Summer of movies

Wifey and I both love to watch good movies. We both get bugged with typical run-of-the-mill movies (read: most desi movies). So while Netflix and public libraries contribute to satisfying the thirst to watch good movies, there is still the occasional indulgence towards typical summer blockbusters. So far, we're two into the summer movie season. Pirates of the Carribean - At World's End, and Ocean's 13.

Loved Pirates. Loved being able to loudly guffaw in the theaters. (Side note: Only Ocean's 11, Ice Age, and Pirates of the Carribean - Curse of the Black Pearl have provided for totally, utterly, and completely satisfying movie-going experiences. These three movies were a perfect synergy of disparate sources of joy - all coming together at the right place at the right time.). Granted that both movies sorta-kinda-desparately tried to live up to the glib-tongued smart-a** feel of their original versions, they were still good in their own merit. Weirdly enough, we've missed the third installment of two other successful movie franchises of the recent decade - Spiderman, and Shrek. And even more weird, we don't even care we have missed it. I guess you can only flog a dead horse ever so much.

Oh well...I am working up the reasons to convince her to go with me to see Ratatouille from Disney-Pixar, and maybe she won't need nudging to see HP-OotP.

Netflix is providing the nature-fix through the Planet Earth series from BBC/Discovery. Thankfully, they are shipping the Sir David Attenborough narrated version. No offense to Sigourney Weaver (she did a very excellent job in another amazing documentary - Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry), but in Planet Earth, her narrative is, to say the least, awful. Well, maybe the reality is that I am biased towards Sir David Attenborough's clear, concise and involved narrative. Maybe it is watching series after series of Sir Attenborough's works including Life of Birds, Life of Mammals, Blue Planet - Seas of Life etc. Maybe it is also the knowledge that he is actually a field guy (an expert even) in wild-life reporting. Whatever it maybe, watching Planet Earth seems that much more complete with his narrative.

You can experience the difference for yourself here in the US - watch Planet Earth Wednesday nights on Animal Planet, and then get your hands on the Attenborough-narrated DVDs selling through retailers or available to rent at your neighborhood or internet video store.

Next up on the 2-do-list - classics and yesteryear black & white features...afterall, "our" movie is one such b&w classic - the evergreen (or should it be ever-black-and-white???) "The Shop Around The Corner".

Eating Out vs Eating In

Eating out is the new eating in, or so claims this feature on MSN Money, and lists two peoples opinions to substantiate the purported fact that eating out actually comes out pretty even on dollar terms to eating in (also known as cooking at home).

That is as fallacious as can get in terms of substantiating an argument - take two premises, make comparisons on essentially uneven terms, without establishing common ground, come to conclusions on those uneven terms, and then proclaim one argument as the winner over the other...and the media companies wonder why people are skeptical of their reporting?

Take the first example of a person who would get off with spending $17 plus tips on dining out on hand-stuffed ravioli slathered with puttanesca sauce as opposed to about $30 for cooking at home (you know, driving to the farmers market, buying organic veggies, spending an hour cooking etc). Another dude goes as far as counting his hourly rate to the cooking time and opines that taking out his family to eat would essentially come out to the same...

Crunching numbers, this is supposed to prove that eating out is cheaper. Count me as one of the skeptics to this theory, and also to the veracity of this feature. For one, both the examples are set on uneven terms. Hey, the second dude factors his wages for cooking at home, but not for his waiting at a restaurant for his food to arrive etc...and the first dude prefers organic veggies for home cooking, but would rather eat cholesterol-laden ravioli made from non-organic stuff at a restaurant...comparison indeed.

Heck, the simplest logic demands that eating out be more expensive than dining at home. Just the simple fact that eating out is a convenience, and any convenience costs money. That's why a cup of coffee that otherwise costs about $0.10 sells for at least $0.99 at your local gas-station. Do the math...and enjoy dining out, because that is indeed an occasion to indulge the senses...

