Microwaved rays

Ok this is, as embarrassing as it may be to admit, the third time I'm sitting down to write a post in 2 days. It's not just your average writer's block, apparently, which usually resolves in the second attempt to write a post, unless one is James Joyce. Or some pathologically deranged creature with suicidal intent every time a blog goes unwritten.
The problem is that this is to some extent therapeutic. If we could get the average agoraphobic sociopath to blog and of course throw in some fake comments to con them into believing someone was listening we'd manage to get old Sigmund into the Internet age. Of course these need to be access controlled since we don't want other agoraphobic, sociopathic, Internet junkies getting ideas to destroy civilian life and property from them.

So here goes attempt three.

The stingray menace is being actively tackled down under, apparently by dragging them onto land. What is wrong with people? Steve Irwin died. We're sorry about that but lopping tails off stingrays doesn't solve anything. I'm not even sure they taste good. But this might just explain things.

In other things that managed to mess my life up, albeit not significantly enough is the microwave. This device powered by electricity but more importantly radiation at 2450 MHz (that's a wavelength of 12 cm approx, which I thought was pretty large) was the brainchild of one Percy Spencer whose candy bar melted in front of a Radar. Stopping short of running down the streets naked and proving the Archimedes principle yet again, he patented it and for many generations ensured that his descendants could live off the interest from the royalties.
That's not the story. Of late the microwave oven has become an indispensable kitchen accessory. Of course it can't grill or roast but who wants the carcinogens anyway. We like boiled food nowadays - it's apparently healthier. And even more salubrious if we do away with salt and pepper. Garlic is still fine. But if you want to breakfast on it just make sure you stay out of the halitotic radius.
In a woman-less household the microwave is of prime importance. In many a bachelor pad, the day starts with paying obeisance to this mighty machine of easy cookery. And consuming it's offerings with relish. Mine is one such abode that resisted the temptation to get one for many a year till our fridge (which contains mostly cold stored pickle, beer and orange juice) died a sad demise. Some wheeling-dealing later we now have a new fridge and a microwave. Joy was that day. Food could be warmed in 2 minutes, pop corn was now do-it-yourself and aerosol cans were no longer kept in stock.
Things went along well. The bell was a joyous sound that meant food was ready and hot. The hazards of trying to heat plastic boxes of frozen food - most involving molten/melted plastic and a tendency for it to coat the digestive passage - were no longer present. The metal rimmed mugs were strategically broken beyond Araldite's reach and all was good. Till Dad decided to put a bowl (microwave safe) of rajma in without a cover despite there being a full roll of cling wrap in the immediate vicinity.
The third item to be tested in a microwave ever, was an egg. Apocryphal perhaps, but here it went in before the chicken and needless to say it burst. As do tomatoes. Boiling rajma also as a similar tendency. Dinner therefore, involved spooning it out from all 6 walls of the oven and spending the rest of my life dreading the bell.

Tomorrow, they say, is another day.

Lusht For Life

After being inspired by Mohayana's bright gifting ideas I landed up at the Lush store at the mall with the plan of picking a gift for a friend who was getting married. Marriages in the friend circle are often trying times. Mom goes into some why aren't you getting married obsession and secretly harbors thoughts regarding exactly which way I swing. Once I'm done with fielding all her questions and convincing her that despite being straight as can be I still don't want to tie the knot so her grand children plans will have to be put on hold. On an aside I once pointed out that in the 21st century it isn't exactly necessary to be married to have children and got two weeks of nag-free time.
But a close friend's marriage can often be a trying time. Apart from the sudden change of heart they get towards sexist jokes, leching on the streets, random women, alcohol etc there's the huge immediate issue of gifts. Which is what this is all about.
Lush seems to be an ideal place to pick up stuff for friends who are close enough to accept a rather cheeky gift without either blushing to the point of bursting or wanting to kill you instead. So I have in my possession assorted items with chocolate including a massage bar, shower gel, soap, lip balm and just plain cocoa butter. We know what chocolate can do. They made an entire movie out of it. Other options included underwear dusting powders but I actually like the guy getting married.
The only problem with the store is the smell. Some would say aroma, I'm sticking to smell. It's appalling. Even cookie man is better. The other problem is the way the stuff looks. Charcoal bricks, alien slime, stuff out of horror movies and stuff that despite the vegan tagging looks like it's about to eat you. Of course if you're really unlucky one of the saleswomen will grab your hand and demonstrate how their glitter bar works and leave you disfigured for life.
Expensive as it is, Lush is a good gift buying joint. That's the bottom line.
The other bottom line is the joy of seeing a man-behind-the-counter's face when you ask for 5 packs for condoms of various types and then ask him to gift wrap it...
Need to ask the man to open his gifts in private. Wish him luck.

