Journalist P. Sainath giving a talk titled Globalizing Inequality in 2005. Hat tip to the kid bro for the link. 

I can’t explain why I go out cycling every morning.

For the first fifteen minutes or so my knees are always sore and my hamstrings cramped up from the previous day. For the next few kilometres, after I am warmed up, I feel good but then about 10 km. or so into the ride my back starts to hurt. The grips on the handlebars rip up my palms and they are now covered with thick, ugly calluses from being rubbed raw for hours everyday. A few fingers on my left hand are often completely numb or tingly. 

If it’s sunny it’s so hot that I’m dripping wet with sweat about half an hour into the ride. If it’s raining, I am soaked to my skin within minutes of leaving the house and bitterly cold and uncomfortable for the rest of the ride. Each day I return so tired that my vision is blurry. 

Motorists think I don’t exist. Whether it’s at a crossing where I’m trying to switch down gears fast enough to keep going and a truck decides to cut across me anyway or on a wide road, a bus overtakes me only to brake hard, just a few metres ahead of me or some scrawny Goan mother-fucker on a scooter, who threatens to kick me over because I didn’t let him pass quickly enough.

Today, an auto-rickshaw side-swiped me and my pedal got stuck in the auto. I was dragged along for a few metres. He didn’t brake, he didn’t slow down. I finally got thrown to the side of the road and my foot got caught between the spokes of the front wheel of my bike and the front fork. Considering the violence of the crash I got off pretty lightly: one badly mangled foot, one destroyed shoe, one really sore ass and one scraped up elbow. The rear dérailleur on the bike is shot. Also the the front wheel is bent but I did that, while yelling in agony, trying to free my trapped foot. I got no apology and little help.   

So, I ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I go out every fucking morning, whether it’s in the pissing rain or the blazing sun to push pedals for kilometre after kilometre, torturing myself and pushing a cycle to the point that it is constantly falling apart? Why do I want to be out on the road at the mercy of the elements and of feckless motorists sending text messages from their cellphones while driving SUV’s? 

Maybe it’s because once in a while, not everyday, often when I least expect it, when I’m close to passing out, soaked with sweat, my lungs and my legs on fire after cycling up a steep hill, I go over the top of the hill and start cycling down the other side, free-wheeling down the slope, fast as the wind, with just the right song playing on my iPod and blasting into my head… and for just a few minutes I experience the closest thing to ecstasy that I can ever imagine.

These recordings have been at the eye of a storm with everyone accusing Ms. Dutt of corruption on an epic scale and NDTV and the ladies involved trying to brazen it out in a typically Indian fashion.

I just realised what the furore was about because in the past month I noticed a huge surge in traffic to this site that was looking for actual Barkha Dutt news and not just the regular wierdos looking for ‘Barkha Dutt Nude, ‘Barkha Dutt Boobs’ or other Barkha Dutt related pornography (I understand fetishes you guys but please, get a life!)

So I read Open magazine’s articles and listened to the recordings and call me cynical but I wasn’t shocked in the least. This is how the media has operated forever and anyone who is surprised by the level of complicity and just pure corruption for lack of a better word is truly clueless.

Listen to the audio recordings here and try to see if you can tell at which moment exactly the line of journalistic integrity has been crossed.

Also worth watching is Karan Thapar’s interview of Arun Shourie, a grand old man of Indian news who still makes more sense and has more dignity than anyone else in the fourth estate today can ever hope to achieve. I think it is very telling when the ex-editor of two of the leading newspapers in India encourages everyone to be highly sceptical of everything they see and read on or in the news.

Also, I said the words ‘Journalistic Integrity’  and ‘Barkha Dutt’ in a single sentence. Funny! Let’s try another one. ‘NDTV gives you balanced news and unbiased editorial.’ Bwaaa Haaa Haaa! Am I a comedian or what?

Some previous commenters on this blog have asked me why I despise the fine lady and my answer is the terrorist attack in Mumbai on 26th of November in 2008.

I watched a television in horror as everyone in charge seemed to be paralysed with inaction but also as Ms Barkha Dutt interviewed the distraught families and friends of the people hiding inside the Taj Hotel in Mumbai that the terrorists had laid siege to and in which they held an unknown number of people captive.

When the captives called their families pleading for help and told them which rooms of the hotel they were hiding in to save their lives, Barkha Dutt announced this information on live television to the world and I’m sure to the terrorists inside who were certain to have a television tuned to NDTV or at the very least have radio contact with someone who did.

