Sound Familiar ?

Seeking matches for Anita Jain

It's that stage of life, fellas. I know that the majority of this blog's members are sick-and-tired of this stuff. So I thought to myself, "why not give them some more ?"

I initially braced myself for the typical ABCD rant against fobs and des but by the end I was feeling sorry for her. Those of you who have just opened a new browser window and are typing her an email proposing marriage, don't bother. Yours truly already on the case.

The Mooring of Starting Out

John Ashbery

Should explain my presence first. CJ was bemoaning the lack of light-hearted vituperation on this blog, and suggested I do something about it. Most of my hatchet-work will be done in the Comments section, the posts will be just vanilla...

What a journey it has been for John Ashbery: from not existing at all to becoming the eminence grise of American poetry! "Flow Chart" is required reading for the computer scientists among us: nowhere else have I seen such a brilliant and exhaustive exposition of the idea. A certain astronaut and his buddy may be interested to know that Ashbery was once a quiz kid of national renown. The arcane facts and references strewn about his poems are but fragments of this previous life.

Modern Music

Levine, Harbison and Wuorinen

Here are excerpts from a three way discussion that appeared in yesterdays NYT. Even though most of you may have already read it, I had to post it just in case -- it is one of those "must read" articles. I was expecting more fireworks though -- all three have their own distinctive musical philosophies are are quite outspoken.

Here is the complete transcript.

Backyard Cricket

Rules

Okay, I know every self respecting cricket fan would have seen this eons ago. Still, I think there's a chance this might be new to at least one of you.

Some Open Problems

From The New Scientist

Most of the problems described are from that messiest of all empirical sciences - cosmology. But there are some that might be new to most of you ...

Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Reviews

I had read this book sometime back and re-read a random passage today morning while having breakfast and re-realised what an absolutely fantastic book this is. The book deserves all and more of the praise in the reviews.

Most books have a narrow scope. They lack ambition to begin with. The narrative of this book has a very Indian, expansive and all inclusive structure. I say Indian because this kind of "complexity" is commonplace in our folklore. Contrast this with the comments in the Guardian review for example.

On some level, one can say that Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra have a lot in common - scope, narrative, improvisation etc. - but I'm surprised that Chandra's book isn't as popular as some (or even the best) of Rushdie's tomes.

Treatise on Boredom

by Lars Svendsen

Apparently boredom was invented around the year 1760 along with the steam engine. Too bad, we were all born in the wrong century.

Amul-ya moments!

Bread and butter of Indian ads

Bharat Dabholkar's brain-child that has sustained itself through the years and retains that freshness about it. Click around and you won't be able to stop. For you news junkies, I thought a particularly enjoyable exercise was to go back 10-12 years, click around, and recount the events. Startlingly, not much has changed! The butter was good too...

All Questions Answered

Art FAQs

Here are some straight answers to some of those burning questions we've always had at the back of our minds - when to clap at a concert, what to wear to a theatre, how to tell whether a dance performance is good or not ... the article though geared for a Chicago audience is still quite useful for hicks all over the world (that includes all of us, folks).

Hitler's Butler

The Hitler Book

Is it just me or has it become well nigh impossible to find a trustworthy butler nowadays ? First there was Princess Diana's butler writing a book of intimate confessions, then it was Charles' turn to get his rear exposed by a trusted member of his domestic staff -- transgressions that would have, in former times, got a butler defrocked before you could say "What Ho!"

There is some stuff in the Times article that might be of interest to trivia buffs (you know who you are) but on the whole it's the same old crap. So Hitler was kind to his dog and could tell jokes as lame as the next guys' - what's new ?

Face-off : Zizou vs Zola

Greatest French Person

If you thought American Idol style popularity contests were limited to living people, think again. TV audiences can now vote off historical figures. Wisdom of the masses, yo.

The ABCD of humor

So-called ABCD humor
More of the same

Want to impress ABCDs? Want to be the life of that ABCD pardee? Did you say you want to be a laugh-riot at that next do? It can be yours for a low low fee of nothing at all.
The 10 commandments for you and your ABCD pals to double up with laughter

1. Picture yourself as one of those rap stars. Not a stretch, given the way you try to talk and walk.
2. Any word can be made to rhyme with FOB -- even chaat, marriage, outsourcing, and biodata
3. Every sentence should contain one of jalebi, samosa, or chutney
4. Put on that accent, we know so well
5. Any attempt to be actually funny and to explore anything outside the above topics will be strictly shunned.

Turns out there are only 5.

Knuth on NPR

Founding Artist of Computer Science

If you have 10 minutes to spare. Includes a bit on Knuth's views on God.

Bon Reviewer

Mahmood Farooqui

Mahmood Farooqui is a journalist with Mid-day. He is an erudite reviewer, who alludes to a deeper essence of Indian movies (clearly missing in your regular rediff/sify type movie reviews) as well as the filming art itself. Moreover, anyone who talks of framing techniques and justifies 'bade miyan chhote miyan' being ranked along with the best Indian cinema, has a 20/20 perspective on life.

This 3to6.com portal is generally worth browsing around too.