More on the Orkut

It's like a online central park. There's people yelling and screaming at each other. There's people snogging in full view of the world, there are even specimens indulging in scrapsex, if it can be called that. After phone, cyber and bluetooth, now it's scrap sex. How depraved can humanity or whatever breeds in the inner recesses of networking sites get.
It's bad enough most people I know are socially inept in real life. On orkut that ineptitude just persists. Now we all know that the only way one can get someone else to appear interested in oneself is by bending the truth. At least when it comes to an online profile.
Tall, handsome, athletic, intelligent, rich, smart, funny the list goes on... Even then it's often once in about 200 profile views that someone is going to sit up and say hey here's a tall, handsome, athletic, intelligent, rich, smart, funny person to interact with. Maybe have scrapsex or something. Or perhaps coffee.
But no. In some weird ideal people will persist on writing things like I'm here for "dating (women)". We do realise that most people are twenty-something never-been-kisseds frustrated and often desperate. I think the term for that is horny. But this is a PG13 blog so if you are less than 13 years of age and don't have mommy or daddy around you this is where you press Alt+F4. Actually it was two lines ago but that makes it a catch-22.
Broadcasting that situation out to the world, getting back to the main point in debate, is not going to get a response. It's Catch 22 again.
And there's profile views to tell you which one of the denizens on orkut voluntarily or by error decided to browse through your page and you politely browse back and that's like eye's meeting. So you walk across the room, hesitantly, drink in hand, bumping into old friends but maintaining eye contact. Perhaps making a few new friends along the way with a mental note to check them out but all the time you're eyes are still on that person. And when finally the twain meet there's the all pervasive orkut pickup line - "Do you vant to make fraandship?" which is equivalent to an ooga-booga, if you know what I mean.
In essence though I'm guilty of being on orkut and I shall plead so on judgement day. It does give me enough reasons to laugh and occasionally someone might just message out of nowhere and then maybe things'll look up.
But here's the typical profile, collected from various sources and amalgamated to make the ultimate deal with instructions.
about me: (whatever you want, you're star sign, how cool you are? yada yada - creative writing. nobody ever believes a word but it just might be a good idea to write a good one here)

relationship status: single (duh?)

birthday: (if you're planning to lie here just make sure it matches with the star sign)

here for: (this is the dating (women) column)

children: (lie here)
ethnicity: (again whatever, make sure it matches the picture)

languages i speak: (a creative zulu, abo, ennui, not that's innuit etc would help)

religion: (nobody cares)

political view: very right-conservative - (this is not what you should be putting here)

humor: campy/cheesy, friendly, goofy/slapstick - (again, no difference)

sexual orientation: straight - (very important)

fashion: alternative, contemporary, natural - (lies - "percentage bags, and vernacular film watching pants" - I owe a friend for this.)

smoking: no
drinking: no
pets: i like pet(s)

living: with roommate(s), friends visit often - (with parents is a strict no no here too. Lie.)

the rest of the passions movies music thing is tough and go. try not to put in stuffed toys in your bedroom, or accessories for sexually deviant behaviour.
And this is turning into an advice column.

Just be yourselves. It'll give me something to laugh about.

The search for Wisdom....

.. ends here.

A large part of humanity's evoluvtion and progression, if we may call it that from climbing down from the trees and climbing up escalators instead has been the quest for knowledge and wisdom. Great philosophers have theorised at length on the topic of where one can find wisdom.

