Books I've actually finished lately: 116

We have to start sometime to turn the end of war into peace.

- Ajith Boyagoda

Against my ruins

Two extracts from the Lonely Planet's Sri Lanka: a travel survival kit (3rd ed. 1987; security updates c.1990):

If you like ruins you'll find your fill in the ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

- 'Introduction' [first full page of text]

There are no places of interest unless you are interested in photographing ruins.

- STOP PRESS [last full page of text]

The (Sports)Writer's Life

Dolled-up women prefer to have their bottoms pinched by international cricketers and not by those who write about them.

- Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman

The worst poem I have ever seen

Book sale!!!*

--
* in Sri Lanka

Keystroke twins - 31/32 (for my Sri Lankan brethren)

contests
converts

election
ejection

Come in, Van Wilder - your time is up.

[courtesy Yamille Wickramanayake/Menaka Ashi Fernando/'Sri Lankan Spelling' Facebook group]

Good lads,* themselves!

Jack Durand (UK) wins World Youth Scrabble Championships.

Some mortifying stats:

--
* (?) Not many girls appear to have been harmed in the making of these Scrabble Championships...

'Familiarizing English with kids'

Seriously.

On the lecture circuit

American literature is fine, but I feel it to be an irrelevance in a disaster area.

- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Books I've actually finished lately: 9

Etymological smack-down!

On the naming of Batticaloa:

It has much rice, principally in a district that lies on the side of the island that faces the east, called Calou, that is "kingdom," by reason of which rice, which they call bate, the kingdom is called Batecalou, which they interpret as the "kingdom of rice" [4].

- Joao De Barros, The history of Ceylon: From the earliest times to 1600 AD

That said:

[4] This is one of the most amusing of Barros's etymological atrocities. Of course, Sinh. bat is boiled rice; and neither in Sinh. nor in Tam. is there a word like calou meaning "kingdom."

- Donald Ferguson, Barros's translator and editor

Errata - or; How it is Done

Page 1. Line 16. after Parts, strike out the comma...

- Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies: Together With an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen now living there, and of the Author's Miraculous Escape

[Note to editors: This page of minor corrections is at the front of the first edition.]

Got watalappam/n?

Nifty Sri Lankan advert/plea for national unity. Nice T-shirt, too, by the looks of it.

Public Service Announcement

There's an advert out and about at the moment encouraging you to switch your e-mail wossnames over to Microsoft, because Outlook - unlike those corporate monsters at Google/Gmail - won't go through your correspondence and milk every second word for targeted marketing data.

I'm on Outlook [herefore known by the entire world as 'Hotmail', but whatever], and a little over half an hour ago I sent a mail to a friend in South Africa discussing my holiday plans for Christmas in Sri Lanka and his mother's well-being in Cape Town. I now have an e-mail - in my Junk folder, admittedly/amusingly - from an unknown South African travel agent, urgently inviting me to experience the wondrousness of Cape Town this December.

From which we learn:

1) that Outlook almost certainly are reading your e-mails; but
2) they're just not very good at it - otherwise they'd have noticed:

• that I've already booked my Christmas holiday,
• that I will clearly not be spending the festive season in South Africa, and
• that the bulk of our correspondence was taken up with the fact that Denis's mum's place in Cape Town has recently been violently burgled.

Metafor Lanka: #813

Sri Lanka is a private bus where the driver has not come yet, and the conductor drives at high speed.

- Priyankarage Bandula Jayaweera

[With thanks to IS.]

Turning over a new ola leaf

Herewith, a page from the Sri Lankan ordinances concerning vagrants, persons deemed 'incorrigible rogues' and those of 'youthful bad character'.

Let it be noted that these ordinances pertain to the present.

Let it also be noted that my two years in Colombo set me back, in total, slightly under a fiver.

[With thanks to MT.]

A big BOOMSHAKALAKA!!

to Chinaman author Shehan Karunatilaka, for adding the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature to his Gratiaen gong.

Nice one, hairy man.

InDefinition - 27

queens' Singlish, n. lingua franca of Colombo chat-shows

Personalised message to the board and players of the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.

- William Faulkner

What to do, eh?