Reading about your own city and country in a lonely planet book is a strange experience. The shift in the point of view to that of a tourist’s is a bit disorientating. Yet makes for a fun read. Whenever I come across a copy Lonely Planet Sri Lanka I can’t resist flipping through it.

Recently I came across the Lonely Planet Sri Lanka 10th edition. Only had time to flip through it in a hurry. One of the interesting parts is a description of crossing over into LTTE terrorist controlled areas via the Omanthai entry/exit point. Another is a familiar thing about Sri Lankans being gentle and friendly. Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain wrote something similar when he dropped by a century ago.

The fact is that Lonely Planet books are never meant to be a native eye view of the place. They are simply practical pointers to basic conveniences. Aimed at helping the  primarily for the first world traveller to encounter another country - without being shielded from it by the tinted widows of a monstrous air conditioned tour bus.

During my days as a global nomad, I depended on the Lonely Planet books  to get me oriented in each city I moved to. It served me particularly  well in places where Sri Lankans, let alone brown faces and English are a novelty.

For the native, Lonely Planet books offer a strangely detached, slightly prickly, and definitely interesting outsider’s view of your home. Particularly when places of significance to local sub cultures are refered to in blandly utilitarian terms. Haven’t had a chance to fully read through the latest edition yet. Or I’d be able to pull out a few juicey samples. Like I have the time for such indulgences. Instead I’ll leave that up to you.

Share some of the interesting/funny things the Lonely Planet says about YOUR home town + country.

After much delay here’s my contribution to the computer desktop festival I won’t bore you with the excuses.

I use Geektool heavily to turn my desktop into a dashboard. Its far better than Apple’s infernal widget ridden annoyance..

At the bottom is the met dept’s sat image which gets automatically grabbed every 12hrs. Its the surest way I know if its rain

The calendar on the top right is output from the cal UNIX app assisted with a sprinkling of shell scripting. Web browser is Camino which I use almost exclusively to access wordpress. I use 3 other browsers but that’s another story.

The floating Earth and Moon are two “eye candy” applications called Earth-dock and Moon Dock. Had them for years.

I use my mac via the command-line hence the heavily customised terminal app that is launched at log in.

I’ll post links to these apps when I get the time. But enough about my Geeky computing habits.

Here’s a list of peeps who haven’t yet joined in who ought to have some interesting desktops:

• Web Alochana - hoping to see a interestingly Sinhala/biligual desktop
• His Rythmicness - a fruit user no doubt. Will there be a drumkit in the picture?
• Sittingnut - unlikely he has a desktop pic of Anne Rand but I shouldn’t speculate.
• Indi - how about a staring role for the Kottu admin screen?
• Dilantha -Which disto of Linux would it be?
• Lost Landscape - definitely like to see that portable firefox in use on some internet cafe box

Geek With an Attitude has put out an early shot

What does your computer desktop say about you - as a computer user and a blogger? The answer is interestingly arguable. The safest answer is that it depends on the blogger/human. Contribute to the discussion by posting a screen shot of your computer’s desktop - with some part of your blogs’s admin panel in the picture - on your blog.

Feel free to hide any personal info or mess. If you got any productivity applications or cool desktop toys this is a good time to show it off.

Send me a link to your post with the snapshot in the comment box below. If you send in the link before 9th July ends I’ll immortalise you by listing you on a static page on my blog.

For those unfamiliar with the rituals of making a screen-shot here are some helpful links. All the hard work done by about.com

• How To Capture a Screen Shot with Mac OS X
• How To Capture a Screen Shot with the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista
• Capture and Save a Screenshot in Windows XP

Lots of Screen Capture Tools & Tips at about.com

Linux/Unix people should now how to do this without relying on me

Water rites of Udappu seems off the newscape though more than an year ago it caught the Sri Lanka blogosphere’s attention in poetic fashion. My Google Earth post about Udappu/Udappuwa has all the relevant links. This year even udappu.org site is quiet. However the ceremonies occur in late July to early August. Specially with the Olympics pushed back to August. Anyone going to one or the other? I am not in any position to go anywhere (Details classified).