From the foothills of the Himalayas in solitude or in Hawaii amidst a bevy a beauties and a coconut cocktails. From t-shirts to maybe even Bangalore Times. Here's the latest.

Been otherwise busy so the orkut bashing and other usual nonsense will return in some time.

Orkutting again

A long discussion was had fuelled by funny scraps that one gets to read on other people's orkut account. Which set the wheels in motion, the gears turning and the machinery working and now we have a post dedicated to networking sites.

Or that's what they want to be called.

Long years ago, when all was text, if you had to meet new people you irc-ed (Internet Relay Chatted) the results of that are seen here. Or if you had to spread any word you painstakingly typed out all the addresses. Or just called everyone up. Needless to say (then why say it? It's just a expression like notwithstanding) life was without charm and people often died alone only to be discovered by the neighbor while investigating the scary noises.

Then email groups became the rage and suddenly like minded people were joining groups of interest under id's both bizarre and interesting. That element of internet uncertainity prevailed where one was never sure if silvan_elf@whatever was a Legolas or an Arwen. So there were hits and misses and geeky boys were trolling the corridors of pro-abortion groups in the hope that they'd land someone. Well, the logic essentially being that here was a bunch of women whom one was sure would be having enough sex to make abortion a legal requirement.

It was also said of Marie Stopes (wiki if you don't know) that at the time she was living in an arrangement with a certain gentleman which would certainly have required the use of contraception.

Then one had alumni sites where with a little ingeunity one can dredge up email ids of either the 4th standard crush that turned one down or the 6th standard bully who turned one upside down and subscribe them both to donkey porn or some such. The only fallout of the whole thing is the rare chance that someone would actually like donkey porn. Like the song says, there are all kinds of people in this world.

Then the early networking sites came up. And now they're sprouting like mushrooms. Advertising on the internet, appearing in magazines and newspapers and intelligent men and women are unable to understand why there's such an exponential increase in subscription. That might be explained in the lines to come.

So there's Hi5, Orkut, Fropper and a bunch of others that beg, plead, entice and cajole people into signing up. Fropper is probably the worst with the sleaziest tv advertisement I've seen after that MR Coffee thing. Hi5 is ok till one starts getting friend requests from unknown cool sounding people who have porn websites as their webpages. Not that isn't necessarily a bad thing but occasionally donkey porn happens. Even my motherboard, which is a particularly cold, emotionless thing shuts down in disgust those times.

Orkut. Google initiative so it is to an extent remarkably intuitive and reasonably well organised. And it's primary advantage is the fact that the level of anonymity is very low. Your email id is on display as is your face if you chose to display it and essentially so are your friends. That can be a good thing. But also can be disastrous.

Orkut has a few issues of it's own. One is that scrapbook concept. Where whatever anybody wants to tell you is open for public perusal. It is like a friend said, akin to shouting out across a crowded room when suddenly everyone's stopped talking. The only way out is the delete potentially offending scraps. Why can't people just mail instead? The other is the weirdo invasion. This happens either completely anonymously - the "fraandship" bunch or skeletons from your old school closet. The anonymous bunch can very easily be ignored or laughed at the others pose a threat.

There exists a concept that one hasn't kept in touch or taken the trouble to keep in touch with a large number of people primarily because one may not want to keep in touch. This theory is ignored, violated and trampled thanks to orkut. Specimens from 4th grade (not the crush) and the bully from 6th grade is back with pictures to take revenge for the whole donkey porn thing. Old school people, here refers to people from the old school, pose a problem of a completely different nature than most of the weirdos from another planet.

The friends one makes in college or even high school are people who have a fair idea of what they want in life and who they are. So a connection formed then is a reasonably sound one. Now in 6th grade where most people are trying to come to terms with either puberty or pimples is an eminently forgettable time. Now if someone from that shady past appears out of the blue and wants to catch up it's terrible. Conversation never progresses beyond ten minutes even with beer and often you find them married with a kid at a time when you can't see a future in your own life.

