Fox spin

It's Diwali for the fortunate but not for those whose family members were killed while finishing their Diwali shopping in Delhi.

I never watch FoxNews as it might give me hypertension at this age. But on Saturday I happened to catch the coverage of the Delhi Blasts on Fox News.

For the uninitiated, Fox news calls itself "Fair and Balanced" but is disgustingly biased towards the republicans and policies of GWBush. And that means they cannot blame Pakistan openly.

Here is how they reported it:

1. This seems to be the work of a local terrorist group, LeT.

The uninformed people would think that LeT has headquarters on the outskirts of Delhi. The fact that this group (amongst others) is actively financed by pakistan was obviously not mentioned.

2. Road Reporter: "There seems to be more to it."
Anchor : " Gee..Do you think it might be Al Qaeda?"
RR (from a script probably): " No. It might be Iran. India recently messed with Iran by siding with US on the IAEA issue."

MASTERSTROKE!! Basically, divert the whole attention away from Pakistan. Blame Iran and use this in future to make a case of War Against Iran.

3. Get this. The only mention of Pakistan was in a positive light.
"Govt of Pakistan has expressed its deepest sympathies. India and Pakistan are moving ahead with the peace process. India has even agreed to open borders blah blah blah"'

Do people at Fox really think that they are making world a safer place by reporting news this way?

PS: Axe, do you seriously think that there is a chance that no Pakistani is involved in this?

Delhi Blasts

I was about to send the weekender when I saw this news. I just don't feel like posting the weekender for this week. We will do it next week.

This is what we get after helping people trapped in bunkers. I cannot even begin to ..

The Mumbai Saint

Sometime back I had mentioned that Dixie and I watched a movie called "Boondock Saints". The movie goes moves around a bit before settling in a pattern: The Two brothers, main guys, nicknamed Boondock Saints by the media, take a job to kill a bunch of bad guys. They arrive fully armed to do their job, we don't see them do anything, next thing we see is a crime scene full of dead bodies and this detective, played by William Dafoe, finds clues and recreates the crime. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The last time that he recreates the scene, he sings. By that time he is convinced that these guys are doing some good work and it is a nicely choreographed sequences where he sings and dances, almost praising them, and the Boondock Saints annihilate their enemies in the background as he narrates.

If you haven't seen Sachin bat in the last two ODIs against SL, you would not know why I remembered this. After watching his innings, it was difficult to put that experience in words. But then there is always Harsha and his art of writing.

I could not have put it better than this. Enjoy the Article! For added effect, imagine that straight defensive push racing to the boundary or that paddle shot off Vaas or the way he greeted Murali today with two consecutive boundaries, stepping out and hitting the first one over the bowler's head.

Hey I got some pictures:
The Sweet Sweep (notice, no Wk ..this was to Vaas)
Hello Mr. Muralitharan, remember me?

Dravid as a captain is just what the doctor ordered and he and the rest of the team are going to rock. I watched live cricket after a long time and I kid you not, it was better than winning a 50-49 Team Slayer Halo game.

Leak

Nah.. I am not talking about the CIA leak from the white house.

Yesterday, we had a leak in our house. In the evening we heard the dreadful "dib...dib...dib" and then, get this, I saw water coming out of an electrical outlet. We switched off the power to the living room and the leak stopped when we switched off the main water supply.

Mario came in the morning promptly and found that the upstairs basin had a lose nut. The water was coming through the wall and falling on the box that enclosed the sockets. Mario mentioned that this could have happened because of vibrations.

Do you know what this means?

It means only one thing..yes you guessed it.. MY SUBWOOFER WORKS!!! :)

A couple of pictures from our Saturday drive.


It was the first time I found a cat "cute". She was roaming in a state park. A little camera shy though.













The colors are coming. One of the best natural phenomenon. Someone up there loves spray-painting.

Weekender #2

ERRATA: JKK has been changed to CKK. Sorry for the typo.
I will try to continue these until there are two consecutive weekenders that nobody attempted.

As some of you might recall (all three of you I mean), I was planning on a word puzzle. I wrote it down on a piece of paper when we were waiting for food in an Ethiopian restaurant (we waited 50 min but the food was great.) Anyway, I lost that paper. I will try to find it tonight and maybe add to this, so watch this space for updates.

Two questions this week:

1. Find the word(s) that contain these sticky three-letter sequences.
The conditions:
a. These should not begin or end the word.
b. These must be together(sticky).
c. No plurals.

e.g. If the Sequence is T-R-E, You cannot answer TREe or CenTRE(rule a)
and sTRipEd is not a solution either (rule b). A good answer here would be sTREet.

