I have a funny haircut.

That is all.

Chilli referred to an email in this post.

And since I’m feeling particularly lazy I’ve decided to post the contents of that email here. Now, the email is nearly two years old, so it may see a little dated to any “shudder” F1 fans. But what can I say, apart from “Go fuck yourself.”

From: Rajneesh S
Sent: Friday, June 25, 2004 1:44 PM
To:
Subject: Re: The Ultimate Driving Machine

Michael Schumacher is the most dominant athlete in the world. The six-time Formula 1 champion has won all but one of the circuit’s first nine races this year. He’s also the sponsorships from megacorporations like Marlboro and Vodafone*. But while Ferrari has always had a stake in F1, it wasn’t very successful throughout the 1980s, a huge source of consternation for such a prestigious brand. When Schumacher signed on, he was able to ensure—partly because of Ferrari’s name brand and partly because of its desperation—that he would have both the resources and the operational control he felt he needed to dominate.

Ooooh schumi is a dominatrix! (A male dominatrix, a dominator?).

If Ferrari were a football team, Schumacher would be the quarterback, the GM, and the coach. Though he didn’t give his team the idea to greatly outspend its top rivals—around $100 million more than Williams and $150 million more than McLaren—he did teach them how to spend it wisely. Schumacher understood the crucial importance of building the team and technologies around him—if the best pit crew, technicians, and engineers in the world tailored his car to his strengths as a driver, then he couldn’t lose.

If Ferrari were a football team.
Um. Couldn’t think of any crap for this. Oh got it.
If Ferrari were a football team Schumi would be the driver of the team bus.

In F1, the drivers may be stars, but the cars are king. Every team spends the offseason in wind tunnels and with feedback testing equipment, secretly crafting improved design elements. This season, Ferrari extended its technical lead by unveiling its “narrow waist” design, in which the back of the car is almost impossibly thin and low to the ground, diminishing the drag exerted on the car and giving the car greater stability in turns.

Fascinating. Simply fascinating I say.

Ferrari’s design excellence allows Schumacher to methodically destroy his rivals. While simple maintenance and production costs eat huge chunks out of smaller teams’ budgets—a season’s worth of tires and gearboxes alone can cost well into the millions—Ferrari can perpetually fine-tune a suite of technologies so that its cars perform under the most extreme conditions of acceleration, braking, and turning. As a consequence, Schumacher’s car almost never has significant technical problems, a huge advantage in a sport where the ultra-expensive cars often just stop working because of technical malfunctions. To keep up with Ferrari’s superior machines, other drivers have to take risks. As such, they consistently make mistakes out of impatience, imprudence, or desperation—hitting walls or other cars or just spinning out uncontrollably. In this past weekend’s U.S. Grand Prix at Indianapolis, only half the cars that started were able to finish.

“Where the ultra-expensive cars often just stop working because of technical malfunctions. ” Get a Santro people.

So obvious is the role money plays in Schumacher’s success that F1’s governing body is taking steps to minimize the importance of cash. Formula 1 will soon ban certain electronic driving aids and will further regulate tire and engine use and testing, all in the hopes of keeping down costs so lower-class teams can compete.

Also, half the laps will be done in either bicycles or auto rickshaws. And the last lap will be run by the drivers in the nude while being chased by hungry dogs…or horny dogs.

Schumacher is a peculiar global sports icon. He can claim to be the greatest race car driver in history, and judging from the sea of Ferrari-red bedecked fans, his team is far and away the most popular on the circuit. But he’s a distant champion, respected but not adored. When Schumacher turned in a subpar qualifying performance at the Grand Prix of Canada, the fans—including the Ferrari faithful—erupted in cheers and applause as driver after driver bested his lap time.

Can he be a global sports icon? F1 is not so much a sport as a mental disease. Call him a global mental disease icon. Incidentally nine out of ten people surveyed said that they find scrutiny of their toe nails growing, far more interesting than F1

Mostly, fans are desperate for someone, anyone, to give Schumacher a fight. While few events compare with an F1 race in terms of loud, macho, colorful spectacle, Schumacher has killed the suspense. There’s a sense that something is badly wrong with Formula 1, but no fans or drivers really fault Schumacher or Ferrari. They just worked hard, played by the rules, and outsmarted the competition.

