real life John F Hickory

Who does'nt this guy hate?

Dog of the temple

Q: What do you call a stray dog outside a temple in Kerala?
A: God's own kantri.

Salman Rushdie in Madison

Ever since I read The Moor's Last Sigh, I've been an ardent fan of Salman Rushdie. His writing is such that, even if you don't like the story, you'll keep reading his books for the sheer beauty of the prose (case in point: The ground beneath her feet). No other author I've read (admittedly few in number) manages to string words together in an way which conveys emotion and conjures up images, and at the same time plays with puns, dabbles with double-meaning and sparkles with satire.

So imagine my joy when I chanced upon an announcement in the local newspaper that the recently newly-knighted author was to appear in Madison promoting his new book The Enchantress of Florence. So I landed up at the Borders store at 7:00 pm on July 11, 2008 to listen to him reading a few pages of his new book and answering a few questions.

A very healthy crowd was already assembled at the place by the time we went. I was quite surprised that so many Americans knew about Salman Rushdie, given that he generally doesn't write about America.(Then again, the fatwa has made him quite famous all over the world).
In the next half hour, Rushdie talked about his book, and the amount of meticulous research that went into it(apparently 7 years of research and 1.5 years of writing). He read half a chapter from his new book, relating the meeting of Qara Koz, the eponymous Enchantress and Argalia the Italian mercenary. He was witty and humorous, inciting quite a few chuckles among the motley group of people gathered there. After reading from the book, the stage was let open for questions, which he again answered with wit. Thankfully (and surprisingly) there were no controvertial questions or questions related to the fatwa etc.
So what did I come away with? An increased respect for one of my favourite authors and yes, an autographed copy of his new book.

Spam-o-rama

They say you can tell a lot about a man from the contents of his spam folder. (Who the fuck are 'they'? How do 'they' know everything? I've never heard this one, you just made that up, shithead. I'll ... I apologize for this schizophrenic outburst. I've taken the meds, and we're OK now ).

Anyway, I decided to find out what kind of a man I am(You're a loser). So instead of deleting the spam folder as part of my morning routine, I let it grow. For two days and three nights, the contents of my spam folder grew and grew and grew, until the Google sent me a warning about '100% of 6122 MB full: do you want to upgrade?'. Let's see what I had inside.

Like everybody else, I had the usual mix of Nigerian money scams, V1agRa ads, ads to increase the length of certain ... err ... appendages etc etc, so I'm listing only the interesting ones.

#1: No rain in Iraq
Like every American, (fucker, you're an Indian) I watch the news regularly about what's happening in Iraq. Like every American, I don't give a shit what happens to the damn Iraqis.(Yeah, we watch it for entertainment) What's the point of this spam anyway?: Buy this T shirt and the drought will stop? Were these T shirts made in sweatshops of Iraq and that's why they have a water shortage?

#2: PhDD
As a grad student planning to spend 5 years and two hundred thousand dollars in a small, bitterly cold, midwestern city in the vague hope of getting a 'Dr' in front of my name, this spam pisses me off. I mean, they can't even spell 'Masters'! And what's PhDD? Doctor of Dubious Philosophy? The only way this spam could have been real was if it had come from Bihar. But that's impossible since noone in Bihar knows how to use a computer.(Look what you've done. You've pissed off lots of people now.)

#3 WW3
CNN must have forgotten to report this. Yeah, that can happen, it's only World War III not like Superbowl or something.

#4 KQA
Now why in tarnation would Google classify a mail from Arul Mani as spam? (Coz you pressed 'This is spam'.) Has KQA started selling V1agrA in order to pay for prizes? (Did you listen to what I said? It's not spam). Is Google pissed off that their team got 0 points in the last KQA Corporate quiz? (Aaaaah!)

#5 Marketing disguised as spam
Come on, Microsoft! You can do better than that. I know Vista didn't sell very well and all that, but stooping so low? Gee, I know Vista's supposed to be full advanced and all, but claiming that it can cure diseases? 'both male and female'? What next, solving world poverty in SP1?(Ha Ha).

Things I did today

Spent 3 hours laughing at arbit things on cracked at pictures such as these:



Spent 2 hours killing dogs and generally going batshit insane in Postal 2 : Share the pain.