A Life Less Ordinary

Its been five months since I returned from Seattle, but somehow something or the other happens that invariably takes my mind back to my trip there. This is a post about some of those memory refreshing incidents that have happened since I got back.

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Grey's Anatomy:
My sister follows the serial, although I haven't seen more than ten minutes of it, not counting the constant promos on Star World interspersed with a song by 'The Fray'. Everytime I end up going home, she's called dibs on the remote whenever the damn serial is on air. The rest of the family sulks in other rooms until such time that the serial is finally over.

However, some evening, I was too lazy to go do something else and I ended up watching the first few minutes of the serial, only to see helicopter shots of the Space Needle, the Seattle Center and 3rd Avenue, after which my sister told me that the serial was based in Seattle. It was kinda cool to see an overhead view of the city and visualize myself having walked along those streets for the various arbit activities I'd undertaken.

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A Guy Thing:
Having seen Julia Stiles in 'The Bourne Supremacy' and 'The Bourne Ultimatum' as well as in '10 things I hate about you' (whose DVD is now selling like hotcakes since it starred Heath Ledger), I thought she was a real cutie, and since I was in the mood for a romantic comedy last evening, I picked up A Guy Thing from my friendly neighbourhood DVD store, only to find out that the entire frigging movie was based in Seattle.

Familiar streets, some shops I've walked past, references to Broadway and more shots of the over-rated Space Needle were enough to bring about feelings of nostalgia. The movie itself is something people can watch when they're feeling brain-dead, and still enjoy it all.

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The Hungry Tide:
The Hungry Tide, a book by Amitav Ghosh, and the second book by him that I've received as a birthday present after having been given The Glass Palace as a birthday gift a long time ago has one of its major characters based in Seattle. She's a marine biologist who's here on some research work, and during moments of reflection has her thoughts drift towards the city she's grown to call her own.

I've gone through only about a hundred pages of that book, given my currently pathetic reading speeds, but so far its not been a bad read.

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Gimme S'More:
I'd got enough chocolates from my trip to last me all of five months. I've been on a recent sweet consuming binge which has resulted in me eating ice creams, chocolates, sweets of all kinds and drinking unmeasurable quantities of Tropicana Twister, ensuring that my blood sugar levels have reached all-time highs. It was during one of these instances when I was gorging on a Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar that I was reminded of a S'more.

On my last evening in the city, I had been to a birthday party thrown by some of my 'native' friends (I used to refer to American citizens as natives) and while sitting out in someone's backyard surrounding a fire, sipping slowly on one beer for four hours to as to maintain levels of sobriety necessary to ensure I was at the airport on time the next morning, I was introduced to a S'more, and I can't honestly think of something else I've eaten that's so brilliantly sweet and tasty at the same time. I gave it my own name at that time, I called it a Hershmellow, because I guess I didn't think too much of the Graham cracker that was also part of the S'more.

Never pass upon a S'more if given a chance to consume one. In fact, ask for more.

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Starbucks, endless solo walks along all the streets, hanging out at the CHAC enough to be a regular there, working decently hard on weekdays and being unerringly slothful during the evenings and weekends, phone calls to India, fond memories of my entire trip and the good times I had have remained, and will be counted as one of the nicest travel experiences I've had.

The times they are a-changin, but the memories remain.

Yeah, I decided to take a page out of the livejournal owned by purely_narcotic and let my meandering thoughts be compressed such that different ones could fit into the same post. The only difference is that, my posts, pretty much like all episodes in all seasons of Seinfeld are about nothing.

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Journalistic Forays:
Citizen Matters, I discovered, has its own page for contributing writers and here is mine. The awesome thing is that the 'about me' section can be modified by people that own the page, and unlike in the two social networking sites that I have content on, this 'about me' might actually be read by some people.

As an aside, my piece on the lack of public space for Sunday Jams is on the front page of the newsletter.