The same thing happened when commandos tried to storm Nariman House during the same attacks to try and free the Jewish hostages. In her enthusiasm to get LIVE NEWS out not only did Barkha make a fool of herself by constantly contradicting the news she had just announced, she also gave the rescue team’s every move away.

Needless to say, NDTV got immense ratings for those two days and most if not all of the people hiding in those rooms at the Taj Hotel died and everyone in Nariman House save for an infant, met the same horrible fate. Wait, allow me to rephrase that.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO BARKHA DUTT RATTED OUT IN THE 26/11 ATTACKS WERE SLAUGHTERED.

Since Ms. Dutt was not put on trial for treason back then these new accusations are totally pointless and shall go nowhere in a hurry. Shut up slaves and go back to your televisions.

P.S. There are absolutely NO nude pics of Barkha Dutt on this web site.

(A thousand guys just read this and went awwwwwwww! )

Be good, eat fruit.

As Mark Twain said, never trust anyone who enjoyed their childhood. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in my happy place during the last twenty years of the twentieth century, but I digress…

So, the memory. Many, many moons ago in the late nineteen hundred and eighties there was a hindi film I was taken to watch in a cinema hall and then since it was such a great picture that all the grown ups loved so much I was taken to watch it in a cinema hall again.

The film was called HUM and it starred among others, Amitabh Bachan, Govinda and my personal gold-standard of pure, unadulterated manhood, Rajneekanth. For those of you not familiar with the pop culture of this subcontinent think about Steven Seagall and Chuck Norris meeting and making sweet, sweet man-love. Now stop screaming and  retching and think of their love child. Multiply this love child by one hundred with a level bonus for coolness and you have South Indian Demi-God, Rajneekanth.

So normally Hindi film-makers copy songs but in this case they were like “Fuck it! Why copy a popular song when we can just play it on a jukebox and have Govinda and Rajneekanth beat the fucking Bejesus outta some bad guy to the beat?” and then they all gave each other high-fives and shot this video.

What you end up with is a fucking #EPICWIN for entertainment even though it is a #FAIL for originality. Please watch the clip and try not to hurt yourself from laughing too hard. Also because I love you I have scoured the internets and found a version with English subtitles because it has been scientifically proven:

Crap Hindi Film + Ludicrous English subtitles by someone who seems to have little understanding of either language =  DOUBLE THE FUNNY!

So, watch the original video above first and then brace yourself and click play on the hindi video below. Watch for:

1> Govinda and Rajneekanth holding hands and dancing while thrusting hips homoerotically at each other.

2> Totally not fake or pasted on looking moustache on bad guy.

3> Rajneekanth giving us the first clue of the impending ass-whooping the baddie is about to receive by saying to Govinda “SHOW THEM THE PROWESS”

Enjoy! You can thank me later….

With the hardware part of my new/old desktop tower running I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the disc image for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Once the 700ish MB download was done was I proceeded to try and burn the disc image to a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around and this is where I ran into my first problem. I tried about 5 different ways to do this on a Mac without any success and finally I gave up and read the instructions on the Ubuntu site that said that this was not a ‘recommended’ method of installation. Windows apparently, was needed to create the USB installer. So a few days later I got hold of a Windows laptop and created a bootable USB drive from the image.

At this point I should clarify that in all fairness my inability to create a bootable disc from the image was due the fact that I use Mac OS X and there is apparently NO way to do this on a Mac except for some weird terminal commands that did not work for me. Also, I could have easily avoided the trouble I had with the disc image by just burning it to a CD but if you read the first part of this post you will have noticed I had a CD-Writer that I doubted was still working. Long story short, it wasn’t and I didn’t want to buy another drive for what I thought would be a one time use only.

Here I shall digress and say that I wound up buying a DVD-Writer anyways a few weeks later, after I gave up on Ubuntu and thought I would make the box a Hackintosh. I tried everything from cloning and patching my own Snow Leopard install disc to downloading various prepackaged Hackintosh distros including Leo4All, SnowLeo, Kallaway Leopard and various bootloaders like Chameleon and some others who’s names elude me right now. Due to the pretty short list of hardware that these OSX86 distros work on and the fact that I am rocking an AMD Sempron processor with a weird Gigabyte motherboard with an ancient Nvidia Northbridge I encountered #FAIL after #FAIL. Anyone who can help me to get any version of OS X running on this system will get as much beer and pizza as they can consume in one sitting, so mail me if you think you have ‘L33T Hackintosh SkillZ‘ and you think you can ‘pwn’ this system.