"Looking For Comedy In the Muslim World"

Diversity. In language. Mannerism. In speech. In contexts. Its everywhere. So it should be no surprise that people have a hard time understanding each others' idiosyncracies. Be it at the individual or family or ethno-religious or national context. A lot of times, we seem to be at logger heads. Being the curious people that we are, we want to try and understand the other.

And when we fall flat and fail to understand, it is because of one and only one reason - the effort was not honestly unbiased.

Looking For Comedy..the film, is the story of one such attempt by the American Administration to understand what causes the Muslims to laugh. Tragically, they use the means of a Hollywood comic, Albert Brooks to achieve their results, and well, the result is a comedy of errors, culture shock, and misunderstandings bordering on the comic. What is perceived as a job well done by the Brooks' character is actually a botched job that may have resulted in precipitating the already tenous relationship between India and Pakistan. (Talk about difference in perceptions).

What this movie so adeptly underscores is that, despite best efforts to actually try and genuinely understand something, when we go into an initiative inadequately prepared, the result is inevitable catastrophe. Especially when the funny guy sent in by the government has had no prior exposure to the cultural subcontexts of the places that he is supposedly scouting.

Two poignant scenes that underscore the theme of the movie happen within minutes of each other...first, the State Department cohort sent with the comic asks the comic's secretary to tell him to "break a leg". Her response..."Oh please. Thats rude." The second is when, the comic has tried in vain to get the audience to respond to some of his stand-up jokes, he asks in jest as to how many in the audience knows and understands English. And much to his chagrin, the entire audience lifts their hands up.

Two vastly different experiences - one at an individual level and another at a group level that has the same symptoms of the vastly under-rated problem - the problem of understanding and appreciating multi-culturalism. When an effort is made to understand a different culture through the same lens as we view ours, the result is a grotesque misrepresentation of the glorious concept of cultural diversity.

Looking for Comedy is a fantastic indie that atleast has the guts to hint at our seeming inability to understand diversity on its own merits.

Baseball Bliss

Now, it must be said that thanks in part to a series of collapses over the past several years (2001 to the Arizona Diamondbacks, 2002 to the Anaheim Angels, 2003 to the Florida Marlins, 2004 to the Boston Red Sox and 2006 to the Detroit Tigers), bashing the New York Yankees for their collapse is becoming almost too sad. Almost. Because it is never enough to poke fun at those Bronx bomber fans with their sense of entitlement, bordering on the obnoxious.

So, to all those Yankee-haters amongst us, ESPN.com has this veritable top-ten list of Yankee collapses. And you may note that of the ten, five happened in the last six years. Must be that baseball players now no longer believe the "mystique" and "aura" of Yankee Stadium. Must be Curt Schilling's famous quote in 2001 ("Aura and Mystique sound like night-club dancers") is coming true. Afterall, night-club dancers do have their shelf-life and then they are just consigned to dust-bins. Thanks to the fawning New York-based media, we've been treated to stories of Yankee mystique and aura etc, and of how Yankee Stadium is the toughest place to play in etc. Now, thanks the same media, we can gloat over the failure of these paper-champs. Until their next such collapse.

Africa in America

Experienced part of Africa' Safari and Serengeti...atleast a percent of it...here in the backwoods of Arizona...at Camp Verde. Out of Africa Park. The Serengeti simulation is nice...I wonder if the fencing could be more discreet, but thats nitpicking, especially when an actual trip to Tanzania/Kenya is not on the anvil... Still can't forget the Ostrich picking on my camera and the Giraffe slobbering all over my hand and face! Or better yet..getting charged by a white tiger...albeit from behind a fence.

Global Warming

Interesting reads.

- Science Mag - NASA

- Real Climate - (more)

- (even more)

Am not sure what to make of the noise in Washington, dismissing the existence of global warming, but it sure smells more like rotten eggs, much like the rotten eggs that are stinking up Kansas with its intelligent-design as Science crap. Thank God I am not a teacher.