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Two Hit Wonder??:
Just this morning, I saw the video of 'Love is Noise' by The Verve on VH1 as I was cleaning up all the nose hair I had trimmed with a jumbo sized vacuum cleaner, and I could think just one more video of theirs that came to mind that everyone has seen and heard of. However, I could think of one other song of theirs that I have heard on the radio - 'lucky man' and I was wondering why VH1 was airing 'Rockstar' by Nickelback about eight hundred times a day and not putting any other videos. Usher's latest song, that I switch off as soon as I see his face, also features on that list.

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Peter has no Principle:
Yes. Woe is me. I am within a ten metre radius of an anomaly that has defied the Peter Princple and risen above to seemingly vertiginous heights and I have no clue why!!! Further elaboration (read whining / bitching) on said matter will be done verbally to people who will ask - 'How's life?'.

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Breakfast at Tifanny's:
I now plan on growing a handlebar mustache and wearing a leather jacket that has a skull and crossbones on it. Additionally, I also plan to cut queues and eyeball everyone in sight. Maybe that will compensate for having received the Rough Guide to Chick Flicks as a birthday present in jest from a certain Simian, although said person will deny the jest bit in no uncertain terms.

To compound my misery further, I rented 'Breakfast at Tifanny's' because I heard Audrey Hepburn was such a babe, and ended up watching it. I think I should not trim my nose hair for all of next year, to compensate. Edit: I must admit, Audrey Hepburn is a real cutie.

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This pretty much concludes the first of my many "Notes about Nothing", although there's few other regular lengthy posts that I do plan on writing once the mood does happen. Maybe NaN will be a one time only venture as well, only time will tell.

While watching 'Last Comic Standing' on Star World on monday night, one brilliant idea just dawned upon me.

As usual.

What happens in that show, as does in most reality TV shows is that participants are eliminated, and in that long walk of shame that they embark upon when they leave the set of the show, the shot of them walking away is interspersed with their reaction on camera.

What I am about to propose has high entertainment value, although it is probably not the nicest thing to do, but then again, anyone who wants to be part of a reality TV show for whatever reason signs a contract which allows them to be made the butt of all concievable jokes.

A participant interview about their exit is usually conducted after they leave, while the others are interviewed for their reactions subsequently regarding that particular person's departure from the show.

What if a participant was interviewed to account for both scenarios before the verdict was out? Their reactions would have to dislpay both anger and joy at being eliminated or having to stay, respectively, and it would be a field day for the other participants as well as the producers and the camerapersons involved to see how people tone down / step up their reactions to react to the unknown possibilities that face them.

Then they should be made to face a third option instead.

(Evil laughter)
End of post.

I am glad I got rid of my ponytail, for more reasons than I can think of.

Among the usual ones that include saving on time for grooming (not that it had any effect anyway, and was done merely for formality's sake), saving money on shampoo and conditioner and life being more comfortable, I have now discovered one more reason for being thankful that I have short(er) hair right now.

I had switched from Pantene to Dove shampoo after it was recommended by a couple of my woman friends who probably thought I wanted soft, sikly hair that shone with all its glory and all that. It was also recommended by someone who swears by HUL products and asked me to switch to Dove when I made an involuntary public service annoucement of sorts on November 1st about my using Pantene.

To be perfectly honest, I actually liked Dove better and used it, until sanity dawned upon me, and I had a haircut in December last year.

As I was sitting and watching TV the other day, I noticed that with every purchase of Dove, one would get some free jewelry to go along with it. I know for certain that the material would be ersatz, but the very thought of being asked to pick some ear-rings or some pendant from a stash of sorts while standing in line at a supermarket while buying toiletries is mortifying, to say the least.

Long live Dove! But not for me.

A friend of mine had come over to watch the Champions League semifinal first leg between Liverpool and Chelsea, and as prior reputations of both teams' playing styles have been kept into consideration, nobody was expecting an excellent match, but it promised to be exciting nevertheless.