So I installed Ubuntu from the bootable USB install drive I created on a Windows machine. The score so far is Microsot Windows XP: 1, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 0. The install was super quick since it wasn’t from a DVD and at first boot everything looked great. The default colour scheme of aubergine/brown may not be to everyone’s liking but you couldn’t deny that it looked smart and cohesive and was a far cry from the eye-searing fugliness of Windows. Score a point for Ubuntu then. All my hardware, new and old,  was correctly detected and the appropriate drivers installed. So far so good then! But as I soon realised, Ubuntu still has some pretty serious issues, even for the basic user who does not have the esoteric requirements that I do.

Ubuntu does not automatically mount any secondary partitions on hard disks. Yes, you read correctly. If your hard disk is partitioned into two or more partitions you are shit-outta-luck. Prepare to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu forums, copy-pasting command line gibberish into the terminal to get some basic functionality that has been in pretty much every OS that I know of since about nineteen ninety five or so. It was at this point that I realised (after I did a face-palm) that maybe I was lucky my mom had insisted on having Windows XP preinstalled on the Asus EeePC netbook I bought her a month or so back. I had been rooting for Ubuntu quite strongly, tempting her with promises of a secure, virus free and anti-virus free computing experience but she had refused. I looked over at the German Shepherd curled up at my feet and said out loud ” I guess we dodged a bullet there huh?” As a reply he rolled over, scratched his ear and went right back to sleep. My dog it would seem, is OS agnostic.

I fixed the problem with a few hours of effing around in the terminal, typing commands that started with the word SUDO and then proceeded to configure the services I wanted on the tower, Apple file sharing with Time Machine Backup support and an iTunes Server. A few Google searches later I realised that the NetaTalk software that shipped with the OS did not support encryption (which is needed by Macs to do file sharing and Time Machine backups) I would need to uninstall the default installation of NetaTalk and download, configure, install and configure again  a custom version of the package. Could I just go into the system preferences or control panel and tick a check box that said “Enable encryption” or something to that effect? No? Fucking brilliant.

At this point my visions of Ubuntu being a free, secure mainstream OS had already been smashed to bits by the disk auto-mount debacle and the command line dicking around in the terminal so I decided to try again. It took me about a week to finally figure out how to get file sharing working properly and I also had to download, configure, install and configure again a custom version of another piece of software called Avahi, which is a Bonjour type service that advertises the machine on your local network so that other machines can see it without knowing it’s IP address. FUN!

I finally got it working in about ten days through sheer perseverance and the aforementioned employment (or lack thereof) situation. I whooped with joy and my dog gave me a dirty look, he seemed annoyed at being woken up from his post breakfast nap. I disconnect the display, keyboard and mouse and hooked them up to the Mac to enjoy the fruits of my labour. ( I know, I know. I am waaaay too heavily invested in backups and file transfers. You would be too if you lost a year’s worth of college work in the great hard disk crash of 2006)

Aaaaand nothing. I could not see the Ubuntu Box on the network.

FUCK. ME.

I disconnected the display, keyboard and mouse form the MacBook Pro and reconnected them to the Ubuntu Box after shutting it down. On rebooting it booted perfectly, all services running, I could see it from the Mac, transfer files to it, backup to it via Time Machine. All good. Shutdown the system, disconnect the keyboard, display, mouse and reboot. Same shit. This time I reconnected the peripherals to the Ubuntu Box without bothering to shut it down and was greeted with a black screen and a blinking prompt. I Googled the symptoms and realised that when booted without a display attached like I wanted to do, Ubuntu booted in headless mode and did not start a GUI which meant that all the services that I had painfully installed and configured did not run.

More effing around in the terminal ended up with me totally hosing the entire installation and having to do a clean install. This time the configuration of services I wanted went a little bit easier because I remembered the vital pieces of instruction that EVERY guide on the internet had failed to mentioned and that I had figured out the hard way the first time around. I got it all configured and fixed the headless server issues only to find out that every now and then the services would stop running and I would have to learn how to SSH into the system and restart them. I then realised that I would have to learn how to configure and use my torrent client of choice, Transmission over SSH. At this point I gave up. I am about as geeky as anyone and had learnt to use the SUDO command like nobody’s business but I drew the line here. I bit the bullet, wiped the drive clean and installed Windows XP SP3 with Avast, iTunes, Transmission and TightVNC on top of it.

I now have to use SMB instead of AFP for file sharing and I can’t do Time Machine backups but I have a stable reliable box that starts-up automatically and shuts down gracefully when power on the attached APC UPS is runing low. It torrents and downloads podcasts and shares these over my home network without any hassles.

