Huge earth shattering changes.
…Not really.
I’m going to try to come up with a new name for this blog, inspite of the fact that googling Zappotron will lead you to this corner of the universe.
Suggestions welcome.
Suggestions that piss me off will be deleted with gleeful alacrity.
So I’ve been getting spammed.
On a typical day, this is what I find in my inbox:
“Hidedn book on how to seduce a girl” from “Thickly J. Mitford”
“Save hundreds every month on low rates” from “Archie Garcia”
“Popular stfoware at low low prices” from “Stamps Q. Debasing”
“Unique manuscript on wnemos pleasure map” from “Ballooning F. Caterpillar”
“Cheapset Viagra delivreed to your door” from “Thoth G. Fated”
(Typos preserved from the original text)
The spammers have decided that I am a computer geek with a wide streak of sexual perversion and an unfortunate erectile dysfunction (Remarkably accurate except for the last part). Fortunately, I’ll be losing this email address fairly soon and shouldn’t have to worry about this…Until the next pack of Viagra wielding, Kamasutra peddling businessmen catch up with me.
I particularly like the names of these intrepid businessmen. You know a person is trustworthy when their parents decided to name them “Ballooning”. An unfortunate choice, even if your last name isn’t “Caterpillar”. A “Ballooning” by itself may not cause a comment, but when that “Ballooning” is followed by a “Caterpillar”, people are sure to notice and remark, “By Jove, was that a Ballooning Caterpillar?”. Incidentally, the people who saw the “Balloon Caterpillar” were stereotypical Englishmen… you know, the kind you find in that putrid piece of overrated crap, “The Da Vinci Code”.
(Props to those of you who can figure out the source that inspired this paragraph)
Change of subject.
After two years of successfully avoiding going to conferences, or displaying posters or giving presentations, I was finally trapped into going to one such “event”. It all started on Thursday afternoon, when I received a call on the devil’s instrument (my cell phone). On the other end of the phone was this lady with whom I’ve been working on and off, for a diabetes research project. The conversation went something like this.
Devil’s Instrument: Thrrr…rhrrrr…rrrrr…(pause)…(now a tad frantically)…RRRRRthrrr
(The phone was, if you haven’t figured out already, on vibrate mode).
Our Intrepid Hero (Me): Sigh(I do not like answering the phone).
Devil’s Instrument: RRRRRRRgthRRRR.
OIH: Sigh…Hello.
DI: RRRRRRRgthRRRR
OIH: Sigh…(Hit answer buton)…Hello.
Agent of Evil (The research lady): Hello…
OIH: Huh?
AOE: Tomorrow, Research retreat, Dr. Big boss expects you to be there with the posters.
OIH: Huh?
AOE: Tomorrow, Research retreat, Dr. Big boss expects you to be there with the posters.
OIH: Um…my boss told me nothing about this.
AOE: Doesn’t matter. You have to be there. My boss said so.
OIH: Did your boss talk to my boss?
AOE: Doesn’t matter. You have to be there. My boss said so.
OIH: Fine. I’ll be there.
AOE: Good. We need to be there at seven AM, I’ll pick you up at a quarter to seven.
OIH: Oh Crap!
AOE: And you need to be dressed in business casuals.
OIH: I need to wear a shirt, and tuck it in?
AOE: (With malignant glee) Yup.
OIH: Oh Crap!
End of conversation.
(I have taken some artistic liberties. It is quite possible that I said “Oh Fuck” and not “Oh Crap” or that I said “Oh Shoot” instead of the afore mentioned “Oh Crap”)
So there I was the next day, dragging myself out of bed at a quarter to six, looking like something out of a Cubist nightmare, hoping desperately that this was a nightmare and that I did not really have to get out off my comfortable bed. Alas, that was not to be. Reality imposed its control upon me and drove me off to the bathroom to make myself vaguely presentable. Having poured myself into a pant and a shirt, both of which had last seen service during an IIM interview, I proceeded to wait for my ride.
If it isn’t clear from the paragraph above, I really am not a morning person. As a matter of fact, before that dark day, I had never woken up before seven in this country. I have occasionally gone to bed at six but never have I had to wake up that early.