Coffee drinking in Sri Lanka feels like an odd preference. Eccentric if not foreign. Particularly outside the Colombo cocoon. I once ordered a coffee at a road side snack bar in rural Sri Lanka - just out side Naramala - since it was the menu. It threw the poor kid behind the counter into a tizzy. I eventually got my brew with a pot of milk and sugar. He couldn’t believe that I didn’t want sugar. The coffee was brewed like tea with a sediment of grounds at the bottom of the cup. Drinkable - mainly because I’m not snooty connoisseur.

Tea by contrast has long since been rehabilitated from a colonial imposition to a “national beverage”. Its now part of Sri Lanka’s “brand” and daily life. Similar to the ipod’s association with Apple. Coffee drinking Sri Lankans (the odd crowd that brews their own)- are an invisible group in popular culture. Like French people who avoid wine - they are hard to visualise. When encountered they are Interrogated like vegetarians by a certain type of tea drinker.

Doesn’t it taste awful ? they ask while flavouring a cup of condensed milk and sugar with a few drops of tea. I empathise that it can be hard to accept deviants who prefer drinking boiling water poured through powdered coffee plant beans. As opposed to having it poured through shredded dried tea leaves. To spare myself from explanations I say “no”. Then add a tiny splash of milk into my sugarless coffee and change the subject. Some obscure detail about the charge of the light brigade does the trick. I blame the Hemileia vastatrix (Coffee Rust) blight of the1860s for such majoritarian ignorance.

My earliest memory of coffee is associated with foul home remedies Along with on of my grandmother’s recollections of the men in HER grand father’s generation using coffee (Ko-pi) as a opium (Ah-bing) delivery mechanism. Vivid description of old men with trembling hands begging for their coffee.

Thankfully coffee wasn’t all dark and bitter associations. I eventually encountered the wonderful sweetness of Sri Lankan Ice Coffee (not ICED coffee). Mostly dispensed as treat at birth day parties and weddings. Later realised that Sri Lankan Ice Coffee is a respectable way for very proper aunties to consume scandalous amounts of brandy and cognac.

My first recallable encounter with brewed coffee was at an aunt’s afternoon tuition class. Someone had supplied home grown beans that resulted in a powerful brew. It cut through the inevitable sugar and milk to pull me through those dull sleepy afternoons.

I’m convinced that tea drinking in Sri Lanka is an excuse for a condensed milk and sugar infused high. Particularly in offices after an anaesthetising rice and curry lunch. Admittedly this onion is not based on rigourous research but on two anecdotes. The one is the memory of my first office tea aka sugar rush. Its a tan coloured brew served hot. Gives sleepiness a mule kicked in the teeth. For about 10 mins.The other is my father’s claim that his first taste of REAL tea occurred during the socialist shortages of the 1970s. When the office was forced to serve its tea plain.

Despite the having to mix in all sorts of sweeteners, Tea is less complicated to brew which I think counts for its popularity. Brewed coffee is a more cumbersome. It requires expensive complicated gadgetry (percolators, filters, etc.) and effort to prepare.

Specially compared to the ease of putting a few teaspoons of instant crap into a cup of hot water.
Another consequent hit against brewed Coffee is that its not as widely available as tea.

Thankfully we live in an enlightened age where Coffee drinking is endured along with the traffic and LTTE suicide bomber. Hip cafes like Baristas brew quite a good cup at a price (even though I have only gone there a handful of times). Even in “outstation” places like Galle fort . Us in the lesser classes are served with instant concoctions and decent beans.

For the minority that brews its own at home, there are good brands like Hansa coffee. Hansa coffee is sadly not paying me to write this but I will say it anyway: Hansa coffee is the best I have tasted in Sri Lanka. Its up to par with some brands in coffee drinking lands. I’m not the only one praising hansa Coffee. Dominic has to - with a delicious shot of the Hansa Coffee beans. Of course there is plenty of crap too - which doesn’t help the cause of Coffee on this island.