Now I am sure Ubuntu can do all this and more without worrying about viruses, hacks and zero-day exploits but I couldn’t get it to work in a hassle-free manner and not for any lack of trying. So I will no longer recommend that people who can’t afford the ridiculous cost of Apple hardware and are tired of using Windows should give Ubuntu a try.

Don’t.

Ubuntu. It blows.

So recently two things happened. Ubuntu launched, to much fanfare, the latest version of their operating system 10.04 LTS (Horny Heron or whatever lame-ass name the freetards gave it though in all fairness, Apple’s Snow Leopard moniker is hardly better) and I sold the Mac Mini, for three reasons;

1> I gave up the idea of ever buying a television and using the Mac Mini as an HTPC, there is just not enough content available to warrant my ever spending money on an LCD television. TV is dead to me. (The irony? I work in the television and film industry)

2> I needed/wanted a tower again, I want to buy cheaper, faster, higher capacity desktop drives and components to use in a system, no more pricey laptop components on a desktop system just because it is the size of a frakkin’ lunch box thankyouverymuch. The Mac Mini just wasn’t cutting it anymore as a file server and a back-up computer to the MacBook Pro and the other systems in the house.

And finally 3>Due to a recent unemployment (HIRE ME!) I had some free time on my hands and wanted to build a desktop computer again, something I had not done in almost half a decade and used to enjoy very much.

So, I sold the Mac Mini to an Iphone app developer on Craig’s List (I also dealt with a scammer who wanted to send the payment to me from the United Kingdom and have me ship the computer to and-I-kid-you-not, NIGERIA. I responded with a cordial, business-like BLOW ME!)

I then gathered the bits of computer hardware scattered around the house like pieces of flotsam and jetsam, mostly hardware abandoned by my brother when he got his first Mac last year (A white Macbook) and this is what I came up with

1> One AMD processor of unknown spec with a heat-sink and a fan missing two blades. WTF?

2> One mATX Gigabyte motherboard with integrated Nvidia graphics, a PCI-E slot and 10/100 Mbit networking. (No Gigabit Ethernet? Really?)

3>One passively cooled Nvidia 7200GS PCI-E Graphics card of unknown make. A Google search for a review of this card’s capabilities led me to a page with this heading.

Thats right. Better than NOTHING!

4> One beat-up computer case with a TWENTY pin power supply that my brother had been using with the TWENTY FOUR pin power supply motherboard. (I’ve always maintained that the kid was short a few connectors)

5>One CD-Writer that may or (more likely) may not be working. (I have 2000 A.D. on the phone here. They want their optical drive back please)

6> One original 2.5” 200GB Apple branded Hitachi hard drive from my MacBook Pro.

So, with all these super high-end components I had readily available I decided that I could get away with just buying a decent quality case and power supply and proceeded with the build. I soon realised that due to my brother’s use of it with the wrong power connectors the motherboard was dead and gave it in for repair.

One week later, when the motherboard was working I bought a discreet looking i-Ball Baby 306 mini-tower case and once again, I proceeded with the build. The case turned out to be very good value for money, it had two decent quality case fans and a half-decent power supply installed in it and the build quality seemed to be quite a bit better than the usual shit you find in the cheap cases they try to sell you where I buy hardware. The only unpleasant surprise I got was when I had everything fitted in nicely, the wiring tied down neatly and I booted the system up for the first time with a view of the front of the case.

What had looked like a thin strip of perspex running down the front of the case in images on the interwebz and at the store where I bought it turned out to be a one foot long strip of brilliant BLUE LEDs that computer-part makers love so much these days.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

After frantically checking I found out that it’s wiring was tied in with the case fans’. I decided not to fuck with it and leave well enough alone. My computer desk resembles the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise in the dark anyways with all the LEDs winking, pulsing and flashing in pretty much every colour of the visible light spectrum so one more light wasn’t going to hurt that much I reasoned. On with the build! I soon found out that the much vaunted CD-writer was in fact dead as a dodo so I removed the dusty paper-weight from the case and chucked it.

Now for the Ubuntu installation! The ‘fun’ as I can now see in retrospect and you will find out if you read the next post, had only just begun.

Stay tuned kids….

So summer is here again. How do I know? Because I am constantly tired and sleepy and grouchy. Why am I like this? Oh I’ll tell you why.

Because I live in the backwater of a third world country run by politicians who are corrupt sons-of-bitches who will not make any infrastructure investments unless they bear fruit within the time frame that these douchebags will stay in office i.e. a couple of years, five at best. What they will do is spend crores and crores of tax payer money on destroying forests and constructing huge, hagiolatry parks with ugly ass statues of themselves.