Actually fans are desperate for something, anything to make f1 less mind numbingly dull. A few events that compare with an F1 race in terms of a loud, macho, colorful spectacle are as follows
1. The aforementioned growing of toe nails
2. Measles
3. The icky stuff in a persons navel
4. The classic watching paint dry
5. Haircuts
6. Channel surfing
7. Competitive belching
8. Watching paint dry, extreme version

Two weekends ago at the Canadian Grand Prix, Renault’s Jarno Trulli broke down on the very first lap because of suspension problems. Later that day, I saw Trulli at the Montreal airport, waiting in line with us race fans for a commercial flight to Newark. I asked if it was tough seeing Schumacher dominate a race that he had barely started. He just shook his head, demoralized. “Schumacher,” he muttered.

Actually what he muttered was “Stop fucking bugging me asshole .” Right after that he proceeded to die from boredom. A common affliction among F1 drivers. Also a common affliction among us normal people who really dislike F1 and are subjected to long boring analysis of probably the most boring “sport” on earth, rivaled only by NASCAR.

– “So are you people stressed? I’ve noticed a flurry of activity.”

– “If by stressed you mean fucked and by people you mean Rajneesh, and by activity you mean Rajneesh getting fucked, then I’d have to say yes.”

So is an atheist who was born Hindu an Omophobe?

I’m sorry. It needed to be said.

Now, a little advice. When you are talking to an attractive woman when you are really interested in, and who actually finds you funny, you should sometimes resist the urge to go for the perfect retort. No matter how perfect that retort is.

You might be telling her about how you internally categorize people into friends, colleagues, buttheads, you know, stuff like that. And if she asks you what you have categorized her as, the appropriate segue is, “Someone I’d like to take out to dinner sometime”. (Smooth-ish eh?)

You do not say, “I have you categorized as miscellaneous.”

Well, that’s one bridge burnt.

I love long drives.

Alone.

Just me and my thoughts and (cliché time) the open road. Thoughts like “Is it paint “your own pottery” studio? Or is it paint your own “pottery studio””. And thoughts like, “The new Pepsi slogan “Brown and Bubbly”, Dumb or Really Fucking Dumb?” (I’m not kidding here. That is their new slogan. “Brown and bubbly.”… That’s just too easy. I’ll leave it alone.)

Back to the subject at hand. Or in my case, at keyboard.

I like the long drives. The four hour ones, when I’m driving to State College, or DC, or back. And I like the middle parts of the drive the most. When I know I have miles to go (…Before I sleep. Because falling asleep at the wheel is a bad, bad idea. I know from painful experience. I’d use a smiley here, but I refuse to use emoticons in posts, and so imagine if you will a wry grin here.) and the end is far, far away.

I dislike the last bit of the drive, because it’s the last bit of the drive. It brings with it a mild sense of disappointment. That four hour block where nothing else existed apart from me and the music from the radio is ending. I need to enter society again and interact with (shudder) people! I can’t make faces at myself in the rear view mirror, or talk back to the radio.

I love talking back to the radio, because of all the stupidity that it spouts out between songs. The DJ’s who think they’re being funny. The smarmy voices trying to sell me stuff. The warm voices convincing me that this product is better than others or that I should enter this contest because I can win junk. Yelling at them, loudly declaiming their stupidity is immensely gratifying.

I love making faces at myself in the rear view mirror. Because…well everybody likes that. You see a mirror and nobody else is around, you stick your tongue out at it, or do your best Darth Vader impression. (I glare magnificently at my reflection and say “Impressive” in my best Darth Vader voice.)

No I’m not strange.

Really.

Okay, maybe just a little.

I’m flipping through radio stations, looking for classic rock. The Beatles always put me in a good mood. And so do the Stones. But flipping through the channels is fraught with danger or at the very least fraught with the possibility of crappiness. You may take your hands off the dial, perhaps to avoid that tractor-trailer that you were about to so blithely rear end…and before you know it your ears are being molested by a boy band, or a gangsta’ or a girl band (and since this is the radio, the girl band does not come with the compensation of semi-nudity. (By semi I mean almost total. By nudity I mean gratuitous nakedness.)).

But once in a great while a paragon of crappiness comes through, something so crappy that you need to hear it again and again. Have it roam wild and free through your head as you are in a meeting or doing your groceries. One such pearl is the Black Eyed Peas’ lyrical masterpiece, My Humps.

…what you gonna do with all that junk
all that junk inside that trunk?

The guy’s singing that bit and clearly he is referring to the fact that she has a ton of stuff in the trunk of her car. I don’t see why that is relevant to him but I let that pass.

And then the chick,(Who is mind bogglingly hot. I saw her on Conan!) goes…

…Get you love drunk off my hump.
My hump,
My hump,
My hump,
My hump,

My hump,
My hump,
My hump,
My hump,

This clears things up. Apparently the song is from a Disney movie, and this “ballad” is being sung between two camels (And both of them are dromedary because only a single hump was mentioned (eight times!). Or maybe we can choose to be broadminded and choose to believe that the male is a Bactrian, unnatural though that may seem.). Or maybe it is an artist’s impression of what the dialog might be between post pubescent camel couples during the camel mating season. This should be on Animal Planet!