"World Champs" no more.

Apparently, the San Antonio Spurs have decided that their winning the NBA title makes them just that - NBA Champions, not World Champions. And who could argue with their case? Not when they employ two players from Argentina, that are the legitimate claimants to the title of World Champs. Atleast the Olympic World Champ.

Maybe, its high time that the champions of the NFL and MLB also gave up on the pretension of World Champion, and called it for what it really is - League Champion. Especially with MLB working toward the concept of a Baseball World Cup. But till that time, I will definitely take the direction that my Spurs are going in. Now, if only someone could drill this sense into the talking heads over at ESPN.

Straight from Cheapshots-ville.

/. had a link to the Singularity project of Microsoft. Clicking it brought this dreaded "nice" error trap page. And that is our image, from Cheapshots-ville.


Yes, a cheap-shot. An ungrateful cheap-shot. Especially when I love everything they are doing with Visual Studio.NET. And yet, what is life if you dont debase yourself, and join the chorus in taking potshots at Microsoft, the behemoth? This is an image capture of an attempt to view the page of the Singularity project of Microsoft, touted as an attempt at dependability over performance. And this error is proof why the concept is more relevant than ever.

(Same-day editor note: As of 2 pm MST, the link is working. Must be one of those curious "not-even-a-day-long" viruses that web-servers can contract on a daily basis.)

Miley Sur Mera Tumhara..

To the NRI, life now usually has a plethora of memories associated with their lives in India, oftentimes with a sense of deja-vu, and quite a few times, tinged with the sense of patriotism that, dormant when they were in the country, has bubbled up to the surface in all its unhindered fountain-like glory.

So it is, that today I felt the need to look up on that old classic filler song video, Miley Sur Mera Tumhara. You know, the one where various people would sing in their native tongues, but the words effectively meant - You and I, when united, become One.

Googling for that classic video actually yielded quite a surprise...enterprising MIT desis coining their own version of the vid, MIT ishtyle...
With kudos to their enthusiasm (after all, it is a rather elaborate recreation of the video) and preferring to ignore the "Americanization" of the video with shots of the Boston area, I do have to say it made for some rather really interesting viewing.

See for yourself. (Warning! The videos are atleast 10 meg in size...)

Country Roads

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue ridge mountains
Shenandoah River

If there was a song that was the primary reason behind a road-trip, this song was it. In mid-August of 2001, my friends and I planned on rendezvouing at a home in Iselin, NJ and then driving down to Seneca Rocks, WV for camping and white-water rafting on the Shenandoah. This took place over the labor day weekend of 2001 - September 1 to September 3, 2001 if you must know. Driving down that concrete stretch of highway nightmare known as the New Jersey Turnpike, ponying up upwards of 50 bucks on tolls alone, we rolled into beautiful rural Maryland and Virginia. Boy was it scenic...

Rolling country-side somewhere in rural Virginia..it had been just two weeks after heavy rains, and with the water re-charging the soil, there was that fresh green all around..absolutely beautiful..

Two predominant colors in the landscape...the black tarred roadtops and the nascent green of grass freshly sprouting following torrential rains of two weeks prior. And my, the gently rolling landscape dotted with white picket fences and grazing pastures for cows and horses, was like a scene out of some classic English poem.

ok, so I lied...it was not all green around..there was this hay field glowing a golden yellow in the mid-day sun...somewhere in rural Virginia...circa September 2001
And sorta true to the song, West Virginia did not disappoint with the blue ridges of the branch of the Applachian Mountains that run into the state.

Maybe, if you drink moonshine like John Denver proclaims in "Take Me Home Country Roads" you will proclaim that the ridge in the background is indeed blue! Meanwhile though, this place was amongst the most peaceful places I have been to....Seneca, WV...circa September 2001

Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growing like a breeze

I cant vouch for either, cuz I am younger than them all :)
But one thing is really for sure...life sure is simple there. And it seems like you stepped through some time-portal of some sort, because of the idyllic calm of the place gave an impression that time ran slower here than elsewhere in the country.