The huge statue of this particular stoop-shouldered ugly-ass bitch now stands covered in blue tarp because our toothless and frankly quite gutless Supreme court finally found its testicles and succeeded in putting a leash on her and making her stop the construction. So the park, the huge Dalit monument and the statues themselves just stand there, in limbo, an eyesore, a criminal waste of time, effort, money and a reminder of the pointless destruction of literally thousands of trees, a pretty jogging track, a park for kids and valuable and scarce green cover that the area could ill afford to lose.

So, coming back to the upshot of all this. Every year the onset of summer is heralded by rolling power cuts for hours and hours. Last summer just to fuck with us, the powers that be (UPSEB) thought that it would be insanely funny to regularly cut the power at 7 AM each morning!

This summer the wankers at UPSEB have gone back to their tried and tested modus operandi of cutting the power at about 1 AM each night, just the time that you have really gotten into some deep sleep. So, by about 2 or 3 AM your backup power source (the inverter) has run out of juice and died in a plaintive high pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! wail that signifies ‘Low Battery’. But this wailing does not wake you up, oh no! You have already been tossing and turning for half an hour in bed covered with sweat and mosquito bites as the steadily decreasing voltage from the inverter has made your ceiling fan’s blades whirl around slower and slower and made the gaang! gaaaanng! gaaaaaaaaaaang! gaaaaaaaaaaaaanngggg! sound successively more and more irritating until the blades have just given up on trying to stir up the molasses of warm, humid air in your room and have crawled to a halt with a aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! sound to inform you that they really are trying to move but just like Star Trek “They don’t have the powerrrrrrrr!”

So, you have gotten out of bed and turned off the fan but the inverter dies anyway and after lying in bed and listening to it for what seems like an hour you finally go “Fuck this shit!” and toss off what little of the covers you haven’t already kicked off and go and try to start the generator. So you perform the little routine that you can do in your sleep now.

Move the fuel switch from ‘off’ to ‘start’ position.

Turn the choke on.

Grab the pull cord and heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeavvve!

Nothing.

Repeat about 15 times until you have got your heart rate up and have a good, steady stream of curse words going under you breath.

Catch your breath. Stop wheezing.

Repeat about 10 more times.

Slap your forehead and check the kerosene tank. Full.

Check the Petrol tank. Empty.

(Let me clarify here that the world renowned engine boffins from Honda Motor Company in their infinite wisdom designed this petrol tank to hold at least a few litres of fuel. Good for a month of starts at least. But they also designed it in a way that let all petrol in it evaporate within a few hours of the tank being filled.)

The result is that I now have to go get a torch, find the Coke bottle full of petrol we keep somewhere, fill the tank just enough to get the generator started this time while taking care not to drop too much of it on myself so that if the shit does hit the fan I don’t scream and burn for too long.

Done.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeavve another few times.

Result!

The generator coughs and splutters to life and covers me with sooty black smoke full of unburnt hydrocarbons.

Turn the choke off.

Switch the fuel tap from ‘Petrol’ to ‘Kerosene’ while trying to inhale as few carcinogens as possible.

(This generator starts on petrol but runs on kerosene for reasons that I am too stupid or lazy to comprehend, especially at 4 AM)

We have power.

I walk back to my room closing all the doors between me and the generator to muffle the godawful racket.

Switch the fan back on.

Peel the moist sheets off the bed. Mosquitos on the wall. Swat the blood-fattened little bastards, fall into bed and try to relax and get some sleep.

Almost as soon as I finally fall asleep the alarm rings to signify the all-too-soon arrival of a new day.

Mother.                                  Fucker.

So. While the whole tech/blog world is caught up in Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated storm of leaks, guessing games, waaaay-too-elaborate renders/mock-ups and general breathlessness about the heavily rumoured but never officially acknowledged Tablet/Slate computer I’m sitting here cursing this piece-of-crap operating system they pooped out last year. Yeah, I’m talking about Snow Leopard (hereon called Slow Leopard)

Wasn’t this supposed to be The world’s best operating system, finely tuned?

Why has boot time gone from a snappy 25 odd seconds to a minute or more? Why does Slow Leopard need to restart every couple of days when Leopard could easily go for weeks without a reboot?

Why do both my screens get a grey tint and my keyboard and mouse stop working when I try and logout instead of restarting to save time? Which then necessitates a hold-down-the-power-button-and-hear-the-sickening-clunk-of-the-hard-drive as the system shuts off while you get Windows ME flashbacks.