Ofcourse, most sequences will have more than one solution, so have fun.

KET

ENC

OWA

RST

KEN

EGI

RGA

LCR

ERJ

CKK


2. This is a real world problem.. not a problem but something that we realized the other day when we were walking in downtown. The convention center next to our office has an elevator that moves between its two floors.

Along with the usual emergency buttons, it has buttons like "Floor 1", "Floor 1.5", "door close" and "door open". If we consider *just the current way* it is being used(no future expansion etc.), how can we make it more efficient? Should we rename the buttons? Can we get rid of any button/functionality and/or replace it with something else?

Fantastix

Mom and Dad are with us and yes, that means we got a lot of goodies.

Axe's Asterix post brought back those memories : I would be reading these comics in a corner, laughing to myself and people around me would be unable to understand what those books could possibly have to trigger these reactions. The last time I read a bunch of Asterix was when I was at Dixie's place. So I asked Dad to get me some Asterix.

With the three books that he brought, I have started to collect them once again. BTW, the shop where he got it from had to dig deep to find them as they are not in demand nowadays (thanks to ZEE/Sony/Playstations I guess). That shop had only 3 of them and since my dad knows the owner, he got a discount. How much you ask.. well he paid INR225 for 3 of them.. that is right!! 3 Asterix for $5. WHEEEEE!!

My nephew (7 year old) wanted Tintin DVDs and I got copies for myself too. About Tintin books, I have all of those 3 in 1 sets of Tintin + lake of sharks and I am pretty content with my Tintin collection. The whole collection is still safe in India though, I don't even trust myself with it. Someday I will try for the ones that were never published in English and transfer or duplicate all the English books here too.

When I get home, I will upload the pictures of Asterix cover pages.

Speechless by CNN??

Can't be speechless when I can blog, can I? :)

From a CNN article

"Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday urged India to allow the people of divided Kashmir to help each other deal with the disaster. India agreed with rare speed."

Is this backstabbing leader going to *urge* India to act in the best interest of human beings? Is the leader of a nation that has been exporting terrorists for more than a decade going to ask India to *allow* people to help each other?

I request CNN not to repot matters that are totally alien to them. Stick to your live telecast of Gulf Wars.

This is after India was one of the first nations to offer aid to Pakistan.

This is after Pakistan rejected India's initial offer of aid and literally begged for aid on TV to other nations. I saw this on TV, Musharraf and Shaukat were short of a katora. They even had to beg to their own contrymen. Pity!! Click here for a possible reason for this.

This is after Musharraf planned Kargil when Vajpayee and team were having tea on the friendship bus to Lahore.

The article is dated October 18th. Why isn't there any mention of this? Wasn't that how Pakistan reacted to "speedy aid" from India.

Kutte ki dum kabhi seedhi nahi hogi.

#1 Solved

Anon has posted the correct Solution to weekender #1. I hope I don't manage any confusing wordings anymore. The solution is in comments of the weekender #1 post.

The next weekender will be some word puzzle.

And I am watching Season 5 of Sopranos, the only Soap that I watch and the coolest one there is.

In news,Australia won the SuperTest convincingly and now ICC is not sure if the SuperSeries will happen again or not.

Congratulations to Rahul Dravid who became a father and was chosen to lead Team India for the next two series. Excellent week for him.

And for some unknown reason I feel like mentioning that Anand is the first Amitabh movie that I watched.

Weekender #1

Update Added at the bottom of the post.


We used to have weekender puzzles in BITS. Every weekend, there would be puzzles posted on mess notice board along with the names of the winners of the last week. Fun times!

We do it sporadically on our mailing list. I hope to be more regular as finding newer and cool puzzles is not that easy. I found one though:

You have a chess-board *grin*. You have a rectangle whose longest side is shorter than a side of this board. You place this rectangle randomly on this chess board with just one condition: Sides of the rectangle have to be parallel to the sides of the chess-board.

Now the question:
What is the condition that needs to be satisfied to ensure that the rectangle has equal amounts of both colors(black and white) inside it?

Update:

Maybe this was a little confusing puzzle for weekender #1. Here is a little clarification and what exactly I am looking for.

Ok. There are two types of rectangles that satisfy this.

Type A rectangle can be placed anywhere with sides parallel to chessboard grid and it will satisfy the condition.