The peaceful hamlet of Seneca, WV as seen from summit of the Seneca Rock, a limestone formation that has weathered erosion to stand proud and towering over the town....circa September 2001

Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, mountain mamma
Take me home, country roads

If you wanna call a camping trip with almost no prior experience, as going home, then yeah..the country roads of W.Va took us home. Those three days spent white-water rafting, hiking and camping was sorta way outta the ordinary. Even though it is over three years removed from that trip, the memories are still as vivid as the day I was there - the low hanging mist during day-break, the chill that permeates the entire region during the night, the sun light falling on the face of the Seneca Rock, illuminating it like it was a beacon in the midst of swirling mist and fog.

All my memories, gathered 'round here
Miners lady, stranger to blue water
Dark and dusty painted on the sky
Misty taste of moonshine
Tear drops in my eye

I don't know nothing about moonshine, you see, cuz i am an in-bred country brute :P
Kidding aside, for what the song claims, I have to say that the air looked, and smelt and felt pretty clean. Possibly the cleanest air I have inhaled in the continental US.

Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, mountain mamma
Take me home, country roads

I hear her voice
In the mornin' hour she calls me
Radio reminds me of my home far away
Driving down the road I get a feelin'
I shoulda been home yesterday, yesterday!

We did our white-water rafting at Harper Ferry, WV, and then crossed the Shendandoah and drove along the shores of the Potomac, upstream. Often times, the road would deviate from the river and run into heavily canopied forests, where a brook would run by the roadside....

A rocky stony brook in Seneca, WV. Surprisingly, the water, while being just about upto the knee level, was still with a strong current..even more surprising...after all the rainfall that region had received just two weeks previously, the water level had subsided this far down.....circa September 2001

In the far distance, sunlight beamed on the road in areas where the canopy was missing...and it was mesmerizing and enchanting...not to mention, simply beautiful.

At last, some clearing in the canopy covering the state highway that leads into Seneca, from Harpers Ferry, WV. Almost straight out of a story book, there was a little gurgling brook running right by the road, on the right side of the picture....circa September 2001
Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, mountain mamma
Take me home, country roads

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mamma
Take me home, country roads
Take me home, now country roads
Take me home, now country roads

Compassion and Support from America

The sleeping giant has awoken, and realized the magnitude of the disaster facing South Asia. And boy, has the reaction been wonderful.

Aid pledge increased 10-fold from $35 million to $350 million, the USS Abraham Lincoln group of ships is in the Indian Ocean area, purportedly to provide help as needed off the Indonesian and Thai coast. Relief materials and aid being airlifted and sent by ships. Personal visits by Colin Powell and Jeb Bush.

And now, Prez Bush, along with the two previous presidents, Clinton and Bush Sr. are coming together in a fund-raising effort for the tsunami relief.

It is indeed wonderful to see the US government following the suit of its own public in the largesse being provided for relief. Remember, the American public had gotten into action way before Bush even stirred from his ranch in Texas to make a statement. Reminded me of 1986 and the USA for Africa relief efforts to combat drought in that continent.

From my heart, thank you..

Update
Weird coincidence...I mentioned about the 1986 USA for Africa "We are the World" relief effort, and now, that is actually a reality. The song is to be duplicated in Hong Kong, with Chinese lyrics, and a new name - Love, with the proceeds from the concert going for the relief efforts.

Hope for a centrist state

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/

This weblog by proclaimed liberals who are fed up with the right-wing is a good resource in an effort to get the country to veer off from the far right and into a more centrist mainstream.

Hope, it seems, is still there. And if you want to fight back them rightwingers, here is how.