Tea loving spousal unit is sporadic coffee drinker. Usually drinks it at cafes when meeting up with her girls for a catchup gos. I’m not much of a cafe person prefering to the cost effective option of brewing my own. Even though we first met at a cafe. Neither of us ordered coffee that day. But that is history - classified of course.

Comments are the by product of blogging. Yet Kalusudda’s comment blog has done something interesting if not new by flipping the traditional blog model. The innovativeness of the idea is its simplicity. No fancy technology or hacks.

The blog about the comments Kalusudda has left through out the Sri Lankan blogoshere. Might sounds like a potentially dry catalogue of an active blog reader. Some could claim that its another form of comment spam. It is none of the above - primarily because of the content. The interesting prospect is that Kalusudda’s comment blog can become an overview of the discussions going on in parts of the Sri Lanka blogoshere. A sort of personalised “meta” commentary on the kinds of discussions going in the blogopshere. Something that might not turn up on blog aggregators or RSS feeds. The closest analogy I can think of is acharu.org for comments.

I think the strength of this blog will rest on Kalusudda’s ability spot where the iinteresting conversations are and direct readers to them. A role that could make Kalusudda the blogospere’s comment correspondant. Or perhaps its gossip colounnist. Maybe even the comment King. Only time will tell. Kalusudda is definitly a new blog worth tracking..

Disclosure: Kalusudda has commented about my blog & linked to it a few times.

Two sort of faded out an year to 6 months ago. One recently after the end of May. There have been no formal farewells as in the case of Half-Doctor and childoftwentyfive. I am referring to Maf who didn’t care to followup his satirical masterpiece. Then there’s R of Towards a Utopia who stopped after killing the Buddha. More recently Vindi the Vindicated packed her trunk at Hogwarts for Sri Lanka and hasn’t blogged since.

All things are transient -including absences from blogging. Indyana has made many entrances and exsists from the blogopshere only to return for another encore.

As for the Maf, R, and Vindi -  I hope you guys are O.K  and have found more interesting things to do than blog. I maybe they’ll drop to say so Perhaps even fire up a post or two.

Sri Lanka’s doesn’t have any crop circles. Extra terrestrial circles discussed in this post are more ancient. The “circles” are a strange circular carving on a boulder near the ancient Issurumumiya temple in Anuradapura.

There are many interpretations as to what they signify. Consequently even the name used to describe the carving varies. “Chakra” (circle) is the only constant component. I heard locals refer to this carving as “Pita” Sakvala Chakra which translates more closely as “extra terrestrial circles”. “Sakvala Chaka” - the name used on the web to describe the carving - emphasises the astronomical meaning. Which puts forward the theory that the carving had some astronomical function. Possibly in the service of astrology. Other of course suggest that it is the work of beings from another galaxy .

H. G Bell, one of the big names in Sri Lankan archaeology documented the carving which lakdiva.org has put online -along with some pictures. In recent times the circles have attracted attention from other sources as well.

I encountered the craving on a “group” trip to Anuradapura a few years back. The carving is unsettlingly precise for the rough surface of the stone. The shapes look very different from the usual motifs of Sri Lankan art. It gives the carving a feel of looking simultaneously primordial and timeless. The iconography could have been cut last year or 10 000 years ago.

The carving’s located is not a well visited or documented with signs. You just have to keep asking around. Outside an occasional tourist brought there by a guide hoping for a little extra in the tip. Or us Colombo types who have fled the city for an extended weekend in a friend’s van. We take the usual pictures posing in front of it. Cool our heals after wondering the regular cultural triangle sites. Our success and long day evaporates the excitement of finding the carving. The predictable speculation about the carving also putters out. It seems to say little other than - “yeah I’m here. I’ve always been here. Fuck you”.

Upstairs the sun is on the verge of clocking out for the day in all its golden splendour. Relenting to the collective call of our stomachs, whe amble towards the van, a shower, dinner, and sleep.