Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Seriously, can someone please explain this to me? This guy went and painted a bunch of tree’s blue and that is supposed to raise awareness about the importance of tree’s. I would be more concerned about the harm this paint might cause the trees. (Paint blocks the pores so could effect the ability of the tree’s to convert co2). I would understand if he went out and planted a lot of trees or did something that educated people about them. I really doubt that I will ever understand these so called ‘artists’, A lot of the ‘modern’ art looks to me like a mad monkey was dropped in paint and crawled across the canvas in its death throes. Or maybe its because someone supposed to be a big art critic said that the above is art and everyone else is just jumping on the bandwagon so that they don’t seem as if they don’t know art (kind of sounds like the emperor’s new clothes if you ask me).

Drawing a box bisected by a line with different colors on both sides or putting a rock on a fence does not make it art or you an artist. Making something that takes actual effort and skill (like this or this) is art.

Now a lot of folks say that it requires a lot of thought to create a painting and I agree with it, I just don’t classify my examples above as paintings. A while ago I visited a art exhibition with a friend and one of the paintings over there was a canvas painted yellow with a black line cutting across it diagonally about a third of the way from the corner. Another painting was a blank canvas with a red (or was it blue) dot in the middle of it (that’s it). Now please tell me what makes it so impressive that someone painted a dot on the canvas?

Source of the image prompted this rant (Although I have been meaning to post about this): Urber Humor: Daily Morning Awesomeness 32.

Any thoughts/Comments?

– Suramya

I am all for trying out the local cuisine when visiting various places as long as its vegetarian or has eggs but there is no way I am every going to try this Delicacy from Dongyang, China: Urine-Boiled Eggs. At first I thought that this was a joke but its on the food section of Gizmodo and a search on Google gave articles going back a few years so it looks like this is real. These are regular eggs that have been boiled in urine collected from boys under 10 years old. Yes, you read it correctly. The eggs are boiled in actual urine and then eaten.

The recipe for Virgin Boy Eggs is quite simple really. One first collects a bucket of piddle from the local primary school. Only the water of boys under the age of ten is suitable. Virgin Boy Eggs are first soaked in in a pot of urine, then brought to a boil. Once firm, the eggs’ shells are cracked to allow fuller penetration, and bathed regularly through out the day with fresh piss to prevent them from overheating.

This is all for now. I am going to go throw up now.

Source: China’s Urine-Boiled Eggs Are a Cultural Delicacy I Will Not Try

– Suramya

Saw this in my news feed today and found this interesting enough to share. Facebook (FB) has become the defacto medium by which most young folks share information with their friends and keep in touch. I can’t even count the no of times I went out with friends met someone new there and once I got back home had a Friend request from the person I had just met. Now this study claims that the new generation is becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships. While its not true for all folks on FB, it is true for a large majority. How many of the 500+ ‘friends’ you have on FB have you had a conversation with in the past one year? Even I have people on my friend list that I haven’t talked to in over a year (although that could be because I don’t log on to FB that often 🙂 ).

From the article:

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site’s public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.

For me friends are people I interact with on a regular (semi-regular) basis as a friend in real life, hence I hesitate in adding folks I barely know as friends on FB. That just dilutes the meaning of ‘Friend’ for me, but I think that this is not the case with most people. BTW, I am not saying that we need to be best friends before I add you to FB, just that I need to become friends in real life before becoming friends on FB. (Another reason for not adding you could be that I just haven’t logged in on FB in a while)

Was reading another article a couple of days ago where they talked about how people tend to exaggerate their life on FB to appear to be more popular. This phenomenon is not unique to FB, when MySpace was popular you could actually pay ‘pretty’ people to add you as their friends and post messages on your wall (don’t remember what MySpace called it). You can even buy FB friends for fairly cheap.

Moral of the story, don’t just post about having a good time; go out and have fun in real life with real folks. This photo is very accurate and something I see on a fairly regular basis and I am sure you all do as well:

What do you think?

Source: Facebook’s ‘dark side’: study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism.

Thanks to LifeHacker for the initial story.

– Suramya