The first half was quite boring, until Kuyt managed to put one in, after having worked hard to get many near chances at shots on the goal. The second half saw a little more action than the first, though my friend was keen on going back home when there were fifteen minutes left.

I told him that he'd endured so much already, fifteen minutes of torture wouldn't really be that bad, considering his body clock would be adjusted to view the Man U - Barca game today, which promises to be more fun. Plus I mentioned to him that you never really know what happens until the last whistle was blown.

My friend stuck on, and we both saw how Riise so skillfully used his head and used his head to put an own goal, much to the chagrin of everyone present at Anfield who were celebrating a home win, and the fact that an away goal was not conceeded.

Four minutes of injury time, and the own goal was scored at 3:55, just on the dot.

The own goal sort of made staying up that late to watch a meh match that much more interesting!

I should most certainly hope so.

However, come to think of it, there is not much that I do that would entail me to make that claim.

Regardless, in the entire course of events, my love for the television has been rekindled by the whole channel rearrangement fiasco, as I now don't have to sit and bother about which channel to tune into. My look-up list does the trick for me.

I've been seeing a lot of advertisements about the Indian version of Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader, and I had been woefully unaware of how it was something that had been done to death in various countries all over the world before having made its appearance on Star Plus.

I was initially enthused by how our television networks have finally seen the light of day to come up with entertaining original concepts for their programs, but this respect for their ingenuity as well as for my knowledge levels plummeted downwards simultaneously once I heard a reference for that show on 'Last Comic Standing'. (Is George W Bush smarter than a 5th grader? I only know one person in person who knows him personally, and even she doesn't know for sure!)

There are a lot of loopholes in the show. Do they take the average 5th grader in mind while setting the questions? If so, which educational syllabus does the average 5th grader conform to?

If the average 5th grader is considered and every participant wins money, then the show would not be conforming to the collective participating populace's Gambler's Ruin of sorts. But if they take the smartest 5th Grader as a benchmark, say for instance, someone who has already invented Calculus on his own at that age, then the general population stands no chance.

In any case, random nit-picking notwithstanding, it should be a fun show to watch.

The new TVS Flame ad is pretty cool. It shows some guy doing a wheel spin of his bike, riding it down some multi-storey parking lot and then going as fast as he can to intercept some girl who has leapt off another taller building and is gliding downwards using a parachute.

Firstly, this ad doesn't show the biker doing some crazy stunts. Any idiot buying that bike would probably expect his girlfriend / wife to jump off a building with a parachute so he can intercept her, rather than try some synchronous bike dancing or trying free biking on a road that can only take more traffic on it in the next millennium. Of course, considering women are more sensible than us men in general, such a scenario will probably not happen too regularly, although the occasional freak occurance cannot be discounted, specially if one is dating a professional sky-diver. One would be better off playing Tomb Raider instead.

The other thing that I noticed in the ad was how there were circular tyre marks around the place where the bike was standing, indicating that not enough attention to detail had been paid for the ad makers to have erased the traces of the previous wheel spins, unless the effect was intentional.

I personally know a bunch of absolute morons who have, in front of my very eyes tried to replicate the stunts shown on TV and ended up having to pay for hospital charges as well as for bike repair at the same time, only to have recovered, dusted themselves off and done it again!

'These stunts are performed by experts and should not be imitated by anyone, especially children', seems to be the best example of reverse psychology at work out there.

If only it would work as people on TV ate spinach and drank lots of milk, and had a message saying 'please do not try this at home'.

The TV I have in my house right now is an awesomely cool dinosaur named Videocon Bazooka, which, despite its ancient vintage still serves me well when I come home cold and tired, to warm my bones beside the fire and all that, you get the picture!

Back at home in Mysore, my family has a Tata Sky subscription, and ever since I have checked out that blessed service, it has been love at first sight. The ease of navigation, the customization of channels, the ability to set reminders and get reviews and ratings and so on and so forth makes TV viewing so much more wonderful an experience, that words of mine, despite flowing out so abundantly in this paragraph, can only do so much justice to it.