But experimentation on orkut by hypolink and me have yeilded the following tips :

- Friend requests expire if ignored for a week

- People can be unfriended without them ever knowing

Use this wisely.

More on the orkut profile and how to ensure you stay single in some time.

It is Done

This is officially the third time I'm starting this post. Not because I have writer's block or carpal tunnel but BESCOM, which is the single highest authority on who gets electricity and who sits and mopes in the dark. I ended up moping twice after typing two lines.

Now, I know I live in the back of beyond with the 'city limit ends here' sign about halfway between here and the city but the BESCOM office is next door. I thought at least the proximity would mean I have nearly unlimited power. Now we do have a UPS powered by what looks like the batteries they use at Sing Sing or some such but that stopped working. In fact I think half the power cuts are because some rat chewed up the wires and died of copper poisoning. I think in it's dying breath it's short circuited my house.

Note to self: might have to see MunnaBhai 2

So it's done. 4 days. 12 hours. An average of 45 pages of writing per exam. That's a 180 pages of writing. James Joyce would be proud.

Learnt a new word today - to pung. Vernacular slang with the u pronounced like the oo in zoo. Loosely translated it means to wax eloquent on a topic with little or no prior knowledge. Now this isn't waxing eloquent like maybe an ex tempore, it's coming up with an answer. Thus more akin to creative writing. Considering a hundred people wrote the exam for the aforementioned four days the collective punging would give a lot of good fiction a run for it's money.

It is commonly believed that the sudden release that one gets after a period of intense activity is one of the most relieving feelings in the world. It apparently applies to a very small set of activities like maybe jogging... or solving a crossword puzzle and maybe one more.

Waited most of the afternoon for the relief to set in and when it didn't decided that beer and food were in short supply.

After the pasta that turned out delicious, the past four days have been highlighted by the conspicuous absence of food. Not like Somalia but of good food. Ready to eat microwave-ables don't count. And neither does ThumbsUp. My tapeworms are all dead thanks to the pesticide. So a couple of beers, a couple of hours of yanking peoples chains, pulling their legs and generally spouting nastiness like there would be no tomorrow I think I've come to terms with the fact that there is no respite except of few hours of not having to look at printed matter.

I refused to read the menu. (at last count the past four days have seen the ingestion of over 2500 pages of fine printed text with the intermittent picture and the occasional quip - can I be blamed?)

Also had many thoughts on what to write, notably the sudden materialisation of William Shatner, back from going where no man had gone before with a 100 lbs added, in Boston Legal. The strange fact that Dr. Benjamin Spock MD (renowned author of Common Sense Baby and Child Care which among other things abhors consoling crying children and circumcision) would have a vulcan surname. Then again Pluto's been renamed and given a moniker akin to my car's number plate. The animators at Disney are out looking for the man who did that. Redoing Mickey's lip syncing is apparently going to cost them EuroDisney.

The Pope's lost it. Ranting about Islam in public. I agree religious differences are an inherent part of a society that has different religions but Benedict's pushing things a bit. Cancelling Christmas Pop Concerts and upsetting Christina Aguilera or Girls Aloud is a little prudish, openly voicing some thought against a religion is inviting trouble. Any possible repercussion would start a modern nuclear missile fuelled Crusade. The Caucasians and the middle east will bomb each other to oblivion and Indians and Chinese will take over the world. We have 1/3 the population so that was going to happen anyway but Ben just accelerated that by about 20 years.

So dad wondered how people could follow religion so blindly and I pointed out that ugly people get married too. Often without the influence of alcohol. He hasn't figured the metaphor out yet.

Some one wanted to fling themselves at someone else at dinner today. That's the line of the week. The corollary to that is whatever floats your boat is ok as long as it doesn't rock mine.

Beer talks. I need sleep. More when I wake up.

And it's all...

... for me grog, me jolly, jolly grog, all for me beer and tabaccy. I'm spent all me tin, with the lassies drinkin' gin...

