Been a while, alligator...

So it turns out that planetary alignments being favourable and a syzygy in the offing led to my suddenly finding 36 hours of absolute absence form work. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a gift. Not one to be squandered on beer, beef and blogging, but one to relish those moments of peace, of solitude, of getting back in touch with the inner Mayan...

But since the only thing Mayan that I'll ever have anything to do with is a llama steak, medium-rare, I settled for beer, a nice ham quiche and kick starting this blog with a brand new edition of the usual nonsense.

Considering my contact with the outside world has been limited at best for the past few months we'll do a quick round up on the current state of entertainment before we launch into the topic of the day.

Dave Matthews new album is a treat. It's heavy, at least heavier than the earlier ones but just as enjoyable. Shake me like a monkey and the oft airplayed Funny the way it is would be the run of the mill picks. The others of course are the ones that really make you happy.

In other music, Dream theater has an album out of the usual insane riffs and time signatures that look like something Mandelbrot and Julia produced after a hot night in Peru. Nice if you're into some self-indulgent progressive thing. If not then there's always pop.

Wolverine was a disappointment. Vastly digressing from print for sake of popularity. Special effects were again not very impressive and the plot was at best, weak. Transformers 2 will need to be seen on a big screen and not some Russian camera print before anything can be said of it's affects, story and everything else that makes a movie. Megan Fox is reason enough to watch it in theater. So that comes later.

The highlight of today is a wish list.

Not a bucket list.

A wish list.

1. A Sailor pen.

2. A Back lit poster of the Matrix. This looks good but any of the others with the green letters would do.

3. This.

4. And this.

5. And any one of these.

I am as you can see a simple man.

And I'm sometimes glad I don't have the time to think.

Peace be on ye.

Baaack

Oh my God! This is what this blog looks like. Derelict, dilapidated, abandoned and all that. Hell I'd like to say I was insanely busy doing this and that and hacking the occasional head and dealing with didactics but nay, those are just excuses for the lack of a muse. A-muse, get it? You do? Great! We're back in sync gentle readers and this ride's going to be a roller coaster.
So it turns out that we've decided to vote again and despite every reservation we had about democracy being a waste of good money and in this part of the world it being a way to waste bad money too, we filled the forms and dropped it off at the local poll office. We jaago-re-ed so to speak. Rose to the occasion. Woke up and smelt the sweaty armpits. Needless to say Murphy chuckled in his grave and we found that the good name was not on the good list. Or the bad. Or any list outside of the list of residents posted for emergency this month. And despite writing to the EC, Jaago Re and the local MP promising him my vote in an act of final desperation, we ended up inedible ink less. (Yes, I know it's spelt differently but it's supposed to be a pun. I couldn't have been gone so long, could I?)
But in funny news I know someone who wanted to vote but didn't want to be marked for a month so she painted on transparent nail polish and did a quick one with some acetone and now all she has to show for the whole franchise deal is... nothing. But a good idea it is.
In other interesting bits of information the sixth pay commission comes to the rescue of all previously underpaid doctors who worked for the central government (not the state government if you've been reading the papers). As a result of recession and fiscal policy Doctors apparently rule the roost at shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony. The hits have, if google analytics has to be believed, risen exponentially. Of course we are at our usual Murphy moment of being the dog in the manger sitting on the proverbial golden egg largely due to the lack of time to spend the new found booty. And I am talking of financial booty. Not the other one. The one that can be attracted with sufficient finances.
Add the arrears to that and we have a new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and a black acoustic guitar. And the dream that little white boys and girls will one day play with little black boys and girls and realise that white men can't jump.
Flight of ideas apart, I can't for the life of me remember why I've stopped writing. It's fun and even the thought of repetitive stress crippling my wrist doesn't deter me. I've learnt that there's light at the end of the carpal tunnel.
Oh yes, there's a few months worth of bad puns coming your way.
In cooking this month, we speak of 2 interesting ways of eating bread. The first was featured on some travel and food show on one of the travel and food channels on Tata Sky (my life is jhingalala, yours?) . The first involves a whole loaf of unsliced bread which can be easily sourced, albeit with the risk of a suspicious stare from the local bakery. Speaking of which there's one in Pondicherry called "Bangalore's Famous Iyengar Bakery", run by a malayalee of course. So we have this loaf which we shall cut in half. The only way it should be cut in half, before an inane doubt creeps up in your mind. and we scoop out the inside to make a bread bowl. Fill it with some nice chicken masala or beef stew or even the bhaji of the pav fame and proceed to demolish it with the inner bits and thence to consume the bowl piecemeal. While not spectacularly different from the taste of sliced bread with any of the aforementioned accompaniments, it is novel in its presentation and therefore worth a try before the realisation sinks in that it really tastes the same.
The next bit of bakery wizardry comes from the National Law School where an enterprising cheta decided to slice a bun in half, keep a good sized bar of chocolate within and pop the result into a microwave for 30 seconds at full power. Here we shall stop and imagine the molten chocolate sandwiched in soft warm bun. Once done we shall mop up the drool from our keyboards before typos become the norm.
Speaking of drool on keyboards, there is a commercially available rubber key board that rolls up in to a crepe bandage sized cylinder and being rubber and all that is impervious to drool, coffee, coke and single malt scotch. Other hazardous substances may be tried on request and the promise of replacement if the rubber dissolves or something.
There's been little on the music scene. David Cook and American almost Idol or Idol or somesuch is out with an album that sounds identical to Daughtry so it is miss able barring maybe one or two songs. The Dave Matthews Band releases it's interestingly titled album next month, the single "Funny the way it is" from the same is brilliant. As is the Freddy Jones Band whom I just can't find enough of despite scouring the web.
The Big Bang Theory is the new addiction. Remarkably sharp comedy that is and it comes highly recommended.
So that's all there is considering I have about 4 hours to get back to work for the night and I've already pulled myself up off the computer for falling asleep on it. Hope there's more in the coming weeks.
Toodle-oo and pip-pip.