Compassionate Conservative? What a bleeping piece of bullshit

What a joke of a response. The official US response to what is seen as the worst natural disaster of the last 40 years, is pathetic to say the least. Does it take a bleepin rocket scientist for a redneck goddamned prez to release a bleepin statement?

Atleast, on the brighter side, the American public were not in the same insensitive pathetic vein as the so called leader of the nation.

Another interesting link that puts the American Governments effort in sharp contrast to its shameless ventures into Iraq in search of oil. Also an expose on the pathetic twisting of facts that typifies the rightwing bastar**zed media. And the venerated WSJ is at it again, calling environmentalists as a bunch of hysterical leftwing liberals. And if I maybe so bold as to copy their style of news and analyses, they also called the liberals as anti-Americans and as un-American as they can be.

As for my parting guess...it is these so called left wing Americans who have probably provided the most for the disaster relief in south Asia.

F*** the South

(Bleep)the South

Pardon my French, but I sure cannot completely edit the fascinating acronym that means copulation with the Kings permit, or some such thing.

Anyway I digress....

Interesting read, about the American South. And yeah, I am a liberal...




Thanks Vish

Monday Toosday Thursday Wensday...

Its all in a days work for this orca doing a lively flip, one fine summer afternoon at the Sea World in San Diego, CA.






And this is all in a weeks work for yours truly...

if you know anyone that knows anyone that knows who owns the copyright, or if you just happen to know who I should credit for the copyright for this, lemme know and I will be happy to oblige....

The Grand Canyon.....enough said

Even the limited zoom capabilities of Kodak's C60 Advantix does not do injustice to capturing the breadth and depth of the beauty of THE CANYON...
hopefully one day I fulfill my dream of hiking down the Canyon and pitching camp overnight, 1 mile deep into the bowels of the earth....






Peace and tranquility...and oh yes, it does not hurt to be single-mindedly devoted to the task at hand for well over a million years...in this case the R. Colorado...at it...carving out the gorgeously colored rock strata that forms the Grand Canyon...

As different as night and day..the Canon way..

High res High aperture long exposure photograph, stabilized by placing on a pedestrian walk-way light..the view is of Jefferson Street looking east, in downtown Phoenix..



Canon PowerShot showing off its capabilities in daylight..well yeah...it was wet and cloudy..nonetheless..

SI.com - Burns: Spurs' quiet excellence a welcome change of pace.

SI.com - Writers - Burns: Spurs' quiet excellence a welcome change of pace - Wednesday December 8, 2004 3:00PM

Almost too good to a fault, these quiet and quite good players are the dream..an elite team with role players and superstars who understand the need for each other on court, yet a team humble enough to realize its own fallibility and hence does not let its on-court excellence translate into off-court negative brouhaha that seems to be following sports everywhere.

Branded as boring by the useless and hypocritical talking heads on ESPN and Fox Sports Net, they are everything people profess to want to see. But the same voices that raise up the crescendo when a "Malice in the Palace - a la Indiana Pacers brawling with Detroit Pistons fans" or a "Desparate Terrell Owens Housewives" saga comes on TV are no where to be found espousing the Spurs and their good-guy image.

You people that follow sport but cannot realize the Spurs for what they are, its your loss. May you have a wonderful time following your team.

Go Spurs Go!

It rains in the desert too....sometimes...

The rain gods have been a little kind to the desert south west recently. We've been getting sprinkles of rain every so often. And they have provided for some interesting scenery locally - what with excellent visuals of lightning strikes on the surrounding mountains, the flashes of driving rain against the backdrop of a gray sky, winds howling through trees making them look like they were stooping with age...

Other than helping the ground water level replenish by just a tad over an inch, what this rain has done has been amazing for the weather. Its freezing..thats what is amazing.
Its early December, which usually means mild to chilly weather in this part of the country. Instead, what we've had is freezing weather that began in the last days of November.

Without much more ado though, here are some views of Tempe under gray skies.


