I get this thing called Logos Quotes – a new quotation in my inbox every day, for the past four years now! I quite like quotable quotes. And this is also some sort of translation service, so each quote comes in about thirty different languages. No, Hindi isn’t one of them: the only non-English alphabet ones are Russian, Arabic, Persian, and Korean. No Jap or Mandarin, strangely enough. Must be banned there!
(It’s pretty cool – every Christmas they send out “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” written in some thirty-odd languages. Credited to that happy soul, “Anon.”)
So today’s is–
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith (no doubt some economic stud).
Haha! I quite agree. And weather forecasting, too.
Anyhow, swimming in more relevant (to me) waters, my dad has agreed to let us (Revanoor, Plammoottil, and Perakath – the three oddly-named mosquitoes) take his Qualis on a “road trip” from Madras to either Pondicherry or Bangalore! (Or rather, Chennai, Puducherry, and Bengalooru.) What fun! We’ve never done it before, and in fact my folks have never given me a vehicle for unsupervised inter-city driving before. I’ve had to promise absolutely no drunken driving.
The plan is, we leave on September 30th (I have the first two weeks of October off) and get back on October 2nd. There’s really not that much to do in Pondicherry. I don’t know why people like to go there! But those chaps haven’t been. So three days of drunkenness and male bonding. We haven’t spent time together, the three of us, since… 2004!!
Woo hoo! Having something to look forward too can really help you get through the boring days.
PS – Yuvraj hitting six sixes! I’m far from a cricket fan, but I must see the video.
I mean, I’m nice enough to let you check your mail at fucking 10 at night, and you sit there for half an hour, banging my poor laptop keyboard like it’s a 100-rupee TVS piece (when it costs 44,000 rupees you’re allowed to be neurotic about your laptop!), while I can’t even eat my dinner because your fat ass is on the only chair I own. Hints about planning to sleep by 11 and having a lot of work go Wheeeeee!
Saaaale bhehnchod!
Now I don’t have time for a Zonuts post.
I began work after class today, for a law firm in Connaught Place. It’s not fun so far, partly because I’ve been told to “hang around and observe” and “you won’t really be given anything specific to do.” Partly because I have moot courts to prepare for, campus placement cell work to do, and a master’s degree to study for on the side. (Yeah, correspondence, but there’s still shitloads of work involved!) Oh, and I have to gym too. Turns out there isn’t enough time to gym after work, so I’ll have to get up at 6 and go. Joy, happiness, fucking euphoria.
It also turns out parking in CP is bloody expensive. 5 bucks an hour; 10 for cars. I’m used to paying 5 bucks for the whole day! Now I’ll have to take the metro to work, which sounds good but actually isn’t because (a) the metro ride gets long and monotonous once the novelty wears off– which in my case was two years ago; and (b) I have to pay for parking at the metro station anyway, pay for the metro ride, and walk 15 minutes in the blazing sun, sweating like Michael Jordan having sex just after a game.
Speaking of my bike, I had a small accident on Saturday night, on my way to Saket in south Delhi to get drunk on the exotic and supposedly potent ‘absinthe.’ (It tastes like saunf-flavoured cough syrup. And is about as intoxicating.) So I’m riding down Khel Gaon Marg, and I slow down at a traffic signal although it’s green– one can never tell when some fucker’s going to run the red. That probably saved me, the slowing down. Next thing I know, I’m riding through these thin pink cylinders on the road that mark off the right-turning lane at the signal. Thankfully, I didn’t fall. Amazingly, I wasn’t even scratched. My bike was pretty much fine too– only the front brake cable was no longer attached to the front wheel. Unfixable. But the only other damage was a small scratch on the left leg guard, which is a big steel thing between the front wheel and the engine, designed to do exactly what it did– save my legs. Some idiots remove them so that the bike looks “cooler.”
So I rode the rest of the way with only my rear brake functional, which is quite dangerous as two-thirds of a bike’s stopping power comes from its front brake. Then I ended up turning right at the Outer Ring Road instead of going straight, and soon found myself looking at signs saying “JNU” and “Chanakyapuri” instead of “Saket”. However, a couple of friendly auto drivers soon put me straight, and I landed up at Oz’s place not much the worse for the wear.
I eventually ended up riding back home (a journey of at least one hour at my usual speed of 70-90 kmph) with only one brake, something which I wasn’t planning on doing. But Oz has only 1 bed, and the absinthe failed to do its job, as I’ve said. (We tried to rectify the situation by going to some bars at 12:30 am, dressed in shorts, floaters, and tee shirts. Predictably, they slammed their doors in our faces.) Anyhow, reached safely and changed the brake cable the next day for 60 bucks.
I’ve been thinking about why it happened. I think it’s a combination of reasons – I was concentrating more on the car beside me than on the road (my fault); I didn’t see the markers (partly my fault– they’re not reflective, and oncoming headlights are blinding, but you’re still supposed to see such things); I was overconfident on a south Delhi road that I’m not as familiar with as north Delhi ones (definitely my fault). I suppose the only saving grace is that I slowed down, anticipating danger. I doubt I’d have been able to control the bike had I hit the markers at 90.
