.. a poem by Shelley comes to mind.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

With prescient élan, the mention of the 'trunkless legs of stone' evokes the image of a forlorn tower of stone, much like the increasingly disrupted and abandoned, formerly high profile construction projects in Dubai. A shattered visage of the Bedouin of old, with a sneer on his wrinkled lips and the lone sands that stretch far away - complete the image of recklessness and decay, that now emanates from a city that strived to be a jewel in the crown of the middle east.

Will it ever recover?

Usually, if you were to use something like,

class testform(forms.Form):
  n = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Models.objects.filter(id=32773), empty_label="All")

you'll end up with a drop down box populated with "M objects" rather than a field from the model.

Instead, this works better,

class vModelChoiceField(forms.ModelChoiceField):
  def label_from_instance(self, obj):
    return "%s" % obj.name

class testform(forms.Form):
  n = vModelChoiceField(queryset=Models.objects.filter(id=32773), empty_label="All")

t = testform()
print t

Woo, finally.

Cluud.in is a new service to help you discover new places and follow conversations about your favorite places in your city. This means you can plan out where to go in real time - getting input from everyone who has talked about it! Neat.

From an address on "America's place in the world" that Stephen Fry - one of my favorite comedians of all time - gave at the Royal Geographical Society (which you should totally read in full, btw - its hilarious superbly penned).

When referring to the well known idiom of making lemonade if life gives you lemons, he makes a pretty interesting point.

So let me look again at that holy text: ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ Huh? But… but… Lemons are amongst the best and most wonderful gifts of nature. They are adaptable, versatile and delicious. A slice for your gin and tonic – juice to zing life into salads, stews, fish and seafood. Oil and sweetness from the rind and zest that is pure and perfumed and precious. They are a staple of what doctors agree is the best dietary regimen we can follow. So if life gives you lemons, shout ‘Thank you, Life, thank you!’ But the American response is ‘make lemonade’ in other words – just add sugar and sell it.

Add sugar and sell it. This can be translated across into culture, can it not?

How very true.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cfd7324-762b-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html

Interesting analysis on how Asia has faith in western economic *theories*, but none in their *management practices*.

Moreover, we're improving trade with all kinds of FTAs being signed between ASEAN and other asian countries - whereas the US Congress has actually let a number of intra-americas FTAs die.

I just hope that the emulation of the west that is fast becoming the norm in Asia stays limited to the better aspects of society rather than the deplorable ones.

Just to put it out there, but David Cramer - who developed the spectacular django-sphinx project - omits a crucial piece of information needed to install Sphinx into your Django models. So if you find that everything works perfectly well, but your search results are 0 in number - this is what you should do!

You have to add 'djangosphinx' into INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py, in the main django directory.

Link,

A quote from Gao Xiqing, the man who runs the China investment corporation (and manages $200 Billion in funds for their sovereign fund). Here's something I came across in the Atlantic monthly - his explanation of the financial derivatives debacle..

If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.

So, what exactly are we talking about?

The other day, someone pointed me to an article about how a small section of the Indian population has stashed away close to $1.5 trillion(!) in secret swiss bank accounts. Curious that I am, I promptly went ahead and searched for this amazing piece of information on the web, and found -

Dishonest industrialists, scandalous politicians and corrupt IAS, IRS, IPS officers have deposited in foreign banks in their illegal personal accounts a sum of about $ 1500 billion, which have been misappropriated by them. This amount is about 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt. With this amount 45 crore poor people can get Rs 1,00,000 each. This huge amount has been appropriated from the people of India by exploiting and betraying them.

Sources for this available here [Link to a Google search]

Click "Read More" or scroll down for more!

Mr. Tharoor's article is here

And I quote,

.. But this time the terrorists may have gone too far. The murderers of Mumbai made special efforts to single out American and British nationals among their hostages, and they killed the Israelis running Mumbai's Jewish center. This was clearly not just an attack on India; they were taking on the "Jews and crusaders" of al-Qaeda lore. If it turns out that the massacre in Mumbai was planned in or directed from Pakistani territory, the consequences for Pakistan are bound to be severe..

He considers the terrorists having "gone too far" *only* when they targeted foreign nationals? Really? Is this sentiment echoed by everyone now? Agreeably, the states who were targeted are powerful militarily and dominate geo-political debates with firm voices - but can India afford to have its own commentators not bring the government to task at its inefficacy?

My attempts at creating a list of movies I want to see. Comments welcome on additional ideas! You know that feeling when someone tells you of an *awesome* movie thats highly recommended that you forget about the next day - and then rack your brain to remember what it was?

This post is intended to help alleviate that!

Updates: (I realized I've seen a bunch of these already, but keeping them here for completeness's sake!)

Maria - full of grace
City of Angels
Cinema Paradiso
Before Sunset (*)
Before Sunrise (*)
Shine
Ondskan
Stardust Memories
Romance and Cigarettes