Type B rectangle needs to be placed in a certain way on the board as randomly placing it cannot include equal amount of black and white in all cases.

What is a Type A rectangle?
What is a Type B rectangle and what is the extra condition for Type B?

I should not have used the word random in the original post as it is true only for half of the rectangles. I hope this clarifies it.

Tag board deleted

I am going to delete the tag-board. It is triggering pop-ups from my blog. I use firefox that was blocking the pop-ups but I used to get that message that a pop-up has been blocked. But not everybody uses the pop-up block feature and the tag-board is not very useful to overshadow this annoyance.

Maybe I will write something on my own someday or *shudder* pay for the service.

Meanwhile, enjoy this Honda Ad is you haven't. Don't forget to read the description.

Or Appreciate the balance.

Or Read about this research on US Postal Service.

Aussies win the Super Series

It can be argued that Aussies were playing for a place in the team/to retain their place etc. But the way Shane Watson ran Sehwag out reminded me of Inzy's runout by Jonty.

If India has to make a serious attempt to reach the top of the table, the team needs to reach this sort of commitment and the desire to win. Australians also do have regionalistic attitudes but end up selecting the best team and once they are in their baggy greens, they play as if their lives depend on it.

As a start, Indian team needs to concentrate on one thing: Cricket!

Darwin Awards Hopefuls

Aaj Tak is showing home video clips in which people captured Earthquake tremors. There were three clips shown.

1. A boy 7-8 year old sitting on a sofa. His dad captured him and the swinging chandelier and the fan above this kid. The kid says something and then the man is heard asking his son to go out while he keeps videoshooting. This clip of 5 seconds ( I counted) was shown 9 times (for 45 seconds) consecutively.

Now if you are in a house experiencing earthquake tremors what would you do:

A. Take your kids and run out to safety.
B. Keep video-shooting the swinging chandeliers and fans.

2. Next video was of swinging chandelier for 3 seconds showing for 1 minute and the guy says " Look a (sic) earthquake.".. as is he is sight-seeing. " Look Eiffel Tower."

3. The third was more realistic. Three friends are sitting on sofa. There is a coffee table in front. Suddenly tremors start and and the guy who is in the middle suddenly stands up, jumps over the table and runs out. He actually used the guy on his right to propel himself forward (grabbed his shoulder and pushed him back to go forward). Maybe I should say "three people" and not "three friends".

All the channels are showing what you should do when Earthquake hits. My wife just made an excellent point that we should show these tips after news or some other time also. Its hardly of any use when the main thing has come and gone. People might forget all these tips by the time they are really needed.

( They just showed some politicians using this opportunity to kiss some a*. One minister actually said that he thought it was the effect of the Prime Minister's earth shaking speech. You are getting that portfolio that you always wanted.)

Earthquake October 8th

A 7.4-7.6 Earthquake hit parts of India and Pakistan today. I never knew Kashmir was in Earthquake zone (it is a high risk zone BTW). But nowadays that does not matter. Natural disasters hit anywhere anytime, not only at places under the highest risks.

Precisely at the time when tremors were being felt in Kashmir, I was watching Bill Maher on HBO (more on him later). The panel included Salman Rushdie too. I do not remember his comment verbatim but he happened to say how God is unhappy with the kind of people who are loving him nowadays. He said that God must be in a very bad mood and if he was God, he would feel like destroying something. A scary thought!

I hope Indian Govt. leaves no stone unturned in helping the people of our Jammu and Kashmir. This is a tragic situation but we might not get another chance to prove to locals which Government cares more for them. They must go all out and exceed all expectations of people.

24 Hour News Channels

A couple of days back DISH network added two more Indian channels to our package. "Aaj Tak" and "Headlines Today". So we have three round the clock Indian news channels now. The third being "Sahara Samay".

Most of us still remember the times when the daily 8:40p and 9:30p news in their monotonous format were enough for us. Domestic Politics first (Rajiv and Sonia waving while boarding a plane) then other domestic then International news and then Sports to end with (to be watched only if India won that day or someone took an excellent catch). The news channels are magnitudes better than what we had then since they are not all influenced by the ruling party unlike those in pre-cable era.

BTW, DD was/is so much under government control that I remember they were screening movie "Khoon Bhari Maang" once. Suddently in the second half the movie stopped making sense at times. It felt very disjoint as if they missed a reel. The explanation was in the next day's newspapers. They had cut all the scenes of one actor, Shatrughan Sinha, who plays the "good guy". Reason: he was contesting in the upcoming elections and that could influence the public opinion. Ofcourse he was (and still is not) from the ruling party. I guess it was a valid concern where people have elected Govinda based solely on his star appeal.