At my place here in Bangalore, I have, out of sheer laziness and the absolute disinterest in wanting to make a heavy initial investment towards procuring the dish antenna and the set top box, have subsisted with the old fashioned cable guy, who by the way, is an absolute moron of the first order.

This vitriol spewed against him is not unwarranted, let me assure you.

I like my TV channels a certain way. I want to have my first few channels as the movie channels, starting from 0 onwards, so that I can check them out first. Saves me the trouble of going to check out serials, whose continuity I will probably never be able to want to put up with, due to my being such a sporadic TV viewer. Next after the movies, I place the sports and the music channels, again for obvious reasons.

Following that are the news channels, should something important happen that I would like to follow. General entertainment comes next, with channels such as Star World, Zee Cafe and so on, which I can check out whenever I have the chance.

At the very outset, in April 2007, when I got my cable connection after having moved in solo into this current place of living, I dilligently rearranged all the channels, sitting for two whole evenings to make that happen, a tired but proud man at the end of it all.

However, our cable guy derives cheap thrills in life out of changing frequencies, toggling channels and making my orderly system of arrangements go haywire. I tried to rearrange the channels according to the way he went about switching and playing around with frequencies, until a certain point in time where I finally had to give up because he was changing the order way faster than I could even imagine putting them back together.

Finally, after almost a year, I have given up. After returning to Bangalore, I have noticed that all my favourite channels had been replaced by K tv. It had irked me no end, and if I were a member of the SIMI, I would've declared Jihad on the cable operator.

Thankfully, I have other means of achieving my ends. Last evening, I resorted to making a list of my favourite channels, written down in pen on a sheet of paper. I have to now make a revised list where I have the channel names written in pen and the channel numbers in pencil, so that whenever my almighty cable guy decides to make a switch, I can do so with as little trepidation as possible myself.

The things people do on a saturday night. Beats the hell out of 'partying' on almost all counts.

You know you are over the hill when the songs that you really like are placed up on VH1 in the classics section. Somehow, 24 years and 9 months seems so very ancient when songs like 'free falling' by Tom Petty and 'losing my religion' by REM and all other music that you'd consider as among your favourite tracks appears in the 'classics' section. There can be no better way to compound one's misery.

I hate the guys from VH1 for making me feel older than I am.

But I do have to grudgingly admit that they play some decent ass music, all the same.

One of the crappiest things that I have come across in recent times on TV has been an ad on Channel V, about how your photographs will be featured on one of their shows if you upload it onto the site - Indiashottest.in or something.

This will spur the mall rats (who don't go there for the sole purpose of visiting the bookstores) and the other arbitly horrible dressers to further go out on a limb in so far as furthering their atrocious dress sense is concerned and as if it wasn't lousy enough to see such people in very select avoidable places, now they have to invade my living room if I put on channel V.

Those random fake stone-washed jeans that look like shit stains have been rubbed on them in strategic places, those really lousy captioned t-shirts and all the other pieces of clothing that make anyone sensible in their vicinity construct comic-strip like thought bubbles that spell out "what were you thinking??" are all in vogue in the aforementioned avoidable places.

There is a distinct possibility of it being a "grapes are sour" case, for I don't think I would ever make it on that list even on the day that I would look my best. Not that I care, the grapes are sour anyway.

But in lieu of some super pranks that we all could play, I would suggest taking some really arbit pictures and then going on an uploading spree in order to befuddle and make the lives of the actual 'India's Hottest' people quite miserable.

One could upload pictures of scenery or pictures of some random monuments, or pictures where you are casting the weirdest of poses or something, and then laugh ones guts off at the extreme cheap thrills that it provides.

This above idea is very much in line with three other bright ideas which you can read here (bright idea#1) and here (bright idea#2) and here (bright idea#3 - my favourite).