Earlier this year, in the summer I did a project where I met some of the sweetest, most adorable kids I have ever seen. Here is a Flickr photo-set of some of these children. Click the photograph above to go the the slideshow.

Here is the link to the set if you’d like to forward it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samreth/sets/72157624791781738/

No snarky comments from me in this post. These kids quieted the icy inner cynic in me, if only for a while.

Also I got the Hackintosh AFP server up and running. The sarcasm will be back in the next post along with some thoughts and advice on the project.

Be good.

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….

Maybe I’m getting old, maybe I just don’t get the music that those crazy kids are listening to these days but yesterday that changed. I was IM’ed a track that saved my frakkin’ lame-ass weekend and has been on single repeat on the iPod and the MacBook for most of last night and all of today. The big THX rated sub-woofer that sits at my feet has never been happier (Note to self: Stop anthropomorphising objects. They hate it!)

Despite its distinctly French sound it is actually by a German duo called Sirirusmo and Dana and it is called Gummiband, which means rubberband in some language according to the Google.

The first comment on the Youtube page on which I heard this song went something like ‘If this song went on for 12 hours I would never have a bad day ever again.’

I totally agree. If this track doesn’t make you want to get up and shake your ass then you are dead inside.

Be good, avoid assholes.

Steal the MP3 from the internets here.

Jack Johnson’s new album To The Sea was just released and its more of the same mellow sounds, he doesn’t cover much new ground here and these tracks could just as easily have been off pretty much any of his previous albums. Some would call this album middle-of-the-road and non-offensive derisively and they would have a point. If you are looking for artistic progression you’re going to have to keep looking, there’s none of that here. This track in particular, ‘My Little Girl’ is indicative of most of the album, simple if jaded lyrics and all.

But it isn’t all bad and I’m just happy to have new driving music that helps keep thoughts of vehicular homicide at bay. Honestly.

Get the MP3 Here and enjoy!

I also got sort of suckered into going to watch the new action film starring Angelina Jolie, SALT and here are some things I would rather do than watch that film again.

1> Be kicked really hard in my nuts by every single person in the cinema hall that night.

2> Be slapped really hard in the face by every single person in the cinema hall that night.

3> Listen to an entire Black Eyed Peas song.

4> Listen to Bono spew bullshit about starving kids in Africa for the duration of a Black Eyed Peas song.

You get the idea…

Be good, eat fruit, avoid assholes.

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….

This is one of them. Its a track called Swing, off Zero 7′s new album, Yeah Ghost. Even though the album is sort of all over the map in terms of style and not even half as brilliant as their previous effort (2006′s  ‘The Garden’ which featured José González and Sia from Sia & Sophie) it still has a few single-worthy tracks like this one and ‘Medicine Man’. It may not be a great album but at least there’s some jewels in there.

So, when the heat, the dust, the frakkin power-point presentations in the year 2010, the script-writers that throw hissy-fits and the less-than-ideal working environment get to me I turn up the iPod, listen to the steel drums and the AIR like vocals in this track and do deep breathing. Try it, I haven’t gone apeshit.

Yet.

As always,the MP3 is here.

Get lots of fluids, watch out for assholes.

PS: DIE POWER-POINT, DIE! WHY WONT YOU DIE!

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.

A couple of people have complained that all I have been posting for a while now are crappy music video links so here goes one last post before what I promise will be a full, angry letter to the internets type post about things that are eating my lunch, with the usual generous portions of cursing and vitriol.

In the meantime, enjoy this Scottish Anthem ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ by The Proclaimers from their 1988 album Sunshine Over Leith. I cannot explain how much fun it is to break into the chorus of this song at the top of your voice, in public, preferably in a heavy, butchered Scottish accent with an equally talentless friend harmonising with you. Joy!

You can then relax in the smug satisfaction of having disrespected another proud and historically rich culture by reducing it to a catchy song sung a cappella in a bad accent.

Scotland. CHECK!

Get the MP3 for your iPod here and sing it aloud with the voices in your head.

Be well, eat fruit and watch out for assholes!