My ride arrived, looking all bright and chirpy, which further darkened my mood. As a small gesture of rebellion, I hadn’t shaved. My reasoning is that shaving daily impedes me from getting that stubbled look that I am striving for.
So off we went, zipping through the deserted streets of state college to Innovation Park. Innovation Park is this modern complex a couple of miles away from campus proper. It consists of “The Penn Stater”, the official hotel for conferences held at University Park and a number of other buildings, whose function I have never quite been able to figure out. They do have one thing in common. They are all remarkably ugly examples of modern architecture. Well…That might be a bit harsh. They aren’t as ugly as much as they are bland and characterless. Excellent examples of office blocks but not what I’d like to see on campus.
I was dropped off with the posters at the front desk as my ride left to find a parking spot. I lugged the posters off to the conference hall, registered at front desk and then discovered that when they meant posters they did not mean hard backed posters but meant posters that you would stick up on a wall. Thumb tacks can be painful when you have to force them through a backing board into the notice board.
I then snagged a muffin and a roll and through some adroit maneuvering, managed to get myself locked out of the lecture hall. This mean that I was all alone in the conference hall. I was crushed…disappointed. I cried softly into my handkerchief for a few minutes and reflected upon the humanity of it all. However, with admirable foresight, I had carried my power-book with me to the retreat, and since they had a wireless network running, I managed to get in a couple of hour of WoW. Now, do not get me wrong. I’d have much rather been inside that room listening to people talk about important and weighty research matters. But hey, what’s a guy to do?
There was a break in between, when people came out and I explained my posters to them and what do you know, after the break I got locked out again. Man was I pissed at myself. Had nothing else to do but go back to WoW and level up my warrior. Oh the humanity!
Lunch was good. Any meal is good if it involves free cheesecake and chocolate mousse. And right after lunch I managed to make my escape.
The moral of this story is that wireless networks are good and that carrying a laptop with you is the wise thing to do.
I’ve been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
-Steven Wright
Now, why can’t I think up stuff like that.
Decaf coffee sucks.
I love comics. There I said it. I’m a comic book geek.
And it has always been a disappointment when comics have been adapted to movies or for television. You do have the occasional passable adaptation, like the original Batman movie and the two Spiderman flicks.
But more often I am subjected to the horror of crap like Batman and Robin. The agony of seeing my favourite spandex wearing tormented hero being reduced to…words fail me.
Sin City on the other hand was fantastic. As some wise critic wrote, it is not a comic book adaptation. It’s a comic book movie. For those of you who do not know, the movie has three stories from Frank Miller’s Sin city Series. My favourite and the best of the three by far was the first one, “The Big Fat Kill”. C’mon, how can you go wrong with a title like that? I was so impressed by the movie I went out and bought the comic. And read it yesterday when I was supposed to be preparing for a demo. And I can confirm what I previously wrote. The movie is incredibly true to the comic. Panels in the comic could be stills from the movie. So, I have no choice now, I’m going to have to buy the rest of the series.
And while I’m at it I’m going to have to buy the rest of the Sandman series too. I remember reading one of the Sandman comics years ago. Frankly I disliked it then. Probably because I was too young and not mature enough to appreciate it. So I went out on a limb and bought the first book in the series. It is incredible. It is a fantasy novel written with pictures. Apparently the artists who drew the comic changed during the first year, but they are all uniformly excellent. The drawings are weirdly psychedelic… nightmarish even. And they fit the story perfectly. The author of the series is Neil Gaiman. If you haven’t read his book Neverwhere, read it now.
Back to work.
I can’t fall asleep. Second night in a row. I dislike this. I’ve been tossing and turning for ages now and this is starting to piss me off. So I reached for my trusty powerbook and decided to inflict this post upon you.
Keeping with my mood, which is pretty bad I shall…
I’m tired. I can hardly keep my eyes focused, but I am not fucking able to to fall asleep. I’ll end up sleeping until noon and that will screw my schedule for the entire day.
I plan to get away this weekend. Let’s see if that happens.
Clean breaks are hard to come by. Just when you think a clean break has been…achieved, your mind decides to fuck you up. To those who know what I’m talking about, go for the surgical amputation.