The clouds descended on Tempe this past weekend..they stooped so low, the 300 ft "A" Mountain top disappeared. It was cold and freezing with a driving rain. The lights of Sun Devil Stadium seemed to just show up the moisture hanging in the thick air...



Finally the rain let up. But the clouds were still lying low. A tad better than the previous pic...


View looking east along the "University Drive"..usually the Superstition Mountains are visible in the backdrop...but the visibility in this is hardly over a few hundred yards.....

Baseball, we have a problem!

Disclaimer: I am a fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and since they play the San Francisco Giants as a division rival, my views and opinions of the Giants are not necassarily fair and objective. What I am meaning to say is that I am enjoying all this hoopla surrounding Barry Bonds and drug-use in the sport of baseball.

Those of you who follow American sports closely, probably know by now all the issues relating to BALCO (the Bay Area Labs Cooperative or some such moniker) and its supplying performance enhancing drugs to various US athletes. Primarily suspected are track and field athletes and baseball players. Anyway the point of this all is that Barry Bonds claims that he used substances provided to him by his trainer and that he did not know they were steroids. Yeah right!

For those not in the know, Barry Bonds, one of the better baseball players to play the game, and a graduate of my school ASU, went from being a spindly (in comparison to his bulk now) frame when he debuted in the Major Leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates to a rather bulky/hulky frame. Conventional wisdom, and the talking heads on all sports shows that have dedicated themselves to yapping away at nothing (ESPN and FSN, take note!) would have you believe that it was all because of Bonds dedication to his body and work ethic, especially his strenous off-season regimen. And that may be the case too. But can that explain this sudden spurt in his body after the age of 35? Can this explain how a guy who never hit more than 45 home runs a season suddenly exploded for 73 in 2001?

US law has it that anyone is innocent until proven guilty. And it is nigh, but a good value to adhere to. But circumstantial evidence, emanating from the time of Ken Caminiti admitting to steroid use, to the sudden increase in the body mass of these superstars, which amazingly enough, coincided with their increased power production, has left many with questions in their minds - are Bonds achievements that of a supremely gifted super-star athlete? Or is it a Ben Johnson-esque flash in the pan fueled by steroids?

I will admit, we are living in an era when there are a bunch of super-star athletes around. World-wide, almost all major sports - team and individual - are seeing newer blood and talent, challenging the way we conventionally thought about the games.

We have 40-plus year old pitchers still pitching in the Major League Baseball like they were in their 20s and 30s.

We have a 35-year old quarterback leading a history-laden franchise of the National Football League (American Football) and still celebrating every score like a 5 year old kid on a playground, and this after having set some amazing records of durability and endurance.

We have bowlers who have set and reset records for maximum scalps in a career in International Cricket, and we have teams setting and erasing and re-establishing records for runs scored and chased to win Limited-Overs International matches.

We have tennis-artiste par excellence Martina Navratilova, at age 47, still competing in Grand Slam tennis tournaments.

So maybe it is just our lucky timing that we are getting to see tremendous offensive output in baseball. But it is still disturbing how callous the players union and the league have been treating the premise of drug-use and abuse in the sport. The National Football League has become pretty good at enforcing the substance-abuse issue and as a result, been able to establish itself as a league that is currently enjoying tremendous popularity amongst the American masses.

Hopefully, the league and the players union realize the hurt being put on what is a tremendous product. Baseball as a game, is a delight. No time constraints whatsoever, and hence the exquisite game generates pressure the unusual way - outs. Hopefully, this storm will come to a pass too, and Major League Baseball would be back up with a straight-face and claim that its atheletes do not use performance-enhancing drugs.

In the meanwhile though, I am going to sit back and enjoy the obvious discomfiture that these allegations must be causing to the fans of the San Francisco Giants. Hey, payback is often sweet you know! You should've known better than to put down the Diamondbacks franchise during our heydays from 1999 through 2002. Well, enjoy your currently rotten luck.