Utopia aside I had to think of a nice way to introduce the term groggy. This seems to be as good as any. I'm in some quasi awake state after a most miserable night. Before ye shrinks amateur or otherwise decide that I'm losing it, let me say that I am. And the regulator of my fan is busted.

There's a strange sense of security in moving air. As long as it's under a certain speed limit. Anything beyond, say '3', and it's a sense of dread. Almost as if hell has area of doldrums interspersed with the roaring forties - much like earth. Now roaring forties is what page 3 of the local news paper seems to be advertising at least 4 days in a week. That isn't the point again. The security in moving air, as I was saying, is strange. The result of this is the miserable night I had. The regulator is busted and like Hobbes all I have is off and high. So I'm stuck with either suffocating or wondering when the tornado lands in Oz. If that ever happened I'd probably stuff the scarecrow into the tinman, and convince the lion to eat Dorothy, maybe get movie rights from the wizard. So after deciding that some air was better than none, here I am sleepy, frozen, with a head full of weird dreams that I only seem to remember when I've had a bad night.

But it didn't seem so bad when it started off. Made dinner for dad and me. As a friend said, cooking is therapeutic. That line got modified after other treatment options included, for instance, folding clothes. The current panacea is doing anything with no one around to bug the beejezus out of me. So I made pasta with tomato sauce, the recipe follows.

Ingredients

2 ripe tomatoes

1 tin of tomato puree

1 medium sized Onion, preferably the white ones

4-5 button mushrooms

olives, salt, chili flakes, pepper, garlic, oregano and other assorted spices

olive oil

about 150 gms of pasta in any shape you desire. The usual packaging is 200gms but that's a little too much for the sauce. you could throw in more tomato, in which case you'll have to make the required adjustments.

so blanch the tomatoes (that's drop them in boiling water for a couple of minutes) and peel them and chop them. Saute some crushed cloves of garlic and that onion (finely chopped) in olive oil and once 'golden brown' (how I love saying that) throw the tomato and puree in and let it simmer. Add salt, pepper, chili flakes (stolen from any pizza outlet) and oregano. Throw in the mushrooms and olives after you've chopped them and stir the thing around on a low flame till it smells, looks and tastes cooked. By then the more perceptive of you would have boiled the pasta, if you haven't yet, well it's another ten minutes to dinner. Toss the pasta in the sauce and serve topped with grated cheese, again preferably Parmesan. You could serve this with garlic bread if you're into that kind of thing. So this, along with a death by chocolate (about 75% of which is now lying in wait in the freezer) was dinner. So it was good.

Then the fan ruined the rest of the night.

Tomorrow's my big day and then I have big days till the week ends. So this weekend is going to be a good one. Come what may.

Music reviews will be on hold till the weekend hangover passes.

But this just might be a good week considering Schumi, Maria, Martina and Leander won.

Alternatives to Retail Therapy

As Vin put it so succinctly in the comment section of the previous post, D-Day is close and I tend to ramble. Then again my options are rather limited. Time is of essence so I don't want to hop into my car and drive around town for a couple of hours. This also rules out shopping, which seems to work for some people in times of severe stress. Right now I can't even think anything I want and can afford.

Strangely most of my material wishlist is done, the few that remain are in the pipeline (wall charger for my ipod) or can never be (trip to the mauritius, perhaps?) But the ones in the middle, in no-gadget-land, in the limbo so to speak are the interesting ones.

I decided that if all goes well I'd go in for a gadget makeover by the end of the year to coincide with my possible entry into the halls of Neurosurgery.

I need a new phone. Simply because I don't want to have to carry a camera around and someone I know blogs from the phone. Take a picture, type a caption, upload to Blogger. How cool is that?

Of course he uses a k790i which a camera that you can make calls on. Me? I just want a 2 megapixel with an mp3 player. Why an mp3 player when I have an ipod? Well since it's not a good idea to carry around an ipod all the time. Which narrows my search down to two phones. The k750i (new and improved with expandable memory and a 2M camera) or the w810i (will have to deal with the orange though. That colour plagues me. First it was Hutch {which is now pink} and now the phone of my dreams). It turns out that the 750i has, keep a straight face here, joystick trouble. And the cost to expanding the memory to what the 810 has (512 MB, that's a 120 songs at 128 kbps MP3/AAC at 4 minutes a song) would even the playing field.