On a far more cheerful note, the weather here has gotten much better. And that means just one thing. Every attractive woman in State College is wearing as few clothes as she possibly can. This is a most desirable state of affairs.
On a far less cheerful note, I’m still sick. The cold and the flu have decided to make a comeback. Rajneesh’s sickness, the sequel starring Influenza as Flu Jacobson, a cop with a mysterious past and the Common Cold as H A Chu, the comical yet deadly bounty hunter from the far East. The name of the movie is, of course, One Flu over the Haachooo’s nest.
Gah.
The worst part about being sick and alone is being alone. Nobody to pamper you or take care of you. It’s one of the worst parts of being an adult.
It’s begun to dawn on me, with growing horror, that I am an adult. I have no idea how this happened. I turned around and the world aged on me. And took me along for the ride. I said some time ago that I felt old. I do. But I do not feel in the least bit mature. I am the last person in the world I would trust to do the sensible, grown-up thing.
(Blank line)
(Suitable Conclusion)
(Lame Joke)
(Obligatory Reference to cat)
Goodnight folks.
I’m sick.
Fever, flu, the works.
Now accepting sympathy and soup.
Now normally I am pretty resistant to the efforts of salespeople. I can look them squarely in the eye and say no, nada, nix, nein…you get the idea. So in most cases I can avoid buying those things that people end up kicking themselves for later.
However I do have a blind spot.
Continue to read gentle reader and you shall discover it.
I have unruly hair. Not your ordinary garden variety unruly hair. That would be manageable. My hair cannot in all honesty be called merely unruly. It should be called rebellious. Violently rebellious. More in the nature of an armed insurrection. Think the Intifada, the non-cooperation movement, the October revolution and a particularly violent Football game (The American variety where people slam into each other with the gay abandon of berserk locomotives) all rolled into one.
That too would be fine if the insurrection was aimed against the same target. However that isn’t the case. Not only is my hair rebelling against me, each individual hair is rebelling against all its neighbours. And not just the neighbours, tensions are also simmering between hairs that have never seen each other. They dislike each other on general principles.
Now while I am the last person to object to people disagreeing with each other, I do strongly believe that it is in my greater interests that this rebellion must be stamped out and the order restored. My hair just as strongly believes that I should fuck off.
But I am of stronger mettle than that. I have persevered through the ages. I have fought the good fight and I have more often than not, lost. I have been soundly defeated. You can hear my hair partying after each victory. The sounds of champagne corks being popped and guns being fired off fills the ether. Not into the air as would be sensible… when the guns are fired off it usually means that fresh hostilities have broken out up there in that long, never ending war.
And that brings me to my blind spot. In my efforts to subdue my hair, I am a sucker to almost everything that the barbers here recommend. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that the barbers here are female, young and usually very attractive. Back in India I was used to grumpy men who wielded the scissors like swords, and who would consider taking off an inch of skin a mark of their skill. So while I am used to grumpy men growling at me, here I am confronted by pretty women, who in dulcet tones convince me to buy a whole bunch of fucking expensive hair products. These gels and creams and other assorted chemicals (solids, liquids and semi-solids) slowly gather dust in my bathroom cabinet and glare at me every morning. A painful reminder of how weak I can be when the forlorn hope of subduing my hair meets an attractive woman peddling products for a commission.
On a happier note, Congratulations Chilli aka Mr.MBA. Wish I had been there to cheer you on. That’s one more treat you owe me when I finally can visit. And Kiddo looking forward to meeting you when you get here.
I wanted to make the title sound like a cheesy news show. I hope I succeeded.
I think I’ve finally solved the problem with my poor computer. The sound card seems to have gone kaput, and that’s causing the crashes. First time I swapped cards out of my computer. I feel all techy and geeky now.
I’ve figured out what my alcohol limit is…I finally threw up. Fortunately, not at Players.
And speaking of Players, Iranian women are hot…smokin’ smokin’ hot.
Nice op-ed piece on the Ramayna, Chilli. I tip my hat off to you.
Final sidebar…a female friend of mine asserted that women think of sex ninety percent of the time that they are awake. Interesting…what?
Later all.
I feel old.
Ancient.
Dinosaurian, dinosauresque?
Aged.
I need to wash this cake out of my hair.