And all this grief for what? No new features besides the ability to play movie clips in the icon itself! Thanks Cupertino. Thats real useful. Slow claps for you. Windows users… eat your heart out.

Is anyone else hating Snow Leopard as much as I am? Is there anyone else who just wants the 10.6.3 update to fix the myriad bugs that make Slow Leopard painful to use? Are there other users who don’t give a flying fuck about a freakin’ tablet computer and just want their expensive aluminium (yes thats the way the English speaking world spells that word) bodied computers to just work, as advertised?

Also, Superdrives. Fuck Superdrives. Mine seem to die on me every couple of months at the exact time I need to burn a few copies of my showreel to send out. This has happened so often that staff at my Apple reseller avert their faces and try not to make eye contact with me every time I walk in with a broken Mac. I feel like it’s my fault sometimes.

Anyhoo…. Rant over. Happy thoughts now.

There is nothing that can cheer you up after spending hours stuck in traffic like looking over into the next car and seeing that a girl you used to date looks like she has spent her life, post-you, stuffing fatty foods into her face with both hands.

Fucking.           Priceless.

That and the beeping and booping. Can you imagine using a computer that constantly made some sort of sound for every UI interaction?

Geeeez…

(via unplggd.com)

This video assaulted my mind waaay too early in the morning today. No, I did not see this at Onion.com and this is NOT satire. This is an actual Christian Rap Group (And if you have never heard Christian Rap or Christian Rock you haven’t lived) singing about the dangers of hugging people head-on where your crotches are actually (GASP!) touching. They call it (andIkidyounot) “Satan’s lustful arm wrap”

Play the video, listen carefully to the lyrics and hurt your brain at your own risk.

Once again. THIS IS NOT SATIRE. These fuckers are dead serious.

I’ve been listening to a whole lot of music from Norwegian duo, Kings  of Convenience and off their second album Riot on an Empty Street, this is my favourite single repeat song, The Build Up, featuring Canadian singer Feist.

(Alright, I’m giving up on trying to fix the grammar and punctuation in  the previous sentence. It can’t be done. Besides, in a world where the dictionary now has the word unfriend in it  and people who write for a living don’t know the difference between the words your and you’re I think I spend waaay too much time obsessing about grammar and punctuation, so much that spelling mistakes throw me off when I’m reading ahem… erotica (I know, I know, waaaaaaaay too much information and for the nerds among us… a parentheses inside a parentheses but what can I say…. proper grammar is sexy!))

I almost forgot… Get the MP3 Here.

One of the upshots of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ programs put into place by many countries (U.S.A, Germany, U.K., to name a few) to stimulate the economy and ‘save or create’ jobs is that thousands of perfectly decent cars (the ‘clunkers’ traded in) must be destroyed. This is one of the many videos of these clunkers being put to death that is floating around on ‘teh internets’, it looks like a late model Volvo S60 on death row. As part of the deal the car dealers accepting these cars as trade-ins must destroy them. They do this by putting either sulphuric acid or some sort of liquid glass compound into the cars’ engines which are first drained off of oil and then run them till they tear themselves apart.

But can anyone spot what is wrong with this video?

THIS CAR ISN’T A GODDAMN CLUNKER!

It looks like a perfectly good, well maintained luxury sedan that  has many, many years of faultless service to give. What is wrong with these people? I mean look at it! It is a beautiful, spotless car! And the difficulty they have in killing it and the amount of time that it soldiers on bravely, plaintively whining is just painful to watch for anyone who loves cars. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t anthropomorphise cars, they hate that.) Also, the idiots laughing in the end as the Volvo bites the bullet just gets my goat.

How many perfectly good cars like this one are being destroyed and exactly why is it so essential to destroy these cars? Once it has been traded in can’t a perfectly road worthy car like this Volvo be given to a family that would never, ever be able to afford to buy a new car anyway? Why is all the energy and thought that went into the making off this beautiful piece of machinery such a short while ago, so worthless now? Anyone ?

P.S. Text updated and bad grammar fixed. WordPress was being a bitch when I was writing this post for the first, second and third time.

So, the old geezer is one of those religious farts and he starts right off with his mini-polemic about how sodomy is a Sin and Unnatural according to the Bible and how the Delhi High Court has in one fell swoop, legalised bestiality too, the fools!

He carries on about the Pope (creepy picture above) and the Queen of England being the head of the church and both of them saying that this is deviant, unnatural behaviour (bestiality and sodomy) and he goes on and on and on….