Not that I'm ever going to actually get down to buying either but the quandry is a welcome change from deciding which the best surgery for piles or cleft lip (depending on your preference) is.

The next on the makeover special is a laptop. This stems from the idea that if one has an ipod and a cool phone and is perhaps far away from a desktop, then one requires a laptop. Many years ago satyam computers came out with t shirts that asked in bright orange rubberized print - "Will you be my laptop?" If it weren't for the fact that most wearers and readers of the t shirt were still coming to terms with getting down from the trees, we'd have had civil war.

Digression aside, here's what I need - 512MB RAM, 100GB HD, at least a combo drive that'll let me burn CDs and read DVDs - a DVD writer is obviously better, Bluetooth preferably but one can always dongle the dongle, so which would that be?

The point of all the rambling and meandering is simple -distraction. So be kind and bear with me.

Addendum : I'm getting too many googlesyndication pages that havent showed up before in my browser history. Why?

Leaving wells alone

Many years ago when lounging in the corridors of the hostel where many of us boys became men, some persisted in staying boyish and others might actually have become women if they managed to lay their hands on the money for the surgery, a friend of mine asked me to solve a particularly noxious crossword clue. It was on the lines of not fiddling with water sources - Leave well alone. Of course it doesn't sound half as cool as it felt when I solved it but we aren't here to discuss whether or not I'm cool. On my usual aside there's a difference between thinking you're cool and being cool.

The point is leaving things to their natural state of progress, egress or entropy is not something we as a race have ever managed to do. My life and work to a large extent is founded on some intrepid man who decided that maybe cutting someone up could save his life. As opposed to poking clay dolls of his mortal enemies, or poking him with enemas as the case and civilization in question maybe. This troublesome meddling thankfully is not restricted to surgery, or to just what mother nature made. It extends everywhere. It would turn out that no self-respecting intelligent being can sit and watch a creation (of any body's - God, Nature, Other beings) and not meddle with it. To see how it works, to improve it and occasionally to just take it apart and see what's inside. Category III includes 5-8 year olds and pathologists.

Why is this relevant? It doesn't need to be but it is. Permit me to meander some more. I'm on a long exam-going leash that allows for random ruminations that may or may not be... relevant. But like I mentioned surgery aside, man's need to mess around with other men's creations has in a very broad way benefited us all. Sony, Open-Source Programming are just tips of the iceberg. How does one get that sentence right? Sony and open-source are on the same tip, so to speak of the iceberg, but most icebergs (including the famous one) don't just have one tip. English apparently is a very phunny language.

The missing Navbar (for those of you who're here for the first time, you'll never know) and the cool drop down menus are the result of people refusing to sit around and let someone else's code take over their lives. Their urge to prod, tweak and hack, ethically of course, established templates is what keeps us from settling into what would have just been another web page.

Not that this blog would win awards for best design, it's the spirit that makes a difference.

Hell it's made me want to learn html, javascript, css and now gml.

The new links acknowledge this. Thanks for the code snippets.

In less intense stuff, more new music - Snow Patrol. It shall be reviewed sometime. And Haiku.

Trip Hop, Industrial and the News

Just read my previous post again and found a rather distressing vein of irritation flowing through it. Is it because I have exams in less than a week? Yes. Then what am I doing here blogging when I should at least appear to be at my desk with some voluminous tome dedicated on how to carve people effectively, safely and beautifully. Yes, au contraire to public opinion we surgeons are aesthetic. We like dabbling in things that would make most people go pale in the face and wrench the guts of a significant proportion but still we are aesthetic. Not Ascetic, acerbic perhaps but aesthetic. Of the many voluminous tomes that I often refer to, in the blog and outside, where I have to refer to them, most wax eloquently about the aesthetics of surgery. And there's the occasional Head of Department (fondly called 'Chief' after the Chinooks or the Apaches I'm not sure which) who'll peer over your shoulder and gently remind you that whatever you're trying to stitch up is a person and not a gunny bag. And so we learn and try drilling this fact into the many scalpel happy children who seem to entering the halls of Surgery nowadays.

