, Anouk Aimees, Catherine Deneuves, Jeanne Moreaus, and Liv Ullmanns. Like some of those actresses, Cruz isn`t cookie-cutter pretty she even has a bit of a schnoz but her unusual features come together in a memorable aria of real beauty. As Woody Allen says, `I don`t like to look at Penelope directly. It is too overwhelming.`

NEW YORK Paint the town in pinstripes!

Nearly a decade after their dynasty ended on a blooper in the desert, the New York Yankees are baseball`s best again.

The New York Yankees won the World Series for a record 27th time after an inspired performance from Japanese designated hitter Hideki Matsui.
Matsui matched the World Series game record of six RBIs thanks to a two-run homer in the bottom of the second, which was followed by a single and a double which each allowed two colleagues to score.

Susan Sontag said in her book `On photography` photography is not as artful as e.g. literature, because you don`t put your own pain in it but the pain of others. You can agree or agree to disagree, whatsoever.

The question she raises about the `exploitative nature` of photography is something that concerns me to a much higher degree than that `art or not` issue. Maybe because I`m mostly interested in learning more about the people and myself while shooting.
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Pumpkins are believed to have originated in North America. Seeds from related plants have been found in Mexico dating back to 7000 to 5500 B.C. References to pumpkins date back many centuries.

The name pumpkin originated from the Greek word for `large melon` which is `pepon.` `Pepon` was changed by the French into `pompon.` The English changed `pompon` to `Pumpion.` American colonists changed `pumpion` into `pumpkin.`

The common pumpkin is a very popular traditional Halloween and Thanksgiving staple. It was originally first associated with the harvest season.

After a six-year absence, Derek Jeter and the Yankees are back in the World Series, vanquishing the Los Angeles Angels on Sunday, 5-2, to win the American League Championship Series, four games to two.

The Yankees have been away from the World Series for the last five years, and in their absence, baseball`s showcase has flopped on a national scale.

Recent World Series have failed to capture the attention of fans across the United States. Will this year`s be better?

`...and the sun`s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?`

- Henry David Thoreau

Autumn, unique, bold and distinctive amongst seasons. It is, for me, a wonderful time of year, and though it is a time when the world dies back and things become sparse and bare at the same time it encompasses that last glorious flush of life, moving like tiny little hands giving thanks to God. The spreading leaves of an umbrella tree with lobes and veins so proud and filled with the warm blood of summer, gracefully falling with color so red and beautiful like roses. After a long hot season when they often fall just before the rains, they all entangle and away the wind takes them blow by blow on a cloudless day.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
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The art of losing isn`t hard to master
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn`t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother`s watch. And look! my last, or

When the worst thing you could do at school was smoke in the bathrooms, fail a test or chew gum. And the banquets were in the tuck-shop, and we danced to a gramophone later, and all the girls wore fluffy pastel gowns and the boys wore `longs` for the first time, and we were allowed to stay out and watch a 9.30 pm show at the Liberty and the Majestic and the Savoy, meet your friends at green cabin....! and the biggest thrill was holding hands...!

The greatest weekend to go to the Galle Face green, eat Isso Wade , hangout at Galle Face Hotel`s `Coconut Grove` with the JETLINERS, or to Ceylinco with the SPITFIRES or to the Little Hut with the AMAZING GRACE or to the Akasa Kade with Sam the Man!

Wind It Up lyrics

High on a hill was a lonely goatherd, lay-od-lay-od-lay-he-hoo
Yodell back with the girl and goatherd, lay-od-lay-od-low

Wind it up
Wind it up, uh, uh, uh, uh
Yodellay, yodallay, yodal-low

(Yeah)
This is the key that makes us wind up
When the beat comes on, the girls all line up
And the boys all look, but no, they can`t touch
But the girls want to know why the boys like us so much

They like way we dance, they like the way we work

In case you were asleep this morning when it happened, we bombed the moon. Twice!

Our unprovoked attack upon our unsuspecting orbital neighbor was ostensibly for purposes of locating water particles in the dust cloud kicked up by the impact, but really, we`re pretty sure it`s the end result of some kind of `What`s the most awesome thing we can get the taxpayers to pay for?` brainstorming session.

Unfortunately, the bombing was a bit of a letdown, with the impact not even visible on the zoomed-in, heat-register cameras of NASA TV. We won`t even link to the boring- seven-minute video they`ve posted. Instead, we`ll link to some songs perfect for raining hell into the Sea of Tranquility. Because you know we`re going to have to try again, right?

While the Twitterverse was buzzing today with President Obama`s Nobel Peace Prize and NASA`s big plans for the Moon, Today marks what would have been John Lennon`s 69th birthday.

So, in honor of John Lennon, play a little extra Beatles Rock Band tonight or your favorite John Lenon song. Thanks for the music, smiles, and gold moments of your life.

Enjoy
Peace, love and happiness to all :))

This morning I finished reading Alain de Botton`s thoroughly enjoyable book, The Architecture of Happiness. I`ve realised that I`ve become a big fan of De Botton`s clear, thoughtful writing after loving The Art of Travel and now finding this book as good, if not better. He has a nice way of simplifying complex ideas and making clear the relationship between philosophy and ordinary, every day life.

Our consciousness is inextricable from our environment. Colors, angles, textures, and lights all conspire to sway our moods and shape our experiences molding our conscious and unconscious minds according to the prevailing social norms and cultural trends of the time. We can feel this every time we walk into a room, a very subtle but noticeable reaction to our surroundings perhaps a sense of calm and spaciousness, or of creativity and energetic vibrancy, or of anxiety and claustrophobia. You can feel this right now as you read this, your immediate habitat inescapably affecting the sound, feel, and meaning of every word. There is no simple mathematical equation to make sense of the connection between consciousness and environment, as the same surroundings can elicit entirely different reactions from psyche to psyche, culture to culture. Adding to the complexity, we often surprise ourselves by naturally surrounding ourselves with environs that dramatically contrast our interior states:

Ecuador is probably the country with the highest number of species of orchids in the World in a given area. With 214 genus and around 3259 species (According to Dodson & Escobar, in `Native Ecuadorean Orchids`, vol 1), it is so rich that we can find orchids almost everywhere we go in the country.
In popular literature, orchids have always been seen as symbols of love, seeming to represent the qualities of love and seduction, and have also attracted the interest of scent makers over many centuries. There can hardly be another plant that is a changeable and adaptable as the orchid which belongs to one of the youngest families of plants in the botanical classification system

I write to you at one of the three peak seasons for girl-watching in North America. Sweater-sheathed Ms. October will knock `em out in the fall, and the darling buds of May will spring fresh in their sundresses all too shortly, but meanwhile this is sultry deep August impossibly flimsy fabrics, exquisite lengths of limb. Addled by murderous heat, provoked by brutal hot-to-trotness, I here risk gathering some modest notes on visual experience and modern manners.

Shall we define our terms? When I say girls, I am employing a common archaism meaning women, also known as chicks. For the purposes of this discussion, any woman who is older than a child and younger than a matron is a girl. By watching, I mean checking out. Despite all the many philosophical inquiries into beauty since the Greeks and into sidewalk scenes since Baudelaire, there is an acute shortage of discourse on the subject of checking out hot chicks, a silence all the more appalling because they are famously difficult to ignore.