All of this without even bothering to check if any of the people in the room that he has just met are gay themselves and might be thoroughly offended by his tirade. I had the urge to tell the pompous old prick that he needn’t worry, no one of either sex would ever want to fuck him recreationally and even the bestiality crowd would have to be going through a very dry phase to even look his way, but I demurred.

And that is the problem with non-religious, agnostic types, we let the religious nut-balls get away with all sorts of bullshit just because we don’t want to lower ourselves to their level and bash the world on its head with our theology. This shit has to stop! People too intelligent to believe in religion need to start speaking up and put these small minded sheep in their place.

Dear Gay People (or whatever the kosher phrase of the hour is) congratulations for what its worth. I don’t see how revoking Article 377 makes any difference to you while you still have to live in a society filled with douchebags who believe that God wrote books that tell them not to enjoy sex, who think anything except missionary is unnatural and who want to have a say in what you do behind closed doors in your own damn home! I wouldn’t want to be a child coming of age and realising that I was gay today, any more than I would while it was still illegal. I don’t see how it could, but if it makes life in this world full of assholes any easier for all of you, excellent!

My own cheap little thrill from all of this is that it will make all the homophobic, religious nuts lose sleep for ages, just lying in their bed thinking about the Delhi High Court’s ruling. Just picturing them provides me with endless mirth and dare I say it, barely suppressed giggles.

Go Delhi High Court!

Absolutely brilliant execution. Shame about the concept.

I caught a glimpse of this on television a few days back and was intrigued. I saw the full ad film today and I groaned.

Ironman meets the Transformers in a Nike ad? Why are the motorcycles playing basket-ball? Hasn’t ‘machines come to life when the guard isn’t looking’ been done to death? Did one of the bikes do the fucking moonwalk?

Have I been transported back to nineteen hundred and nintey two?

P.S. While on the subject of time travel, I just started reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and it is freakin’ amazing, like most books that I read totally fuck-all abridged versions of when I was in school as part of the curriculum. No wonder kids don’t read.

Hi all (four of you). It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a proper post (the BS Youtube video posts don’t count) but sickness and a recce that keeps getting postponed over

BTW if you’re wondering what my affliction was, I had/have a runny nose, a fever and the nerdiest of them all, an asthma relapse. That’s right ladies! They call me Sexx-Y! (Just like that catchy/crap song by ‘The Ting-Tings‘ that I can’t get outta my head, MP3 Here.)

So, the screenshot on the right with my retarded digital scrawl on it. Let me explain. I’ve posted about Google Analytics before. If you let Google put a bit of code on your web pages they will give you all kinds of interesting information about people who visit your site. For example, a listing of all the search terms people have keyed into Google that led them to this website.

So, the other day I was looking at the Google Analytics app on my iPod Touch (BTW, that app is so well made that I’ve stopped looking at the site on a computer) and amongst the many search strings that included the name of NDTV’s most famous anchor was the one you see here. Needless to say, my nose instantly wrinkled, my face contorted into a potty expression and a loud, involuntary EEEWWWWWWW! escaped my lips before I remembered that:

a> It isn’t nice to comment about how people look.

b> Specially for someone with a mug like mine.

c> Beauty is in the eye…  etc. etc. It takes all sorts to make up this planet and after all, people actually read this site, so there’s obviously no accounting for taste.

Anyway, I’ve walked around with that image in my mind for four days and now it is my gift to you. Enjoy!

Hell! At least it leads some credence to the frankly quite unbelievable stories that friends from NDTV have told me over the years.

So, in closing I shall say “Good for you Ms. Dutt!”

P.S. To the dude who keyed in the search term in question: I know who you are!

P.P.S. To Ms. Dutt: Mail me and I shall give you the dude’s contact info, you never know when you might need it….  and I won’t judge.

Also, on an unrelated note. I caught a glimpse of CNBC TV18 last night and some sardar journo had pitched a shoe at our honourable home minister, Mr. P. Chidambaram. I had/have two observations:

1> The surd in question throws like a girl. (But I shouldn’t talk)

2> Rajdeep Sardesai needs to switch to decaf. Seriously. For the entire three odd minutes that I could bear to watch, Mr. Sardesai looked and sounded like he had been given a chilli enema sometime between when he finished make-up and  when the bulletin started. I’m just sayin’

Please don’t leave smart-arsed one liners about this blog being read exclusively by the women I’ve been with. Haa Haa, I’ve heard all of them before.