That apart this post is about this new genre of music that I've recently discovered. Before certain people accuse me of being pompous enough to say that I 'discovered' a new genre, let me explain. It's been around for a while and I learnt of it's existence now. Like Darwin discovered that big turtle. Those of you who pay attention to what you read and store every word in some vague recess of your memory, you would remember Supreme Beings of Leisure. Those miserable worms of readers who simply scan through, skipping alternate words, lines or even paragraphs depending on your attention span, it's this new band I've been listening to.

It turns out that a bunch of people in Bristol or some such scenic locale in England decided that hip hop wasn't trippy enough and so they made this totally new kind of music with 'ambience' and 'groove'. With 'break-beats' and sample heavy synthesizing. All those technicalities apart it sounds like it sounds - trippy. Morcheeba, Supreme Beings, Massive Attack, Lamb would be a good set to start. The sound is often dark especially with Massive Attack's Mezzanine album. For those of you who've watched House, MD the title track is a sample of a song off this album 'Teardrop'.

When music like this gets too easy going, for times when that extra energy is a must, for late night journeys into the textbook - we switch to industrial. Now don't get me wrong it's not my favourite type of music and given a choice I wouldn't listen to too much of it. But when journeying into the aforementioned, there's nothing like the OSTs of Spawn, Matrix, Mortal Kombat and Prodigy's Fat of the Land to make throw one convulsive jerk and hit it like there's no tomorrow. You can throw in chemical brothers but there's a tendency to zulu dance to galvanize which can be detrimental.

So there it is boys a girls a guide to the latest noise that's haunting my haunt.

Of course I had the option of talking about Aldous' Brave New World or what's been happening in the world for the past week or so but it's depressing enough to have to read it in the newspaper. Why waste blog space ranting about the ABVP or the NSUI, or how politics today is like politics 2000 years ago - founded on clan and tribe, or how political parties are wooing Abu Salem to contest in elections.

May Balrogs eat them all.

Beta late than never

So blogger's gotten itself this brand new upgraded, beta functionality thing that would at some point of time become the alpha blogging service in the world, in tune with the rest of google's grand scheme to take over things. So despite this having issues on the lines of not being able to post via ftp servers and me not able to comment as a blogger on any other blogspot blog, I've decided to migrate. Those of you who tried accessing this space around dinner for about fifteen minutes a couple of days ago would know this already, those of you who didn't this is it. New and improved.

As is generally known thanks to my attempt at getting a comment box inline with the main post page I now know enough html to make a mess of things and not know how to set it right. It turns out that beta is a lot more complicated than that. True it has labels for each post and this might just be labelled general blade, which I guess most of the posts would be, but editing templates now requires an in depth knowledge of GML. Google Markup Language. See what I mean by world domination.
But cool things do exist. RSS feed subscription, so I don't have to depend on Feedblitz or Bloglet, just click on the link right at the bottom and I think you all would know when I updated. And the hierarchial display of previous posts on the sidebar.
Technicalities aside, Steve Irwin fell victim to one of the dangerous animals that he was chasing. It is a sad thing. Much as I detest snakes and other such relics of the evolutionary past that constantly remind us that we shouldn't be taking our pinnacle-of-evolution-status too lightly, he made them both entertaining and interesting. His trademark outfit, thick australian accent and unnerving tendency to piss off a poisonous reptile made him special. It's only right, I suppose that he died from a sting ray sting, doing what he loved most and did best. Go Steve!
Relics from my past keep visiting to haunt me. Orkut was bad enough (shall expound on my theory that if I don't stay in touch with certain sections of society, it's for a reason, some other time) and now I was reminded of this really irritating song called "Are you Jimmy Ray?" by none other than Jimmy Ray. Incidentally this also came up since the lyrics in the middle are on the lines of "Are you Sting Ray..." He looks like plastic man I thought. Do You?














A week remains.