But now the first part of the song makes no sense. Because camels do not drive cars!

…My lovely lady lumps,..
See. Lyrical Masterpiece! The camel has goiter? I only ask this because this is an awfully graceless way of referring to a camel’s hump.

…Assorted atrocious lyrics and worse music…

…I mix your milk wit my cocoa puff,
Milky, milky cocoa,
Mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky riiiiiiight…

Now the dude seems to be getting more than a little excited at what seems to be a Kellogg’s product placement in the camels’ love ballad. Or maybe the singer really, really likes milk with his cocoa puffs and his passionate love for them is coming through in the song. But his passion is a bit unseemly, and because of him I now feel a little bit dirty when I have my breakfast cereal.

There’s probably more to that song, but at that point I decided that I needed silence, to decide whether it is “Paint “your own pottery” studio or whether it is “Paint your own “pottery studio””.

So, yeah, Long drives are good.

I called home a couple of nights ago. My parents hung up on me. Ouch!

Most of my friends send me emails from their work accounts, convenience and all that stuff. I used to do the same before I got sucked into grad school.

Now, most of their emails have the following disclaimer, or something very similar inserted in them:

“The information contained in this electronic message and any attachments to this message are intended for the exclusive use of the addressee(s) and may contain proprietary, confidential or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please notify the sender immediately and destroy all copies of this message and any attachments.”

No shit! Do they seriously expect me to jump through these hoops if I receive a wrongly addressed email? Your firm’s fuck up, you fix it.

Heck, if the email contains the attachment Maria_Sharapova.jpg, I’m going to disseminate all over the place. And then I will distribute it and ensure that it is not destroyed. Preferably by setting it as my wallpaper, my screensaver, my startup screen.

(I promise that one of these days, I’ll try to write something without obscenities or references to bodily functions.)

(Note the emphasis on the word try.)

UPS takes the cake (Cheesecake! Mmmmm cheesecake. Evil diet destroying cheesecake.) with the disclaimer on their Package Tracking Page.

“UPS authorizes you to use UPS tracking systems solely to track shipments tendered by or for you to UPS for delivery and for no other purpose. Any other use of UPS tracking systems and information is strictly prohibited.”

Now, maybe I’m criminally naïve but I cannot think of any way in which I could abuse that page. I could perhaps put in an invalid tracking number and take unwholesome pleasure in the fact that the servers have to spit out an “Invalid tracking number” message, but that seems harmless. So, yeah…suggestions welcome. I’d love to abuse that page.

Now, what was that bit about logic again?

Arrr…

…”Winter Wonderland”, should be fucking drawn and quartered.

You Are a Snarky Blogger!

You’ve got a razor sharp wit that bloggers are secretly scared of. And that’s why they read your posts as often as they can!

(From the image it appears that I am also a hot anime chick.)

So, it’s late Saturday afternoon, and I find myself in Edison, NJ. For those of you who do not know, Edison is little India. That’s where a hungry expatriate goes to find some decent Indian Food. (There’s this place at the corner of Oak Tree Road and Middlesex Avenue that has the Best Pav Bhaji ever!). Actually I was there trying to hunt down some Indian Beer (Apparently people like Kingfisher!) for a party the next day.

So there’s your back story and the scene. Rajneesh, semi-seedy Indian restaurant, excellent Pav Bhaji and the stereo blaring out loud, fairly up to date Hindi Film music. Now, I am not a big fan of Hindi Music. (That is an understatement. Saying that would be akin to saying that Hitler was a misunderstood chap with a few unpleasant eccentricities.) Well, one of the songs had this bit in English, “It’s the time to Disco.”

And I ponder, “Is it? “

Really? Is it the time to Disco? The singer of the song seemed giddy at the thought of imminent Discoing. I did not share her misguided enthusiasm.

I continue to ponder, “Am I in the seventies?”

I look around. Nope, no bell-bots or funky sideburns. Granted, the folks at the next table were a nice Indian family, but still.

Well that’s cleared up. It isn’t the seventies. Ergo it isn’t the time to disco. (And judging from the funky hairstyles and bad, bad clothes from that decade, I’m pretty sure that the people from that decade regret the fact they ever discoed.)

I demolished the food and left. Without once succumbing to the singer’s earnest pleas to disco! I got into the car and turned on the radio.

“…Mambo Number Five
Jump up and down
And move it all around…”

Fuck.