Anyway, back on topic: now since you have to report "news" for 24 hrs, you do two things:

1. You repeat the news till the viewers get sick of it. You repeat the news till the viewers get sick of it. You repeat the news till the viewers get sick of it. . well..you get the idea.

2. You create news.

I am quite familiar with #2 here in US. If it is a slow news week, suddenly there are Shark Attacks on the front page. Thanks to GW, we haven't had a slow news week for sometime now and as a result everyone is safe from Sharks.

Indian news channels (I am watching them regularly after a gap of 5 years so cut me some slack) are trying their hands at #2. *Every* news session has a story of some domestic violence in a remote village. If not that, then the other day there was a news when the reporters in a "sting" operation caught a corrupt *clerk* red handed.

In a country where Politicians literally get away with murder we are reporting corrupt clerks?? A guy who probably makes 5-6K a month accepts a bribe and it is national news?? Surely there are other big fish to be caught. There was a nationwide raid by ACB last week. How about giving us the names of the suspects and the list of the properties?

I am not doubting anybody's (news channels) intentions. A huge number of people are working towards making India and world a better place to live. Do we start at the bottom and work our way to the top or clean up the top and work our way to the bottom. We cannot ignore the latter.

BTW, Lalloo Prasad still makes me laugh even before he opens his mouth. Today I saw him holding a real wall-clock with a swinging pendulum and he was telling in his own style how RamVilas Paswan is like that pendulum. "Yeah Paswan bilkul iss Pendulum ki tarah hain.".. ( then he points his finger at the Pendulum and moves it with that).. "Na idhar hain na udhar hain".
[Paswan is like this Pendulum, he is neither here nor there]

I don't know who got that clock for him but it definitely gave me US-Election2004 flashbacks. Rove would have loved this analogy to describe Kerry.

Tag Board Added

I have added a Message board at the bottom right. This is in case you want to leave messages that are not related to any blog posts. We can have an asynchronous chat session through this.

I used the one provided by http://www.tag-board.com/

I do not want to clutter the page but I believe you will have to scroll down to view it unless you have a gigantic monitor so it does not look bad at the first sight.

That 1994 Gem

1994! A year that most of my friends and I remember for a very special reason that happens to be at the border of Rajasthan and Haryana. It is also remembered as it gave our world a gem of a movie called The Lion King.

Our modest DVD collection has all the Pixar movies, some "non-animated" movies and The Lion King. I did some adjustments to our home theatre yesterday and watched a good chunk of LK once again to "test" it. The movie is two degrees away from humans, it is an animated movie and it does not have any humans. Still, it touches you more than most other movies. It is a complete package. It has all of those NavRas. (There are nine major emotions that we can experience. These are usually shown in some never ending dance sequence by Indian classical dancers, the only thing longer than this being the "Dashavatar" dance.)

LK has all of them to some extent and just like a dish that has all the ingredients in right proportions, the resulting taste is out of this world. So what are these emotions and lets see if we can remember where they featured. It can be argued that most movies have these, especially Bollywood, but it is extremely difficult to get them right.

1. Bhaya (Fear): When Simba is caught in the stampede.When Simba and Nala are cornered by the Hyenas.
2. Bibhatsa (Disgust): What you feel with Scar's character.
3. Karun (Compassion): What you feel for Simba when he finds that Mufasa is dead and runs away in guilt.
4. Hasya (Humor): Timon and Pumbaa, need I say more? ("The monkey is his uncle?")
5. Shringar (Love): Simba and Nala's romance.
6. Veer (Courage): The fight at the climax. Simba and Scar going at it in slow motion. Mufasa's voice etc etc.
7. Krodh(Anger): When Simba finds out the truth. Another emotion you feel when Mufasa dies.
8. Shanti(Peace): Simba's birth. PrideRock's return to normalcy.
9. Adbhut(Amazement): What you get with this whole package.

A perfect blend.

Some of the scenes that can be treated as benchmarks:
1. Rafiki showing Simba to the Kingdom for the first time, Simba's eyes a little scared, the background music and the happy animals bowing down one after the other.
2. Rafiki and Simba. (the whole "Correction! I know your father." scene).

And the goosebump-meter needle goes wild even when I remember the majestic run of Simba back home.

Now if you excuse me, I think I am going to watch these scenes once again.

Bye for now and Hakuna Matata!