Mal Rhetoric -- Summers (en)Lightning

Larry Summers' infamous speech

I'm not sure how many of you actually got a chance to read the text of Larry Summers' speech. Its a delectable exercise in rhetorical analysis (a HOWNOTTO of sorts). Peppered with wild speculation on sensitive issues backed by minimal scientific evidence, the speech does contain some interesting observations about diversity in science and engineering. Unfortunately, too caught up with the way things are, this is completely backward looking speech.

Some More Inanities

An article on Science Writing ?

Here's an article purportedly about the recent glut of "popular science" books most of which have turned out to be (deservedly) unpopular. It is interesting how the author abandons his original subject and suddenly launches into a diatribe against science itself.

Of course anyone can give tons of examples of scientific research that is basically garbage - but that is true of any field and has been true for the last 50 years at least. This phenomenon has nothing to do with the success or lack thereof of "popular science" books. In any case many of these books, particularly those on 20th century physics, do a pathetic job of presenting "real science" (blind accumulation of facts ???) and are therefore excellent dustbin material. Ergo 20th cent. physics is dustbin material too ?

Logical thinking doesn't seem to be the author's strong suit despite his scientific credentials which I strongly suspect were acquired through the correspondence courses offered by the University of Yoobudoobu.

Is Linux obsolete?

Linus vs. Tanenbaum

A good flame war :-) even if it was fought 13 years back.

Explosive effect

Don't put the pin back on this

CBS sought survivors and NBC sought contenders and Donald Trump chaprasi's (Chapprentices if you will). Hamra zee music would not be outdone. It sought the next "item bomb" in nothing less than an item bomb hunt. In creaucodile-man Sanjay Dutt's words, "this will rock".

The Making of The Hunter Gracchus

from The New Criterion

Here's a great essay by Guy Davenport (a former Wustl prof) on the Kafka piece. I have always found it interesting that many modern artists get their material from unexpected (sometimes even kitschy) sources - Stravinsky was a lifelong Tchaikovsky fan, Borges admired Kipling, Ashbery is a self confessed addict of cheap paperbacks etc etc.

Disaster of pyramidal proportions

Amway/Alticor/Quixtar Sucks!

Some amway/quixtar fellow waylaid me today. Had the most interesting time observing this sub-species of kingdom animalia. More about that later. For now, here's a site with a lot of information about this. But forget all that, check out this dateline video . Those amway conventions have to be seen to be believed.

Desi sitcom status report

Indiantelevision dot com's Perspectives: Indian television - a comedy of errors

Children, a little heads up about sitcoms in India. 'Yeh jo hain zindagi' is still the benchmark, apparently. I think those hasya kavi sammelans on DD were the funniest thing I've seen on desi TV.

Another take on IWE

Naipaul speaks 'home truths' about India

An excerpt relevant to our previous discussion on the cult of authenticity (also related to my comment about implicit "target audience"),

Do not go courting the West, look homeward -- this was Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul's message to Indian writers who wished to make a real contribution to the intellectual life of their country.

"Indian writers, especially those writing in English, prefer to publish books abroad in the hope of greater glory and bigger rewards. That's why Indian writing tends to be exotic," said Naipaul here Friday.

Endings

SF Chronicle

Java's comment on novel endings reminded me of an interesting article I read a while back in the SF Chronicle. The article mentions many great examples of how an ending can make or break a story but I will temporarily take the stand for the contrarian viewpoint with a single example - the movie "The Big Lebowski" is an amazing and completely satisfying movie despite its relatively weak ending.

An ode to myself

Book review of Shashi Tharoor's new book

Since we've had posts on Shashi Tharoor, Stephanians, Indian writers, "Indianness", Maximum City, bad books ...

The unforgivable sin ...

... of noticing beauty

John Rockwell, an NYT dance critic, stirred up a hornet's nest recently when he wrote that for ballet dancers looks do count for reasons of (among others) "dramatic verisimilitude" and "romantic allusion". I don't think that this claim is in any way self evident. Opera singers for ex. often suffer from what a rhetoric prof once termed as "the problem of the undistributed middle" and I've seen pictures of Indian classical (male) dancers whose figure and face was nothing to write home about.

The article brings up some interesting points about how the 'hotness' of a performer colours our judgement in both positive and negative ways.

Can you believe this ?

Bittersweet symphony:HindustanTimes.com

Appeared yesterday in the Hindustan Times. This musician apparently has all her senses hardwired together - a C-sharp minor for example looks red to her and tastes like ice-cream. Gives a whole new meaning to the term musical taste ...

ps: Sorry for the interruption/intrusion, but folks and fellow blOGgers, this is the 50th post on this bittersweet blOG. Right time for a commemorative link to the original OG page - Intrepid Man

Pat Metheny

on music he digs

A couple of weeks back I had to choose between watching a movie on Sun Ra ("The Magic Sun" by Phill Niblock) and going to a Pat Metheny concert. I chose the movie ... mainly because it was by far the cheaper option - PM is one of the few jazzers with a rock-star following.

Most of you are probably familiar with him - Kurt Elling covered one of his tunes (Minuano) in the album "Man in the Air". He is quite the eclectic musician and his recommendations are generally top-notch.

For all you arch post-modernists

Some food for thought

Two summers ere I assigned a similar project in a programming course I taught. The results were quite interesting especially in the case of a random walk on the text of Ulysses. You can check some of them out in the comments below..