confused of calcutta

I’ve been on a couple of transatlantic flights since Thursday, and to the West Coast at that; so I had a lot of time to think. And one of the things I spent some time thinking about was Twitter.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve picked up my fair share of idiosyncrasies. The most recent one is [...]

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In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea,
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines,
So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our yellow submarine,
We all live in a yellow submarine,
yellow submarine, yellow submarine,
We all live in [...]

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I like Twitter, particularly because of its publish-subscribe nature. A few weeks ago, I described Twitter as:
a newspaper. a bulletin board. a club. an “adda”. a telephone network.
Twitter is all these things. It brings me the news. It is a place where people publish notices. It’s a place where I meet my friends, and where [...]

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Take a look at this study in the latest First Monday, on Twitter Under the Microscope. What it does is associate each Twitter user with three types of people: “followers” (people who “follow” the person), “followees” (people followed by the person, the declared friends) and “friends” (people who have received at least two @ messages [...]

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I was born in Calcutta, the city that served as British India’s capital for the majority of the Raj years, born a bare ten years after India gained independence from the Empire. British India was still very much a part of people’s lives when I was growing up, with tales, often apocryphal, of unusual events [...]

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Here’s something you don’t see every day:

Some wonderfully evocative phrases:

allen bowling feeling bitter
woodfull declining warners sympathy
one side unplaying cricket ruining game
time decent men get out game

So where is all this from?  Here’s the story:
Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam [...]

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Aristology: The science of cooking and dining. Abjured, even denigrated, by Nero Wolfe, on the basis that both cooking and dining are arts, not sciences. Now more commonly defined as both an art and a science, covering the preparation, cooking, presentation and eating of food.
Zeuglodont: A type of carnivorous whale. Now extinct. Also referred to [...]

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Today I “met” someone via Twitter. Dallas W.Taylor. The Dallas Taylor, as in “Crosby Stills Nash and Young Dallas Taylor and Greg Reeves“. The Dallas Taylor who played drums on that album shown above (Deja Vu),  on the first album Crosby Stills and Nash, on the first Stephen Stills album, and on the two Manassas [...]

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Twitter stayed up throughout the Mumbai terrorist crisis; at least that’s the way it seemed to me, everything just worked. Never spotted the Whale.
And then today, a few minutes ago, there it was, in all its splendiferous glory, reproduced here for newcomers:

Sightings are getting rarer and more fleeting. So, according to traditional scarcity economics, we [...]

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I’ve been learning a lot from the whole Twitter phenomenon. How, despite its frailties and weaknesses, it continues to attract followers. How, despite it being “down so ***damn long, that it looks like up to me” people continue to build Twitter ecosystem tools. And how it spawns an entire industry around the Fail Whale: the [...]

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