Last Week Was a Good One

Last week was a good one. The goodness really started on Saturday when I saw this really inspirational movie called "Peaceful Warrior". It's about a talented gymnast who is taught how to live life by this wise old person, whom the gymnast calls Socrates. The movie is based on a book called "Way of the Peaceful Warrior" by Dan Millman, who was that gymnast in real life. Nick Nolte has given a great performance in the movie. I could recollect parts of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence while watching the movie. While, of course the Zen is a different book written by a different author, both of them try to say similar things about how life should be lived. The movie is in my all time favorites list now.

Then Tuesday, I received something quite unexpected - a lithograph of the Systematic Chaos album art signed by Dream Theater, a free gift as part of buying the CD from Fye.com. There were supposed to be only 500 or so copies available. Considering the large fan following for Dream Theater, I really wasn't expecting to receive that. So that was indeed a pleasant surprise. This along with the autographs I got from Michael Romeo, Russell Allen and Jason Rullo of Symphony X on the ticket for the Heaven and Hell concert and autographed CDs of Wind Dance with Fire and Mritunjaya by Agni's Koko and Ross are now among my prized possessions!

The next day I received two CDs from Lala.com, a CD swapping service I'm trying out. Lala.com members select the CDs they want and then the ones they have. The service matches these haves and wants of various members and routes these requests to the right members. You get rewarded by fulfilling the "required" CD requests of other members which you can see in your profile page once you sign in. By rewarded, I mean that more of your "want" CDs are channeled to other members, thus increasing your chance of receiving those soon. This service isn't a one-to-one kind of swapping service. In fact the shipper's identity is kept anonymous. Lala.com just matches the want-list and the have-list of various members using a good algorithm that ensures that things balance out in the end. Lala.com also rewards you for trying out the service by sending you your first "want" request for free. Of course, this doesn't mean that Lala.com actually sends you brand new CD; it just routes your want requests to other members who have them and one of them would probably ship it to you. My first want was "Dark Side of the Moon". Someone just sent me that - the 20th Anniversary Edition! Can you imagine!? Now I need to ship out some CDs to other members in order to continue receiving these CDs. While the service is not free, Lala.com still charges you only a dollar (plus shipping and handling, of course) for each CD. Also you have to agree not to remove all digital copies of the CDs that you ship out. I think it's a great little service built around a great concept. Hope it does well. Of course, I don't think I'm planning to ship out "Dark Side of the Moon" anytime soon, possibly ever! I also purchased a CD from Lala.com - A Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash, featuring the hit single Hurt! I haven't heard much (none is in fact more like it) of Cash's early tracks. The first one I heard was Hurt, which I saw a video of. It's an amazing song, and Johnny Cash has rendered it extremely well. The album also features Cash's cover of three other great songs - Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Waters - easily my best S&G track, Beatles' In my life and Sting's I hung my Head, from the Mercury Falling album, which is also one of my favorite Sting albums. And to cap things off, I ended Wednesday in a grand style my watching The Last Samurai for the Nth time. I don't think I'll ever get bored of watching that movie.

So that was pretty much it, so to speak! Don't think it can get much better than that. Now I think I have a good weekend to look forward to. Hopefully i can make it productive enough...

Been reading a little more lately

Been reading a little more lately. And thats good. I would like to read much more though. I'm currently reading 'Sometimes a Great Notion' by Ken Kesey. I like to find connections (sometimes even where they might never exist ;-) But this book has some real connections to the book I was reading just before this - On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Ken Kesey was the leader of this adventurous group called the Merry Pranksters in the 1960s. The exploits of this group has been chronicled in an excellent book called the Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. But back to the connections, one of the key members of the Merry Prankster's group was Neal Cassady who was also the driver of the bus Further on the Pransters' trip across the continent just after Sometimes... was published. Neal Cassady is none other than Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Infact the Electric Koolaid Acid Test mentions what appears to be one of the last times Neal Cassady met with Jack Kerouac when the former's group finally reached New York.

I enjoy reading books about travel, be they fiction or not. V.S.Naipaul is another of my favorites for this reason. While Sometimes... is not much about travel, its a nice book none the less. I must admit I found the title very interesting and one of the reasons I wanted to read it ever since a friend told me about it. I had read Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest before and his style is not (at least for me) the easiest to read at a stretch. I think I read two or three books in between me starting One flew... and finally finishing it, one of them actually being a Naipaul book. And the same has been the case with Sometimes... as well. But in the last two days, I've found the book picking up pace and Kesey has been building up the enigmatic Jonathon Draeger character very well, building this whole mystical quality around him, as if he holds a key piece of a complex puzzle.