Guffaw

On the other hand, China is completely immune to the (anti-semitic) slur. Mention the Holocaust to the Chinese and they’ll think you are referring to the Rape of Nanking.
-- Xymphora

Twenty20

From an article on the Twenty20 format:

Every conscientious lover of cricket cautioned against the inherent risk of the format: in a pool of adrenalin-filled moments, how does one sift the outstanding from the irrelevant? With every six hit, every wicket taken, every catch snagged celebrated homogenously [sic], how does one determine the context?

Well, duh, the context is 13 needed off the last over; the context is scoring 36 runs in the penultimate over to post a competitive target; the context is...

I cannot for the life of me understand how paid columnists get away with this crap.

Quote of the day

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it's not real?"
-- Albus Dumbledore

The Celestine Prophecy / New Age crowd could not have come up with a more inspirational defining statement of their philosophy if they had tried.

I initially wanted to do a review of the book, but considering that it took me something like a month to finish the goddamn thing -- man does it drag in the middle -- it's probably not fair.

One positive outcome of finishing the book is that I can now go ahead and read Stephen King's review without the fear of running into spoilers.

Movie Review: Chak De India

Eminently watchable, mainly because Shah Rukh Khan doesn't have much scope for the kind of histrionics that make my hand start twitching involuntarily for the remote. Though there are some scenes -- the slo-mo stride through the tunnel after the melee at the McDonald's, for example -- where the usual Bollywood macho BS is evident, such scenes are mercifully few in number.

The barbs at cricket, though well-intended, seem overdone and artificial; especially the way the cricketer boyfriend is spurned in front of the paparazzi.

If you set aside the fact that the undisciplined-underdogs-transformed-into-champions by-coach-with-something-to-prove motif has been (ab)used by Hollywood at least 1372 times, Chak De... is definitely an entertaining watch, with the added bonus of rekindling some much-needed patriotism in the viewers as well.

Note to some folks in audience: guys, it's a given that India will win the championship -- it's Bollywood we're talking about, after all -- so don't tell me you *really* didn't know that the goalie saves the final penalty stroke?

IT superpower my a$$

The other day somebody was telling me how a typical day at work goes for him: come to work at 2 PM for the afternoon shift, log in remotely to 32 servers, check the CPU utilisation, check the memory utilisation, clean up system log files older than three days...

Oh, BTW, he has a masters from one of the top colleges in the country.