Long delayed...

... has this post been on the state of affairs in the world. I'm largely bored which explains both the lack of something to write about and the lack of enthusiasm to write about something. But we're changing that. The cobwebs that have grown around the keys have been wiped clean and those little bits of dust stuck in between have been dealt with an ingenious device - the USB powered vacuum cleaner. How cool is that? USB powers the world at large if no one's noticed. After cell phones and Microsoft, USB is binding us and bringing us closer.
How? I don't care it just sounded cool to give the port importance.
Slumdog has swept the Oscars. Leaving a very disgruntled Sukhwinder Singh moping on the sidelines. Little unfair but c'est la vie, apparently. Resul Pookutty is da man. But seriously best film and best director? Think the Academy needs to take stalk of where they stand. It's a good movie, different from the rest of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood and apparently different enough to make Benjamin Button, Frost, Nixon and the rest of them seem - ordinary at best. In any case it won and a bunch of Indians are jumping around claiming that it's our movie. No it isn't. It got shot in Mumbai, that doesn't make it our movie. If it were our movie, it would have never reached the Kodiak Theater. It wouldn't even have run longer than Billoo Barber (which till I got to know better, I was hoping was a rip off of Sweeny Todd).
So stop calling Slumdog an Indian movie and feel happy for AR Rehaman. His work is finally being recognized.
And global and local warming has arrived making life a sticky sweaty mess most of the time. Polar bears are apparently turning bipolar with the glaciers melting, and Arctic Terns have decided to no longer migrate. I'm looking at a Honda Civic Hybrid and coming with a cruel reality that even the electricity that would charge the car is generated by the burning of fossil fuels.
It's all going downhill and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep. Before we go back to the stone age. Though I still believe we were at the height of peaceful coexistence then. Largely because there were too few people to make a difference.
Morbidity apart, I've blissfully rediscovered the Star Wars, comics in .cbr/.cbz, pakistani music, lounging around in a lizard like fashion and other such hedonistic pleasures that would at best last the next 3 days till I find myself back in Emergency.
Oh well, that's fun too. May the force be with you.

Path, Pasta, Pod

So, some many unfinished prematurely done posts are beginning to clog up my thought process. The saved drafts section is slowly growing to near epic proportions. There are posts about music, movies, new year rants, resolution promises and even that magnum opus on the evolution of pornography that I've been planning for many a year now.
The last one of course is never ever going to get published. For many reasons. One my research (purely academic) is never going to get done. Every day I think I have enough material to go forth and wax eloquently but a cursory check reveals some new and often unimproved piece of absolute kink that warrants more investigation. Now if we'll avoid the innuendo and the puns and the general nonsense in the comments for that I'll be glad but then again one can never be sure. Anyway thankfully all is streaming and none is stored. So they can't find me.
Got me a bigger and better iPod recently and have spent the better part of one early morning filling it up and drooling over coverflow. It's not rocket science and seeing the album covers whizz by is never ever going to change music quality but I still choose to drool.
And speaking of drool since when we have very little to actually talk about outside of an absolutely terrible start to the year with respect to work , I decided that my month in Pathology (this one) is going to be spent in the pursuit of updating this place a tad more regularly. Maybe even the porn post.
Pathology is a strange subject. It deals with the dead. In a convoluted not-so-comforting way so does neurosurgery but that'll change in the next many years. I hope. The joy in having the absolute last word is omnipresent in jars of formalin and bits of paraffin. People stare rapturously into bifocal and confocal and fluorescence microscopes deriving pleasure from little bits and blue and pink and ultimately pronouncing life and death judgments. And as I found out today, destressing with Shakespeare. They didn't take too kindly when I picked a skull up and proclaimed in a baritone, "Alas, Yoric! He was a good friend." Or when some technician was heating a beaker full of some noxious looking fluid elicited a"fire burn and cauldron boil."
Tomorrow there promises to be a session on gross anatomy (yeah that's what it's called. with good reason.) of the brain. Where we slice and dice a real thinker to learn how the hippocampus curls in around the dentate gyrus and how the choroid fissure runs in the inside of the brain and how if time and circumstance permit, the perfumes of Arabia will never wash the smell of blood off my hands.
No such humor is not appreciated. Though strangely referring to a malignant brain tumor which would translate from slide to reality as a life expectancy of 6 months, as beautiful is considered standard behaviour.
And of course the jabs at neurosurgeons who never remove the right part, neurologists who never send enough tissue for diagnosis and radiologists who never supply enough clinical data are a part of the daily schedule.
But enough about pathos.
Dinner sometime ago was a tomato and pepperoni pasta.



Straight forward stuff really. Blanch tomatoes, peel and cut roughly. Saute some finely sliced onions in olive oil, toss a crushed clove or two of garlic. Once they're soft, in go the tomatoes and some tomato puree. Add salt and paprika and oregano/basil/mixed herbs. Let it all simmer away merrily till it looks, tastes and smells cooked. Feel free to throw in some pepperoni slices/cut up sausage along the way. Al dante some pasta in the mean time and drain out the water. Mix it all up. Top with grated parmesan.

Bon appetit.