One of the better tracks off Gorillaz’ latest album, Plastic Beach, out a few days back. On the whole the album is a lot more whimsical and subdued than their previous releases and nowhere near as catchy at first but it does grow on you. The tracks with Damon Albarn (from Blur) on them are much better than the various other collaborations featured on the album. (including Snoop Dogg)

Other great tracks on the album are Glitter Freeze and the title track, Plastic Beach.

As always, get the MP3 here.

Before someone bravely went forth past the barriers of good (or is that bad) taste and made a cover of The Knack’s biggest hit, My Sharona cut to some footage of Toyotas crashing into each other. It could have been done much better, the lead singer specially but it should still make you laugh despite yourself. If you haven’t heard about the world-wide recall of Toyotas due to accidents (some fatal) caused by faulty accelerator pedals then you ought to spend less time reading the internets and get out more. BTW: Get the MP3 of The Knack’s brilliant original here.

In 2003, British Jazz outfit The Cinematic Orchestra reworked this absolutely awesome track from their previous album Everyday as a score to Russian film-maker Dziga Vertov’s groundbreaking silent documentary film of the same name from 1929.

Get the MP3 here.

Also, since we are stealing from the internets and shit (and because Samreth is your friend) go get the entire ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ album here. You can thank me later.

Be well. Eat fruit and stretch.

Happy Valentine’s Day all!

May 15th 2002  -  February 2nd 2010

Extremely loving.

Occasionally misunderstood.

Often mistreated.

Desperately missed.

You had more of a personality than most humans I’ve ever known and for all the times I was mean to you I am so, so sorry baby.

.

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.

Just got this video of a to-scale visualisation of the size of the entire known universe from M. Watch it and then remember the scale every time you think of God, your life, your loves, your troubles, your time on this planet or your quest to leave this world a better place than you found it.

Hat tip to M for sending it to me. This must be so freakin’ awesome to watch after ‘smoking the weed’ huh?

Speaking of things that (I imagine) go well with psychotropic substances, here is a great house track I’ve been listening to off Roger Sanchez’s Release Yourself Volume 7 CD.

The track is Do The Night (Ricky Ryan Edit) by Applescal.

Enjoy the new year. Get the MP3 here.

Merry Christmas to all, whether you believe in the baby Jesus or not!

In the new year, may you have (in no particular order):

Belly laughs

Good posture

Healthy food

Interesting conversations

Big pay-cheques

Fulfilling work

Occasional bouts of the-floor-is-moving drunkenness

Lots of sore-the-next-morning sex

Be good, stay calm and eat fruit!

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)

So, the kid bro and I had a random instant messaging session the other day that ended up with us discussing women who we used to think were the hotness back in the dizzayy (a decade ago actually, when he was still a prepubescent little runt that ratted me out regularly and I was a teenager who had a three ring circus in his pants coz he was at his lifetime hormonal high) We traded opinions on what we thought of the fine ladies ten years later. (trout lips, scary ass chick, I’d still do her and the ubiquitous awwwwww yeahhhhh!) Which had two weird results..

1. I tracked down this song, Camino De La Vida from a decade old album by French artiste Sergent Garcia and had it blasting through an empty house (not counting the dogs) all weekend. The album is Un Poquito Quema’o and it is a funky blend of jazz and salsa and Cuban music with a bit of electronica that is hard to describe but listen and it will have you shaking your ass.

2. I finally got around to watching the Gul Panag starrer from a few years back, Manorama: Six Feet Under. As the first hindi film I’ve watched in probably a year, I’ve gotta say…… meh! Of course, Gul Panag’s dimpled smile makes me slack jawed and weak in the knees but she disappeared about a third of the way through the film and then there was nothing to distract me from the weak acting and contrived plot except for maybe Vinay Pathak (who directed a brilliant little short film that I saw at a film festival a while back but can’t remember the name off now for the life of me, but I digress..)

Anyways. There you go, a disturbing story, a film recommendation and a single repeat song for the week. Be well, eat fruit.

As always, get the MP3 Here.

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.