As always happens after an accident — or even a close shave — I was a little shaken up. My road confidence levels have dropped a bit, which is a good thing, because I’m usually fast to the point of being reckless.
This is the ending solo from Dream Theater’s song The Ministry of Lost Souls, from their latest album Systematic Chaos.
Actually, it’s a guy playing along to the ending solo from Dream Theater’s song The Ministry of Lost Souls, from their latest album Systematic Chaos. If you listen closely, you can hear John Petrucci’s original guitar in the background when the player deviates. To me, it emphasizes how smoothly Petrucci plays. He’s a fucking guitar god.
This guy kinda falls apart at the end, but it’s a fantastic effort. It’s very hard to play Dream Theater’s music. Definitely full marks for effort.
So many things happened this past week that I wanted to blog about. But I somehow never seem to find the time to write. Here’s a roundup of the things that caught my fancy last week (in no particular order):
1. The government has allowed Jet Airways to fly to the Middle East from January 2008. I like to follow the aviation sector in the Economic Times and other newspapers, as recent price rises following consolidation among airlines directly impact my travel home every vacation! (But prices were unsustainably low earlier. I flew Madras-Bombay for 1500 bucks on Indian Airlines. Including 1300 as taxes. Madness!)
So anyway, the government was earlier making noises about reserving the “lucrative” (disputed by some – see link above) Gulf routes for Air India and Air India Express alone beyond December 2007. Thankfully they’ve changed their minds.
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2. 255 years ago yesterday, England switched over to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian calendar. The day after September 2, 1752 became (in England) September 14, 1752. The story is quite fascinating (see the above link) – England delayed switching over for almost 200 years because it’s a Protestant country (hurrah for Henry VIII!) and the Gregorian calendar is so called thanks to (the Catholic) Pope Gregory XIII, who mandated the switch way back in 1582.
How would you feel if the such a switch were to happen today? Cheated out of a week and a half of your life? Of your rent? Of interest? Of your birthday? And it would have to be publicised pretty darn well, or people wouldn’t follow it. Scott Adams and the rest of the blogosphere would go mad blogging about it.
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3. F1 team McLaren were fined $ 100 million in the Ferrari ’spygate’ saga. My God! Even by F1 standards, a hundred million dollars is a lot of money to fine someone! The only other areas in which I can think of such huge sums of money being involved are cases against Big Tobacco and perhaps environmental scandals such as the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal.
McLaren boss Ron Dennis however says that the fine is effectively halved because McLaren has not been required to forfeit any revenue earned till date this season. And doubtless the fine would not have been so high if the authorities didn’t feel McLaren was financially strong enough to take the hit. That’s the funda behind a fine, isn’t it… to hurt but not to cripple.
McLaren was also stripped of its points in the constructors’ championship, but McLaren drivers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton were spared – ostensibly because Alonso gave crucial written evidence at the hearing.
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4. I somehow stumbled onto some random chef’s blog and from there learnt what a Googlewhack is! This chef (it’s a pretty interesting blog, actually), in the course of some research, stumbled upon a three-word googlewhack.
What is a googlewhack? It actually refers to a search query on Google, consisting of only two words, that returns a single result.
The first ever googlewhack was apparently “dork turnspit” (a breed of dog). Aidan’s three-word search string was “atlas mountain soup.”
The interesting thing about googlewhacks — apart from their uniqueness — is that the act of disseminating information about a googlewhack (e.g. blogposting about it) destroys its status as a googlewhack, because searching for the googlewhack will now return the original result plus your blog post about it! All the original googlewhacks have been destroyed in this manner, including Aidan’s.
The concept of a googlewhack has been extended to such items as googlewhackblattaptomas, googlewhackblatts, antegooglewhackblatts, and a load of other such rubbish. The wikipedia page gets boring after a while.
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5. Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards:
What is she playing at?
Her initial claim to fame was her hotness. And those killer abs. She hasn’t looked very hot for a while. Here she looks — not fat, but she doesn’t have her killer body of yesteryear.
And, as the criticism goes, it was well known that she lip-syncs, but that was forgiven due to the complexity of her dancing. What she’s doing here is hardly dancing! She looks quite out of it.
Poor thing. Apparently she ran backstage after this performance, having seen herself on monitors, and began crying, “I looked like a fat pig!” I’m not sure how true this is, as I don’t see how they could have video monitors large enough for her to watch intently while on stage. Unless they had a JumboTron or other large screen for the crowd.
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In other news, I’ve started gymming again. Yay! At 500 bucks a month, this gym is double the price of my earlier gyms, and is a rather large strain upon my monthly budget. But happiness! It has a motorised treadmill (3 actually, but 2 don’t work), not to mention motorised cycling machines and stepping machines.
I therefore now have some aerobic exercise in my life again, having virtually quit basketball due to all the good players having left Stephen’s. I find I can manage a 20-minute run after my weights easily enough, except when it’s my leg day. Then I just do a 5-minute sprint. What’s hard is not so much the running but the boredom that creeps upon you while running! There’s no television to watch while you run, and I can’t listen to my own music thanks to the radio blaring out Big 92.7 fm and Red 93.5 fm non-stop! Oh, for a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones…
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