So, here’s why I haven’t posted in a few days. First off, I’m torn between:

The knowledge that I ought to post regularly if I want more readers on this blog. (To what end, I haven’t figured out yet.)

&

My long standing laziness and more recent apathy (maybe I’d go so far as to say misanthropy) to everything and everyone around me these days. Its hard to write when everything you see,hear and read about in the world around you either pisses you off or you don’t care enough about much anyways and would rather spend your time blasting away at endless hordes of zombies in Valve Studio’s latest PC game, Left4Dead, which by the way, is absolutely brilliant and deserves to be spoken about in a post of its own, but I digress.

The main reason that there have been fewer posts recently than chicken with teeth is that over the past few weeks many people registered as users on this site. I was pretty chuffed about it. The last new user though, had a slightly dodgy name. Something like Viaa Garth or some such shit. So, I sent out a polite e-mail saying “Hi, Thanks for registering on my blog. Please reply so I know you aren’t a spambot” and sure enough, a few minutes later I had a reply in my inbox that went something like “Hi, I know great site for cheap meds, make you penis larger, order now, yaada yaaada..” Crap.

So, I repeated the exercise with all the users on this blog and I got either

a> No reply, or

b>Replies with links to sites that would sell me meds to stay harder for longer, reduce belly fat and I quote “Drill her all night!”

Now I’m a pretty average guy and would like to reduce my belly fat, have a larger penis and drill her all night as much as the next schmuck but this shit wasn’t about to fly. I booted off every single one of the users, including the non-repliers and spent the rest of the day steaming at the nerve of these people. Now I’m not new to spam and can spot and tune it out as easily as I detect bullshit when (or whenever) television newsreaders open their mouths to speak, but this was really pissing off. I guess it’s a sign of how hard the times really are that spammers are actually registering on my site to spam ME! Cripes.

Anyway, moving on… come back soon for a review of the best game I’ve played recently, Left4Dead, a very important Mac OS X terminal tip that is nowhere on the internet (I looked) and a weird post under the Fives category.

Peace, love and larger penises to all. (as applicable)

At this early point in El Presidenté’s (my nick name for Obama) first term there are already films calling him out on all the campaign promises he has reneged on and all the lobbyists and ex-banking motherfuckers he has filled his administration with. (Rahm Emmanuel anyone?)

For people not clued in to the conspiracy theories (for want of a better term), this film may seem to go off on the deep end about global banking agendas and a New World Order but even so, just the laundry list of promises (already) broken and shady back room deals makes for thoroughly interesting viewing.

Something for all you Obamabots to really think about and form an opinion that is actually your own, not the product of some fucking Facebook group.

And the government adverts in the main paper? Sonia Gandhi, Shiela Dixit or some other cowherd-looking ‘government servant’ grinning at me idiotically from every second page and our ‘Health Minister’ Ramadoss-something-or-the-other’s mug on every third page. It makes my blood boil.

As a Delhiite, I harbour a particularly deep seated and vicious loathing for Dixit (Is she still Delhi’s CM?) Every time I’m stuck on the stretch of road with the fucking BRT corridor on it I curse her and the IIT dudes responsible for this mess in language that would make a sailor blush. I do it loudly, with the windows down. People nod and cheer.

And Ramadoss. Jesus, what is this dude’s fucking problem anyways? Why is he so desperate to get his mug in the papers and on television everyday? Will someone just give him a two bit role in a South Indian film and let him get it outta his system? First he fucks with AIIMS, then he wants to outlaw smoking, now he wants to outlaw alcohol. Let me just say this to him.

THE COMMON PEOPLE NEED THEIR VICES MR. HEALTH MINISTER. IT’S THE ONLY THING KEEPING US FROM RUNNING WILD IN THE STREETS AND LYNCHING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS.

That goes double for Dixit and the Gandhis. And you politicians know where you can stick those adverts too.

So anyways, no more Times of India. It pisses me off too much nowadays (as you can see). Between The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times I think I’m killing enough trees as it is. The news is filled with stories of how print newspapers are dying. I say it can’t happen fast enough.

I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

This is the new Microsoft OS for Smart-phones (for those masochists who don’t get enough of the awesome ‘Windows Experience™’ on their computers. Thwaack! Thank you sir! May I have another?)

Notice how even in the demo the phone isn’t actually doing anything.

Oh and BTW! My favourite part of all this? This might be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPhone. It’s iPhone killer as it were.

And what have they called it? The MyPhone! LOL. This shit just writes itself! I don’t even have to try with stories about these monkeys.

Thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. I’m here all week.