Hahaha!

Good for a whole afternoon of laughs.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all/

Amusement Update

A series of perfectly horrible movies has sent me running straight back into the arms of the written word. Now that I am all cosy from having read some lovely Asimov and lovelier Roddy Doyle I can talk about the awful movies.

   

 Laga Chunari Mein Daag. Now don’t ask me how I ended up watching it on the first day of release. First half was horrible. Rani Mukherji and her much used liquid eyes are much abused in city and the icky wince feeling gets worse with every passing minute. The cinematography is lovely, the Benares sequences look like extended Fab India advertisement and Ms. Sen-Sharma totally sucks at pretending she is small town innocent. The same morning I had read article in paper about how girls are turning to prostitution so they can put themselves through Oxford and Cambridge. Does our Ms. Mukherjee do that? Nein. Her sister might go to college but she herself must be the tragedy queen. Given how tragic she is, it is a  wonder she had any clientele.   Second half has a glowing Kunal Kapoor and becomes nice hindi movie which moves rapidly to happy ending for all. Much improvement on first half and therefore brings the movie up to the level where it can almost compare favourably with a 2 hour session at the dentists.

There was the Bhool Bhulaiya in between which was awful, slow and made me love Rajni. Then a Ben Afleck movie (Man About Town) watched in the spirit of ‘I am going to finish this movie even if it kills me’ – and it almost did. Most memorable line of movie from M. Afleck “I worked harder on my abdomen than my Marriage”. He certainly worked harder on it than on the movie!

Famous

The Romans it seems had a Goddess of Rumour and her name was Fama. She repeated all that she heard – first in soft whispers and then in louder and louder tones till all heaven and earth knew. And its from her name that we get the word ‘Famous’. Its a bit odd that the word is more ‘famous’ than the goddess , but hey! that is the way of celebrity.

Consider the case of the Mann-Whitney U Test. (Okay. The only reason I considered it is because my paapi pet sort of depends on it.) Still, I ask you to consider the Mann-Whitney U Test. Now if you will go back to the deep dark days when you did Introductory Statistics and some stupid prof droned on about non-parametric methods and sign and rank tests? Ringing any bells? (other than the ones that woke you up when you slept through that class).

 Anyway, the test itself is not so important. Its Mann & Whitney that I want to talk about. In whatever limited way, Mann and Whitney got famous enough to have a statistic named after them and their name is in print in hundreds of research reports and thousands of text books and yet, I can’t find their first names. Sigh. What kind of fame is that?

But then again all of us know of Diana, Princess of Wales. Some of us may even remember her maiden name – Diana Spencer but how many of us remember her as Diana Windsor?!

The Page Rank

After a brief exile from the online world I came back to discover that someone came to this blog after searching for “Mallu Sex”. Again!  I looked at ClusterMaps and saw a couple of new red dots in Australia. Now I’m stuck with this image in my head of desperate desi man sitting somewhere in the outback and going online to get some ‘cos all the Ozzy Girls have headed to Bondi Beach.  I have one question for this much deprived gentleman (or lady) and another for the gods up there that give us our search results.

 a) Why Mallu Sex? And how on earth can you tell that its two Mallus doing it? We’re all as brown as one another! And for the money, I’ll bet you could get anyone to fake ‘Oooh’ with proper Mallu accent if its sound quality you are looking for.

b) How on earth did my page turn up on the results? Once I could understand. Someone hit “I’m feeling Lucky” when they really weren’t. But thrice?! Someone is having a real bad run of luck or someone at the search engine is having a good time assigning page ranks.

Me Too!

Ye! I can finally decode things like V 05:19 F 00 to mean Virar Fast that leaves at 5:19. Now if only I can learn to travel on one of these without throwing up!

Throw Poos at the Screen, I Say!

After three weeks of saying,’This Week’ I finally made it! S showed herself to be a true kindred spirit. We not only talk together and start blogs with Hello World, we also think to watch same movies. Ye! In this third edition Jason Bourne finally figures out who he is. The pace of the movie is great though this version has some shaky camera work. Supposed to convey the chaos of story line and all, I know, but it only succeeded in almost giving me a head ache.

Story starts with journalist digging up Jason Bourne’s name and his connection to ‘Operation Blackfriar’. Evil CIA covert ops chappie issues order to kill said journalist. Fortunately for our journo Jason’s looking for him too. So a little chase around Waterloo station happens with Jason directing journo on how to stay ahead of his would-be assassins. Unfortunately our man decides to take matters in his own hand and gets  shot in the head, but his purpose in providing entertainment had been served. What follows is similar chases through Paris and Berlin and Spain and Morocco and finally in good ‘ol New York.

Jason gets his memory back, exposes the evil plot with a little help from a few women. He also gets the girl (one hopes!)and the cause of goodness is served. And I for one was extremely entertained while all this got done.

Johnny G and Other Adventures

What a lovely week this is, barring cricket matches that were washed out or that you wished were washed out. Just as the weekend is done, one little Monday and back to holiday again. Before I know it, Friday evening will be here again. Ye!

Amongst other things, several movies have happened over the past few days – so much so, that my movie watching rate now easily beats my book reading rate.

There was Johnny Gaddar over the weekend at the friendly neighbourhood Hub. I love this cineplex. Tickets always available, no queues for the popcorn and the experience of watching a movie with 32 people in theater that can seat 10 times that number – unbeatable experience. That last gives me the feeling that the rest of the world is out there working hard and I am one the chosen idle few.

I’d wanted to watch Johnny G from the promos. The noir, stylized cinematography was full pull. I didn’t know anything else about it – director, most actors were all new or barely familiar faces. Now I want to get lot more familiar (purely in the third person) with the whole lot. Directed by Sriram Raghavan, Johnny G is thriller of best kind. Suspense is not in the who or the what but in the how. The story is of 5 partners in a deal to buy unspecified stolen goods for 2.5 crores and sell it at twice the amount within a few days. Dharmendra as the elder statesman crook named Seshu / Sesahdri is good. Vinay Pathak and Zakir Hussain as the warring  twosome are perfect but star of show is the  Neil Nitin Mukesh as the Gaddar who decides to steal the whole amount for himself. His intention for gaddari is limited to goods and not human life but things go badly wrong and each of his partners begins to die. No songs in the movie despite traces of some great music in the soundtrack, so the pace stays good and you stay at edge of seat waiting to see who’s next and how they die. Second half feels a little long but still a great movie! Fully recommend.

I’ve never been one to do movie marathons outside of a flight or even book marathons unless they are books of same genre. Mind doesn’t shift gears fast enough to go from Pixar to Pyaasa or in the book equivalent, Milan Kundera to Mills & Boon. Today though, all that changed. A’s hard disk plays host to several movies and the ones we picked to watch have more in common alphabetically than in terms of genre.

First pick (second actually – my tasteless companions didn’t want to watch Die Hard 4.0 again) was ‘We are Marshals’ – american sports movie. Total guy version of a chick flick these things are. This particular movie was about a small university in West Virginia whose football team, its coaching staff and some of its more dedicated fans died in a plane crash in the early 1970’s. In shock, the town and the univ manage to put together a team and send them out there the next season, where they win only their first home game (and that is where the movie ends). The team didn’t manage to win any title for the next 20 years and the minute they showed some signs of a winning streak, someone thought the ‘magic words’ based on ‘real story’ and voila – we have ‘We are Marshals’.

For more on the second, third ,fourth and fifth picks you will just have to come back later.