Less Exciting Band Names

Yesterday morning was unusually spent on Facebook. Two of my friends were having this long chain of comments triggered by this and they very graciously allowed me to intrude. The following are some of the ones I contributed:

The 5,6,7,8... uhm...shit...s: Formed by three second grade friends six years ago, they've now renamed themselves as The α, β, x, y, zs

John, Secretary to the Mayor: A famous percussion artist who uses innovative beats such as the phone ringing and typewriters

The Bee Gee Kay Em Dee El En Es Are Sees: Formed in the late 1800s by the whole Gibbs family, they now record as only The Bee Gees because of the passing away of most of the other members

Less Exciting Movie Names

And after we were done with this then Ruff had this idea to do it for movies and  this is what ensued. Sacred Cow was still around. He tells me that he doesn't agree with my selection of the titles and I tell him that it's my blog and that's that.

12 Angry Women (It's a silent movie, none of them are talking to each other)
Glad I Ate Her
Virginity, a Die Hard prequel
Found Nemo

Mark Hitting

Advertisements border on the ridiculous. The day to day ridiculous ones involve ordinary men picking up women with a little help from their bikes, their shaving razors and their mobile phones and independent, smart women walking around with their heads held high because of sanitary napkins with stretchable padding. The once in a while ridiculous ones have been listed here. But occasionally there comes along this real corker of an ad which just makes you suddenly sit up and raise an eyebrow or two. If you survive that part (unlike poor Humpty D., god rest his yolk) then that advertisement will elicit a laugh out of you. After the laughter fit passes you will be doing some serious introspection about the ad, the product, your life and the world in general. What got me up and ranting this time was the ad released by Chevron quite some time back which was left behind by the one that Pakistan (PDF/JPEG) got on the WSJ recently.

All in All You're Just Another Post on the Wall

For the purpose of this article I'm going to refer to a social network as FB unless mentioned otherwise, like it or report it. I would also like to thank those people who were my observations, you know which ones you are.

FB is like a mircocosm of sorts where a friend can refer to anyone between and including that hot chick you met once who is very obviously beyond you, complete strangers with whom you share a fair number of mutual friends, vaguely familiar people from the past and celebrities. For people from this part of the world, friends on FB could also refer to bittu, monu, sonu, tinu, mummy, papa, bhua, mausa, tauji, jethani and even the occasional dadaji. And then along comes Plus. No one plus ones anything. I plus oned one of my posts myself but then minus oned because plus oning something that one posted oneself is a little stupid. Nonplussing, this plus business.

Ask Uncle π

This article was written for The Fourth Estate a long time ago along with Tejas Sanjay Deshmukh. It popped out in some cleaning up and seemed worth a second print. This one is also the original without any of the cuts made by the Dean then.

The last two were written for the hostel creative writing competition and were added on the 12 of September when they came up in the cleaning up too..

Dear Uncle π, I am a freshie in one of the new hostels. Don't get me wrong - by no means am I wishing to convey a message that sounds like "I hate my hostel" - but I am faced with a rather unique problem. I have been allotted a room, on one of the higher floors, vertically above the entrance, and every time that I return after classes I have problems in reaching my room. In fact, I have spent only about 63% of the nights in my room. Anyway, not going into statistics, after I climb out of the lift I realize that I have already lost all sense of direction. Just to regain it I go all the way back to the ground floor to check out where the entrance is. After I climb out of the lift on the ground floor I find that I am at a loss so as to where the entrance was. But then life is not all roses, so I go search for it anyway and keep trying. This method fails often, approximately 37% of the times. Please help.
The Spanish follow the father of the ugly duckling, searching for the lost boy (6)

The Congress Can't Afford The Jan Lokpal

Reference

Dear Customer. Sincerely, Manager

I’ve never written about the corporate world before partly out of ignorance and mostly out of a lack of concern. The stock markets rise and fall all the time like a man in the ocean who’s going to drown eventually unless a helicopter rescues him. Guys attracted to the bobbing man, mistaking him to be a hot wet drowning damsel in distress no doubt, tie their fate to him and continue to float or sink. (I don’t know any women investors so yes, Women - 1: Men - 2360978) Companies take over other companies like funky microbes. People get fired and/or resign and/or defraud other people and/or spend their time running between the courts of golf and law. Dirty business, business.

The Smiley Post

• This post was born on the twenty second day of the twelfth month of the two thousand tenth year of the AD period
• With severely constrained resources at home (or wherever I am right now) this is the best I can do.
• I'll update this whenever I have sufficient a number of new ones to update it.
• These are all characters on your keyboards. Nothing fancy. You can enter ASCII codes and get characters by holding down alt and pushing the ASCII code on your numpad
• They are all text and not images so you can copy them and use them as you like.
• If you use them a lot I'd like you to credit it to this blog. Isolated usage is okay but if someone asks you if you came up with it then be honest.
• They vary from font to font.
• Hopefully the HTML doesn't screw this up too much

Latest (29th Dec 2010):

Ç≈ - hot coffee

:>-< - a condom company logo

--/--Æ - flying plane

(-8ϞΞ - HP

 վ - Prabhu Deva
/o\

,O9P - Elephant
 ''''

:Þ the :P for those who aren’t retarded

If There is a God Then Nou Camp is His Pinball Table

I’m no expert but football tournament finals are usually really good exciting games with two really good teams and deserving finalists playing it out to win the title. The exceptions are when the game features the current best national team or club team in the world, Spain and Barcelona respectively, as the last editions of three of the world’s most exciting tournaments, Euro 2008, World Cup 2010 and the UEFA Champions League 2011 have had the grave misfortune of. Each of those three matches was more boring than a deep sea oil well. And just for my convenience, henceforth when I refer to one of the teams I shall mostly be referring to the other one as well.

This week’s contest - Find all the Barcelona fans in this picture and win hormone injections!

Calling a Spud a Spade

Dear Shri Kapil Sibal,

In your efforts to make every engineering college in India an IIT I suggest you go a step further and declare Tihar Jail to be one too. The other option obviously is starting an ITI there but ITI Tihar, or ITIT, is something I would advise you against. It's just too much IT in one college for our country's self respect.